The Year of Recorded Books, pt. 2

April 9, 2008.

The Center Cannot Hold, My Journey Through Madness, Elyn R. Saks, 2007, narrated by Alma Cuervo.  This is the memoir of a remarkable intelligent and well-educated woman and her harrowing life with chronic schizophrenia.  I'm sorry to say that I found her so unsympathetic that I couldn't stand this book.  In fact I don't know why I made myself listen to the whole thing.

You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem, 2007, narrated by Jonathan Lethem.  The first Lethem novel I've read from the point of view of a female character.  Totally fascinating and original, as one expects from Lethem, about rock and roll, sex, and the nature of creativity (if I'm not going to far with that one) - what's to criticize?  I guess I will say it although I hate too - I want to trust Lethem more than myself.  But.  Our main characters is patently a fantasy female created by a man.  I want to give Lethem props for writing what feels like a bold book about a woman, but he's not able to get out of that box.  She writes rock songs, which she really cribs from listening to a creative man on the phone, forms a rock band, falls in love a lot and has a lot of sex with unattractive but interestingly artistic men.  The book tries to be /about/ this, or at least be arch or knowing about this, even as it does this, but that is what it does.  It was definitely a turn on to hear Lethem in his own voice describe sex scenes in my ear but I was left feeling a little dirty and disappointed.   Oh god, Jonathan, forgive me.  

April 17, 2008.  

The Trustee from the Toolroom - have already blogged about this one.   What a great book.

April 30, 2008.

The Bishop and the Beggar Girl of St. Germain, "A Father Blackie Ryan Mystery", Andrew M. Greeley, 2001.  Read by George Guidall.  A mystery set in Paris, narrated by the amateur detective, a Catholic priest from Boston.  A young priest disappears under mysterious circumstances - spoiler alert-- he turns out to have been a woman.  Not only did I find this book incredibly annoying in all other respects, especially in the simultaneously unbelievable and unsympathetic characters - even its cavalier-while-pretending-to-be-reverent treatment of the Catholic Church got under my skin.  How is this part of a succesful series?  Who reads these books?  Among other problems they seem suited neither to people who like or dislike the Catholic Church, and that's got to cover about everybody.  As a side note, George Guidall is second only to the great Frank Muller as a narrator. 

May 8, 2008

Tears of the Giraffe, No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book 2, Alexander McCall Smith, 2000, read by Lisette Lecat.  I listened The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (book 1) read by the same narrator while in Cameroon.  These two books are very simple (in a great way) and note perfect.  Here is an example of a female lead character created flawlessly by a male author.  They are the story of Precious Ramotswae, a seemingly ordinary Botswanan who sets up a detective agency.  She solves a series of mysteries, which are connected in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways, in a way reminiscent of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple as opposed to Sherlock Holmes - character observation and intuition rather than forensic science or subtle deduction.  As in the Holmes canon, much of the pleasure is derived from repetitive, loving descriptions of the main characters and their home.  The stories are not only the most lovely character portraits but also a subtle, graceful tribute to the nation of Botswana and to African women and people.  The narrator is superb and perfectly suited to the books.  Almost too good to be true, I always feel as if McCall Smith is almost pulling one over on me.  (That said I read one of the Sunday Philosophy Club series, probably the eponymous first one, circa 2006, by the same author - centered around an amateur female detective in Edinburgh- and hated it, finding the characters unsympathetic and unbelievable.)

May 13, 2008

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton, 1948, read by Maggie Soboil.  I took a copy of this book with me when I went to South Africa and never read it.  I was blown away when I listened to it.  A deserved and heart-breaking classic about a black country priest in South Africa who travels to the big city when his son dies; he finds his son's mistress and son and rescues them. The narrator had the most beautiful South African accent and did a perfect job.  Apparently a more popular version is read by Michael York, a man whom I loved in Cabaret but who ranks a my least favorite audiobooks narrator of all time, having botched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  

The Year of Recorded Books, pt. 1

Here are all the books I rented from Recorded Books, starting with the date I rented them.  Will split this into multiple entries or it will get too long.

Jan. 23, 2008.

