The Friday List! Best Holiday Movies

The holidays are always a good time to catch up on movies, whether it's at the movie theater or lounging around watching DVDs at home. What have you seen recently that's good? Bad?

Russ and I had a double feature on Wednesday night: The Golden Compass and Charlie Wilson's War. The Golden Compass was kind of terrible. It is almost always hard to watch a film adaptation of a book that is so well-loved. It looked amazing, and the actors were well-cast, but the structure of the story made all the interesting things you discover along the way just exposition. I don't see how people who haven't read the book could really care about what was going on in the movie. And the ending? Ugh. I felt embarrassed for the film because half the theater groaned at the ending and said, that's it? What the hell is Dust anyway?

On the other hand, Charlie Wilson's War was great! It was especially interesting after having recently read A Thousand Splendid Suns. Tom Hanks was a pleasure to watch. I highly recommend it.

More holiday movies I'd love to get out to see:
Juno
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Sweeney Todd
The Kite Runner
and of course Atonement, after it comes out next week

Allison's 2007 Favorites

Top 5 Books of 2007*

1. Atonement
2. Eat, Pray, Love
3. Little Children
4. Interpreter of Maladies
5. Little Earthquakes

*Of the books I remember reading. I have a vague recollection of reading some good books my last semester in school but they are lost to me now. If you are like me and have trouble remembering what you've read but would like to, I highly recommend giving GoodReads a try. You can keep track of books you've read, are currently reading, and would like to read as well as write mini-reviews. Plus you can link to friends' profiles, like mine and Liz's.

Top 5 TV Shows of 2007

1. 30 Rock
2. The Office
3. Friday Night Lights
3. Cold Case
4. Pushing Daisies
5. Ugly Betty

I wanted to end this list by taking a moment to honor the memory of Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars, both of which ended this year. While neither of their final seasons was their best, they are sorely missed.

*Addendum - I just noticed a huge omission in my list of best tv shows of 2007 and that would be Damages, the BEST tv show of the year. I would have added this as a comment but this show is just too good for a comment and deserves its own post. It was short (13 episodes) but highly suspenseful and fun to dissect and discuss after each episode. How much did I love this show? So much that when I realized the season finale would broadcast two days into my honeymoon - my romantic, Hawaiian, tv-and-internet-free honeymoon - I seriously considered postponing it for a few days. Of course, we set up the DVR to record the finale to watch after we got back but that was just too long to wait. Luckily, the episode was available on the internet a few days after the broadcast and we had brought along a laptop. We "borrowed" a neighbor's wifi connection, though the signal was so weak, we had to go outside the cottage and hold the laptop towards the sky to download the episode. Yes, we are geeks but we love our tv.

Liz's Favorite TV Shows of 2007

(almost all of these were watched on DVD so they really came out in previous years)

1. Brothers and Sisters (my new favorite!)
2. Journeyman
3. Big Love
4. Deadwood
5. Lost (final episode of Season 3 only!)

Favorite Book Club Books of 2007

Sorry about the last post. I should have proof-read before publishing it. As many of you know, I love books and TV. For me they go hand-in-hand! My favorite book club books that I've read this year are:
-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
-Eat, Pray, Love
-Atonement
For the non-book club books, I need to go home and remind myself what I've read. I think my memory is getting worse the older I get! More later...

Top 5 TV Shows of 2005

Here are my favorite 5 TV shows of 2007.

-Big Love
-Lost
-Battlestar Galactica
-How I Met Your Mother
-Flight of the Conchords

Honorable Mentions: Pushing Daisies (favorite new show), House, Heroes (2006-2007 season), and The Office....Wow, I really watch a lot of TV!

Liz's Best Books Read in 2007

This was harder for me than I thought. I had trouble remembering the books I read in 2007 - even with my LibraryThing and Goodreads accounts. I guess if I can't remember a book, it doesn't belong on the top 5 list.

1. Atonement
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
3. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
4. I Don't Know How She Does It (Allison Pearson)
5. Key of Light (first in the Key trilogy by Nora Roberts - seriously, how many times do I have to plug these books before one of you reads them??)

The Friday 5! Best Books of 2007

Happy Friday everyone! As it's the last Friday before the holidays, now is the appropriate time to be creating "best of the year" lists. What are the top 5 books you read in 2007? Book club or non-book club books count. Books released in any year count, as long as YOU read them in 2007.

