Man In The Dark by Paul Auster

The audio book of Man in The Dark was read by author Paul Auster and he does a brilliant job of bringing this odd story to life.  His voice has a soft cadence and a deliberate touch which perfectly matches the slow paced story of a seventy-two year old man who can’t quit get to sleep. As our tale opens, we find our hero alone in the dark, staring at the ceiling he can’t see, surrounded by an emptiness that he can’t quite feel.  To keep himself occupied, he tells himself a story. A man wakes up in a perfectly…

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The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech has received various awards and nominations, including twelve Academy Award nominations (the highest number of nominations in 2011), seven Golden Globe nominations, fourteen BAFTA nominations and wins from various critics’ circles.  –Wikipedia I was expecting The King’s Speech to be a good movie, and I am often disappointed by movies I think will be good.  Not this time.  The King’s Speech was great.  It’s an almost literal fairy tale of a Price who becomes a King through no real desire or action of his own.  First his father, played by Sir Michael-Dumbledore-Gambon, goes a bit mad and…

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The Inner Circle

T. C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the story of Professor Kinsey and his obsession with all things sexual.  In the book we find that Prok, as Kinsey is known to his associates, is a pansexual pervert who loves all manner of deviant behavior.  Part and parcel of his personal philosophy, of course, is that there is no such thing as perversion or deviant behavior-all human animals want all manner of sexual contact. The story is told from the perspective of John Milk, one of Prok’s many students/sex partners/researchers.  Prok has sex with anything that moves, and so to, does…

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Downton Abbey comes to PBS

Downton Abbey is one of those rare shows that was able to surprise me.  Not once, not twice, but almost constantly.  The writer did a brilliant job of directing my expectations in one direction and then doubling back and surprising me. The story is a familiar one, another tale of that fantasy world that existed in the British Empire for about thirty or forty years where a rich family owned an Estate and a Staff of fifty were needed to run the House of that Estate. Downton Abbey is the story of The Lord of The Manner, his rich America…

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