Mariel of Redwall, book 4 of the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, 1991

Salamandastron, book 5 of the Redwall series, 1992.  Both books narrated by Brian Jacques and read by a full cast.  The Redwall books are a real pleasure and the series of audiobooks narrated by Jacques and a full cast which includes his son add another layer of enjoyment.  My favorite parts are that all the songs are sung with instruments.  I loved the Redwall books as a kid and my parents took me a Jacques book signing once.  He speaks with a thick British accent and also as if he has a potato in his mouth, and is a born storyteller, the perfect narrator for his books.

My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult, 2004, narrated by .  I got this book because a friend wanted me to read it.  Unfortunately, it's a strong contender for My Least Favorite Novel of All Time.  I wouldn't read another by this unfortunately prolific and bestselling author if you paid me.  The story is told from multiple first person perspectives and narrated by various readers, a cutesy device that didn't really pay off for me, although I suppose it helps one keep track of which character is talking.  But if the book is well written and interesting, why would you need help with this?  Anyway, it's the story of a girl who is born with some sort of fatal disease.  Her parents have their second child genetically engineered to be a donor to keep the first one alive; a third child is neglected.  The story focuses on the emotional problems of the three, as teenagers, as well as their parents and some lawyers who get involved when the donor child takes the parents to court for forcing her to donate.  The lawyers, coincidentally, were in love as teenagers and had a horrible breakup from which neither has recovered; they are reunited due to the case, as if the primary plot weren't annoying enough.  Every single event, plot twist, backflash and character is hideously contrived and cliched, though not quite so much as the prose style.   

 

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem, 1999, narrated by Frank Muller.  I started this book while waiting for the plane to take me to Philadelphia for the first leg of our trip to Cameroon for our Peace Corps service, and reread it later in Cameroon.  It was originally recommended to me by my dad, who got me into Lethem, one of my favorite writers.  It's a fantastic novel though to flawed by to be Great, narrated by Lionel Essrog, and orphan with Tourette's who works for a detective agency run by a small time mobster, his patron Frank Minna.  The first chapter - in which Lionel eats six White Castle burgers while on a stakeout - is unforgettable.  (And also stirs up an unbearable longing for White Castles.)  The amazing Tourette's studded narration is amazing and makes this book a must-read (God help me with this book-review-speak) and Lethem's apparent vendetta against Zen buddhism is also good for a sympathetic laugh; I only hope it wouldn't hurt Leonard Cohen's feelings too much.  Sort of an homage to the classical noir detective novel, really its own thing.  

March 18, 2008

Mossflower, book 2 in the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, 1988

The Bellmaker, book 7 in the Redwall series, 1994, both read by Brian Jacques and a full cast

I listened to both of these while driving to Williamsburg, Virginia for a long weekend with my mom.  I enjoyed these too, but four was enough for me take a break from Redwall for a good long while.  The series is good but you can tell he was making his living cranking out one a year; Redwall was the best and after a while they get quite repetitive.

  

Audiobooks

I learned to love audiobooks from my parents.  When I was little, they owned a collection of radio dramas on tape which they may have had since before I was born, most of which I believe were produced by a company called The Mind's Eye.  I can't find most of these online, but I remember what the covers of the tapes looked like and most matched.

The Hobbit, definitely the Mind's Eye, came out in 1979.

The Wind in the Willows

Emma

The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

There may have been more but those are all I can remember at the moment.  

I believe the actor who did Toad's voice also did the voice of Stapleton, which I found cool but distracting.  I think there was more actor overlap as well.

Anyway I absolutely loved these tapes.  I literally wore the Hobbit out.  I can still here the voices of the narrator and the actors when I read those books and stories.   Just as I listen to audiobooks while cleaning the house today,  I would listen to them while I cleaned my room, which is probably something I learned from my father.

My father is an addictive audiobook listener, and he does it primarily when he does housework, when he drives and when he does "projects" - which for him includes a range of activities including home improvement, construction, carpentry, art, and arts and crafts.  I think maybe he first really got into listening to books on tape at the same time he got into counted cross stitch, sometime in the early eighties when I was a small child, and boy are these two activities certainly made for each other.  He probably discovered that he could get books on tape from the public library, of which he was an avid customer.   He was big into putting books and books on tape "on hold" - the primary advantage being that they would ship the books from other libraries in the system to your local library, so you had a wider selection of what you could get, and you could preselect using the computerized card catalogue.  I think there was a limit to how many books on tape you could have out at a time, so he had a careful system of finishing a book on tape just in time to turn in and pick up the on waiting; this often involved listening to the end of a story sitting in the car in the library parking lot.  