FTF: The Next Generation

From our holiday party . . . the second generation of book club!


Are these great looking kids or what? Clockwise from top left: Matthew, Sarah, Collin, Jake, Isa, Charlie, and London. It was such a treat to get all the kids together. Happy holidays everyone!!

Pride and Prejudice Viewing Party

Well, it's official. The P&P viewing party will occur on Jan. 5th at 8pm. We're watching the BBC version with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle (a Winston-Salem native!). Everyone is more than welcome to spend the night since the movie won't end until around 2:00am. Below is a link to the BBC website for P&P if you're intersted!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/prideandprejudice/

Sonya's Top 5 Guilty Reading Pleasures

1. Television Without Pity - I'm completely addicted to it. Their recap of The Christmas Shoes movie is a holiday treat for the Scrooge in me: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/Shows/Mondos-Extra/Stories/%3CI%3EThe-Christmas-Shoes%3CI%3E?currentPage=1
2. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series
3. People magazine
4. Anything by Maeve Binchy- sweet and satisfying
5. The Christmas Box series

Allison's Top 5 Guilty Reading Pleasures

1. The Cat Who ... series.
   
2. US Weekly magazine
3. Perez Hilton, People, Popsugar - celebrity gossip in order of most offensive to least
   
4. Watching or reading about The Hills, a MTV show
5. When visiting my parents I sometimes reread my old Sweet Valley Highs and Babysitters Club.
   

Memoir about Mormon Fundamentalism

Has anyone read the new memoir, Escape, by Carolyn Jessop? It's by a woman who was raised FLDS and became the 4th wife of a polygamist. She escaped with her children after about 15 years of marriage. It looks fascinating.

Last Minute Shopping Guide

Looking for gift ideas? Try these.

1. All-purpose gift for book club members #1.
2. For Dawn.
3. For Allison.
4. All-purpose gift #2.

Liz's Top 5 Guilty Reading Pleasures

1. My new love, Nora Roberts! For all of you Buffy watchers, I think you'll really like the Key trilogy.
2. Sarah Dessen books
3. Marie Claire magazine
4. A blog so ridiculous I can't even mention it.
   
5. Occasionally I'll read one of those teen series books from TV shows like Alias or Buffy. But only if Russ gets silly and puts it in my Christmas stocking.
   

The Friday 5! Guilty Pleasures

This is the inaugural edition of our blog's Friday Five. My goal is to keep them book or food-related. But who knows what will appear here.

What are your top 5 guilty reading pleasures? Submit them as a post or a comment. Don't think - just post what comes to mind!

March 2000: The Power and the Glory

Did anyone understand this book?

January Book: Anna Karenina

It's December 13th. Forget about Christmas shopping, the real clock that's ticking is the 31 days until our January meeting. How many of you have started Anna Karenina? I have not, because I've discovered a new guilty pleasure. More on her later. (And because it's the holidays, and who the heck has time to read anyway?)

But I do think a lot about how I'm going to start reading Anna K. very, very soon. And I plan to be very organized about it. First I'm going to get my head around it with this wikipedia summary. Then, I'm going to peruse Oprah's book club's info on the book. I might even read a little about Leo Tolstoy's life in my down time.

My reward for finishing the book? Watching this miniseries with yummy Kevin McKidd from Journeyman! (And BTW, if you are not watching Journeyman right now you should, right Sonya?) Or if you're more of a Boromir kind of person, you could watch this movie version.

Oprah says Anna Karenina is "an extremely sexy and engrossing read." Definitely something to look forward to.

Atonement?

What was our book club's favorite read? Atonement is the winner! Of the four top 10 lists posted, only Atonement made every single list! Runners up include The Handmaid's Tale (3 votes), and Jane Eyre, The Time Traveler's Wife, East of Eden, Middlesex, The Namesake, and The Blind Assassin (2 votes each).

Also apparently Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin) is our favorite writer!

Now I know this is a skewed sample because Atonement was a controversial book. Several people strongly disliked it! So if you want your opinion known, be sure to post your top 10 list (or send it to me and I'll post it). I'll edit the summary.

The movie version of Atonement is getting awesome reviews. Let's plan to go see it when it comes out in the area.