Bloodsuckers

HBO has me completely under their spell again. I guess the lingo is that they've glamoured me. This Sunday night lineup of actual vampires in True Blood paired with the Hollywood bloodletting on Entourage is just too good. I still find the actors on TB unattractive, but have also come to realize a large part of that is their phony southern accents. And the fact that they're unattractive. But I love the camp and the gore and sex and that weird humor. And Entourage started a little slow, but as Piven was picking up his Emmy, I flipped the channel to catch him in action and laughed so hard -- at both him and Kevin Dillon -- in the latest episode. They actually had a car chase in the latest ep. When it started, I figured they'd really shit the bed for the year. But it was good, man! Better than most movie car chases these days! And then it just got funnier. I won't give up Dexter which starts tomorrow, but he will be relegated to tape delay.

The Big Read

I stole this meme from Citizen Jane.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and...
* ...bold those you have read.
* ...italicize those you intend to read
* ...underline the books you LOVE.
* ...encourage people to reprint this list on their own blogs.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials- Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -- ahh, someday, so I say.
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time- Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Nitpicky perhaps, but Hamlet isn't a book. It's a play. I have read it, anyhow, many times. Fuck, I'm currently writing my own version of it, because I am actually that big of a fan and so daft that it doesn't really bother me to sully my favorite dramatic work. But it is intended to be watched, performed. And it's better that way.

Also, no Hemingway? Seriously? Or The Divine Comedy? This list is kind of weird. Gimme a list of the top 100 flims/movies, and I'd be willing to bet a benjamin that I've seen 'em all.

True Blood Brothers

Gah. Man, I've been blowing off the blogging lately, eh? All I can tell you is that I got all caught up in enjoying the last of summer, and all my entertainment came late at night from watching the crazies on Big Brother After Dark (once all the psychos were gone, it got boring) and a plethora of Bravo shows. You know, even the crappy ones are addictive. I don't know how that station has such a proclivity for finding such self-centered and yet un-self aware people who are also fascinating, but I love watching it all.

Had to give up on Weeds this summer. Nancy is just too much of a completely shitty mother for me to deal any longer.

I did come indoors early on Sunday to usher in the new season of Entourage. Thank heavens the guys are finally back. They really nail what Weeds stumbles with -- making characters do assholey things and yet still make you root for them. This week, Drama was in the throes of a prima donna meltdown, but it had to be backburnered when he got a whiff that his baby bro was in trouble. I love Drama. I really wish they could Emmy Kevin Dillon this year. Even though he's in one of the categories not entirely dominated by 30 Rock (and I'm not complaining about 30 Rock getting props) he's still got really tight competition from his own show and Piven, again. Not to mention NPH.

And, since I was in, I watched True Blood, too, because Alan Ball has a lot of goodwill built up from Six Feet Under. I like vampire stuff, and this show seems cool, though I was a bit shocked at how bad the acting was. And I don't mean campy. I like campy. But also just...bad. And bad and campy is completely excusable when you're dealing with enormously attractive people -- Showgirls is a great example -- but when the people aren't very attractive, it's a little harder. And this cast just isn't very attractive. Yes, that's mighty damn shallow of me. I don't give a shit. It's TV. If I want to watch semi-attractive people overacting, I'll stick with Big Brother After Dark. But since I do love camp, I'll stick with it for a couple more weeks. After all, it can't be as bad as John from Cincinnati was.