All or most of the books on tape in the library system were produced by Recorded Books, the best of the audiobook companies, still in business today.  All their books are unabridged - my father, like me, will not abide an abridged book on tape -- and they employed the man who is commonly recognized as the greatest audiobook narrator of all time, as well as being my father's favorite, Frank Muller.   (Muller was in a motorcycle accident in 2001 and was so severely injured that he stopped narrating; he died in 2008.)  

My dad primarly used a walkman for listening to the books on tape and was constantly wearing them out; as he discovered, the tape for a book on tape has much longer tape on it than a musical tape and will more quickly kill the motor on a cassette player.  I can remember him often having to take a tape itself apart, tiny screws and all, to fix the tape itself when it got stuck or tangled. He seems like the only man in the world who have attempted this - with a tape owned by the library, no less-- much less succeeded, which he always did.  He would even use a walkman while driving, which drove my mother crazy; I think he may have been pulled over for it by the local cops more than once.  (My father was frequently pulled over the by the cops when I was a kid for various reasons, usually speeding, but never so far as I know got a ticket; he had a gift for dealing with policemen.)  My mother also insists that the constant walkman use caused him to suffer permanent hearing loss and she would nag him about it.  I think she eventually succeeded in getting him to switch to a boombox and the car cassette player most of the time.  

So I'm sure I got the idea from him, and maybe because I'm his daughter and we have extremely similar personalities, I too obsessively listen to audiobooks.  Actually I don't understand why everybody doesn't; it turns the drudgery of long car trips, the commute to work, and housework into pleasure, and also, I think there are few pleasures greater, if any, than being read to.  When I was in college, I would listen to books on tape when I cleaned my tiny dorm room; in the Peace Corps I would listen to the very occasional one I could get my hands on when washing our clothes by hand.  When Nate and I got back to America and moved into our first apartment, we were across the street from Beatley, Alexandria, Virginia's central public library, so I was able to rent books on tape easily - by that time they had become books on CD.  I don't think I used the CD walkman from my teenagerhood much; I switched to a small CD walkman Nate bought me, and we had a CD player in our car (a wedding present from a friend who worked at Crutchfield, and we received few better).   Then we moved to D.C. and I signed up to get audiobooks through the mail from Recorded Books.  I started with the two a month plan but that proved grossly inadequate so I switched to four-at-a-time.   Now that era, too, is at an end; I finally have an iphone, the sleak modern version of my father's walkman; there is no tiny motor, no yards of tape for it to turn.  I'm cancelling my account with Recorded Books in favor of getting my audiobooks in MP3 format from audible.com.  No more finishing the story in the parking lot of the post office.   There are two drawbacks; audible books are still a bit expensive for my taste, although the selection is magnificent and the books are always at hand; and boy, that iphone doesn't hold its charge.

Ordeal

Ordeal, by Nevil Shute, published in Britain under the title What Happened to the Corbetts, 1939.  I couldn't get into this book when I started reading it but then listened to it on Recorded Books, read by Ian Stuart, was able to get into it and loved it.  

(I have much more patience with a book, even a book that's bad all the way through, if it's an audiobook.  When I was a kid I would force myself to finish a book once I had started reading it no matter what, which lead me to waste a lot of my childhood - I think because I had more faith in books.  If someone published it, it must be worthwhile!  Now I have more faith in myself and less in the publishing industry, so I've learned to be able to let go and stop reading a book if I don't like it.  My time also seems a lot more precious now that I'm an adult.  Audiobooks I'm more willing to put up with because I'm always doing something else (usually housecleaning or driving) while I'm listening, and I think the entertainment factor of having someone read it out loud makes it more bearable.  Also.. there's almost always something else to read at hand if I don't like a book, but I might be stuck with only one audiobook; better a bad one than nothing to listen to.  That's somewhat changed now thanks to my iphone, but more on that later.)  

Anyway, Ordeal was a book that Shute wrote right before WWII, in which he predicted what it would be like when the Germans bombed England, with such amazing accuracy that I don't think you would guess it was science fiction rather than a historical account of the war unless someone told you.  It's the account of an ordinary middle class family - father, mother, two young children and an infant -- who have to leave their bombed out house and town and end up sailing their small yacht to France so that the mother and children can take a ship to Canada and safety and so that the father can enlist.  That's it, that's the whole story, and it's told in the typical, beautiful, uniqe understated Shute way; a story of ordinary people who become heroes while remaining themselves under extraorindary circumstances.  Good lord, how the typical language of book reviews fails to express what a book is really like!  Well, it's an awesome book and Ian Stuart does a pretty good job narrating except for not even trying to do the little girl's voice justice.    

Reading by Example

My parents taught me to love reading. I'm sure they did it consciously too, or would have if it had been necessary, but I think they mostly "taught" me by just being themselves. I have vivid memories of lying in bed awake long past my bedtime (I enjoyed this time and entertained myself by making up stories), or waking up in the middle of the night, and looking out the half open door of my room into the living room to see my mother, with her knees drawn up in front of her on the corner of the couch, absorbed in a book in a pool of lamplight, a slight frown on her face, combing her fingers through her hair. She was the type to stay up late with a book, and also suffered from insomnia and could often be found to have gotten up from bed to resume her spot on the couch at any hour of the night. If it was still evening, there might be the sound of the dishwasher, NPR, or classical music in the background; later she would be perched on her spot on the couch in a pool of silence and darkness in our very silent, dark house, which was located miles from any other in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I found the sight of her there extremely comforting. I slept in a high loft bed right up under the high ceiling of my bedroom (except in the summer, when it was too hot up there; then I slept in a regular bed); at a certain point my book collection grew so large that my father completely walled the loft in with bookshelves. This was delightful, but I remember telling my father it was imperative that I still be able to look down from the loft on the side where I could see out the door of my room. He built a small window into the back of the bookshelf which formed the headboard of the loftbed, which gave me a perfect view of my mother's spot on the end of the couch. While it was generally useful to be able to see into the living room from my bed, I think it was this sight of my mother reading in the night which made me insist on the window.

Nevil Shute, Christmas 2008 - New Years 2009

When I was teenager, thanks to my father's recommendation, I listened to In the Wet, by Nevil Shute, as an audiobook. I think it must have been the 1988 Recorded Books edition read by Norman Dietz (as that is the edition still available from the Jefferson Madison Regional Library system of my hometown!). Recently, also at my father's recommendation, I listened to Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute, also the Recorded Books version read by Frank Muller.

More on audiobooks in general later. For now, I want to talk about Nevil Shute.

I loved Trustee from the Toolroom so much that I wanted to immediately get my hands on more of his books. I discovered that although he was a bestselling author in the 40s and 50s, all of his books except On the Beach are out of print in the United States. (He was British and lived for much of his adult life in Australia; many or all of his books are still in print in the U.K.) To my extreme good fortune, for Christmas, my father gave me a stack of old hardbacks of Shute novels: An Old Captivity, Ordeal, Pastoral, The Chequer Board, A Town Like Alice, Requiem for A Wren, and Beyond the Black Stump. I think I started reading Beyond the Black Stump on Christmas Day. When I finished it I had to immediately pick up the next Shute book from the stack, and for the next couple of weeks sped through all of them except for Ordeal, which I am currently listening to as a Recorded Books audiobook, read by Ian Stuart. I will attempt to give a paragraph to each book in the order that I read it. (I won't review Ordeal yet since I'm still in the middle of it.)

In the Wet, originally published in 1953. I will preface this by saying it's been at least 10 years, maybe 15, since I listened to it; the following is by no means a complete plot summary. There are two plot lines: a drunken bum is dying in the Australian outback during the rainy season ("the wet"). He has some sort of link, or memory, of an alternate/future reality in which Australia plays a more central role in the world and the U.K. A young pilot receives some sort of politically important secret job and falls in love with a secretary who turns out to be beautiful and tan in a bathing suit and also good at sailing. (This latter theme, of a serious, buttoned-up woman in a functionary position turning out to be hot and a good sailor, and thus worthy of the main character's love, is central to Shute's ouevre.) That's pretty much all I remember; I can't wait to reread it.

Trustee from the Toolroom, originally published in 1960, after Shute's death the same year. My favorite of his books so far, possibly one of my favorite novels of all time. Frank Muller, widely considered to be the greatest audiobooks narrator of all time, does a lovely job narrating. A humble, lower middle class Englishman becomes his young neice's guardian when her parents die while carelessly sailing around the world. He alone knows that all their wealth, in the form of diamonds, was sealed up in their sail boat, so for the first time in his life he must leave his native town and find the crashed boat in the faint hope of recovering the diamonds to give his neice a shot at a good life. He's an amateur creator of tiny, fully functional machines and the main contribtor to a fanzine on the subject; he turns out to have fans in unlikely places who ensure the journey is a success. What a book! It has a completely original plot; vividly drawn characters you would never meet elsewhere (most importantly that of the main character, the brave, humble little engineer), and is both melancholy, uplifting and hillariously funny. It does all the things Shute does best and does them even better. I've never read another books like it.

Beyond the Black Stump, 1956. This is the portrait of a young, beautiful, brave Australian girl who's both emminently sensible but young and sheltered enough to be a naif. She's grown up in the wildest wilds of the outback with her eccentric family (white) and neighbors (mostly Aboriginal). She's well-educated and even refined but at home in the rough frontier lifestyle (think Ma from Little House on the Prairie as a young girl). (Oh man, someone should totally write a novel about Ma - Charlotte Ingalls, I guess her name is. One of the great characters from literature about whom we know far too little. Remember when Laura realizes she's never seen Ma's ears?) A group of American engineers comes along to look for oil, and she falls in love - sort of - with one of them. They want to get engaged but her mother is smart enough to insist she visit the American's family first. So she travels to a 1950s Oregon town, where the people still pride themselves on living on the frontier -- she's too polite to point out she knows what the real frontier is like, but ends up realizing she belongs back on it, with the British outback farmer who's loved her all along. This was not my favorite Shute novel-- it spends a lot of time from the POV of the American boyfriend, and Shute did a better job than he intended of making him unsympathetic, and not enough time with the awesome Outback eccentrics. However it is a fascinating exploration of ideas that were near to Shute's heart - the nature of the outback or the frontier, and his two favorite countries, Australia and America (Australia, of course, was his favorite place in the world, and America doesn't come off very well in this particular book, but he did like the idea of it).

A Town Like Alice, 1950. My second favorite Shute novel, and another favorite of all time. One of the most original books I've ever read; a book only Shute could write, and thank God he did. The story is so surprising, and takes such a perfect but completely unexpected twist that I'm hesitant to write it down. Not that's it's all that likely, dear reader, that you exist, but I'd hate to ruin one of the coolest novels of all time for you. I'll tell you how it begins: World War II comes to the British colony of Malaya, and the Japanese take all the British civil servants prisoner. They don't have a camp for women and children, so a group of them are ruthlessly marched round and round the island, emprisoned but homeless, for years. Apparently this part of the book is based on the true story of what happened to a group of Dutch women in Sumatra. In Shute's version, all the women are the wives of the civil servants, except for the heroine, a young secretary, who emerges as their leader and ensures the survival of those that do manage to survive the horrendous conditions and tropical diseases. This is a story with true horrors -- I'm sure I cried more than once in Starbucks while reading it - but I also cried tears of joy at other parts. It's a bit like a classic holocaust survivor's story with a lot M*A*S*H* an an Australian outback story thrown in, and as Dickens would say, tell me higher praise and I'll use it.

Requiem for a Wren, 1955. All Shute novels I've read have a core of seriousness but usually a lot of humor; this one is purely sad, with only the barest hint of optimism to allow you to have the will to live in this sad world when you're done with it. Instead of crying in Starbucks I cried in Uptowner's (24th St. NW between L and M, down the alley from Trader Joe's, decent sandwiches and buffet but very expensive). An Australian WWII vet and sheep farmer researches the life of a mysterious suicide to find he knew her as a Wren during the war; his heart is broken but finally allowed to heal. This is a delicate book and I'm not sure what Shute was trying to say with it... maybe just to tell the truest story he could about some very particular kinds of sad and broken lives.

The Chequer Board, 1947. An interesting complement to Spike Lee's movie The Miracle at Santa Anna, a story Shute might have told if he were a modern day black film maker. (Spike, if you're out there, I appreciated your movie even though nobody else did.) Being himself instead, this is a much more understated, even funny story, and it's about the reaction of lower class Brits (rather than Italians) to black American soldiers during WWII. In a nutshell, each group finds the other understandably awesome, and also Gen. Eisenhower was a cool dude. The end. Another total original and a pleasure.

Pastoral, 1944. Shute obviously thought this story an adorable defence of romantic love and gender roles in the midst of WWII England. I was not a fan. Essentially the Wren, happy and fulfilled in her newly possible professional role, is persuaded to give it all up to marry a pilot and keep house for him, because unfulfilled love causes him to pilot his plane less well. What a dork. A story in which he loves the Wren enough to leave her alone and allow her to do her job, and allows the unfulfilled love to motivate him to be a truly heroic fighter pilot, then gets tragically shot down by the Nazis, would have been infinitely preferable. Sorry Nevil.

An Old Captivity, 1940. Another Shute original, which is beautifully echoed in what may be the greatest Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of all time, The Inner Light. A Cambridge don hires a bush pilot to fly him to Greenland for archaelogical research, and takes his spoiled daughter along (she is reformed by the dangerous adventure of the journey). The pilot falls into a coma in which he experiences the life of a slave belonging to Leif Erickson; he heads the first exploratory expedition when Leif discovers a new land, and as a reward Leif sets him free to live there with his beloved fellow slave. When the pilot wakes up, he is not only able to validate the don's theory about the Vikings discovering America, but having experienced true love in that other life, is able to find happiness with the don's daughter. Wow.

I Speak of Boredom

To explain the name of the blog: "monstre delicat" is a phrase from Baudelaire's poem Au lecteur, which opens his collection Les Fleurs du Mal ("Flowers of Evil").  To quote from Richard Howard's translation of the last two stanzas:  "But here among... the squalid zoo of vices, one is even uglier and fouler than the rest... this beast would gladly undermine the earth and swallow all creation in a yawn; I speak of Boredom...  Reader, you know this squeamish monster well, -hypocrite reader, - my alias, - my twin!"

(Monstre delicat is here translated "squeamish monster" - the monster being Boredom, or ennui.)  

Perhaps needless to say, Au lecteur is one of my very favorite poems.  

 

Ce Monstre Delicat - an explanation

The purpose of this blog is to document books I have read (or listened to as audiobooks) and movies I have seen.  For a while when I was a teenager, I kept a journal of books I had read, and it proved quite useful: writing a summary of the plot helped me remember a book better, and writing a brief review helped me analyze the book and form a more considered opinion about it. Now as an adult, I will sometimes have a flashback to a scene or idea in a book I read years ago, and wish desperately I could remember the author or title and find it again.  If only I had kept up my brief practice of a book journal!

It would not have occurred to me then to document movies.   I liked watching movies very much, but for reasons beyond my control, I consumed (for lack of a better word) far fewer movies than books, and partly due to their shortness and vividness, and also to their rarity, I found them more memorable than books (thus there was no need to write down plots in case I forgot later).  I also took movies far less seriously; it did not occur to me to analyze or review them.  I was pretty old - 16 or 17, believe it or not- before I truly realized there could be such a thing as a bad movie or a bad play.  (Not because I saw only good ones - rather, I just liked, or believed to be good even if I didn't really like it, almost every one I saw.)  I was much younger- maybe around 8 - when I understood that a book could fall anywhere on a spectrum of abysmal to Great.   In other words, while I liked all movies, I enjoyed them uncritically, and therefore, didn't truly appreciate them - didn't love them.  I could read better than I could view; I could understood a book better than a film; at least on some level I could analyze a book, and I could certainly identify some good and Great ones to love with all my heart.  Why was I a better reader than viewer?  Partly due to practice - in my childhood, at least, it was easy to get my hands on a nearly infinite supply of books and rare to see a movie - and also I was taught from an early age not only to critique and analyze books, but specifically how to do so.  I think I got the message from my parents (and more arguably my culture) that movies are for occasional entertainment, while books are there to sustain life and make it livable.

I would still consider books to be more necessary to life than movies, but I have gained much in my appreciation of movies as an important art form, and worthy, side by side with the books I read, of a little record-keeping and reviewing.