Windsor Castle.

Mt St Helens (from the Johnston Ridge Observatory). As far as I know, only the second time I’ve been to the north side.

Chatsworth House Bonfire Night. It was not this cloudy, and the fireworks were amazing.

Jökulsárlón (glacier river lagoon), Iceland

Every other place in Iceland, suitably represented here by Goðafoss (waterfall of the gods)

Let’s be honest: if this were a Top 10 or 15 or 100 list, all of the remaining spots would be taken up by Iceland. You will find out more than you ever wanted to know about our trip very soon.

Bess of Hardwick by Mary S. Lovell
Biography of the matriarch of the Cavendish family (today the dukes of Devonshire). A fascinating, shrewd, and incredibly wealthy Elizabethan woman (second only to Elizabeth herself), Bess was involved in all the political intrigue of the day: she and her fourth husband “hosted” Mary, Queen of Scots, in their assorted country homes before her execution, and even attempted to position a willful granddaughter to ascend the throne. We happen to live right in the middle of her vast property, about halfway between her two primary residences, Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. We’re practically related!

Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis
Fictional account of the repercussions of a mid-century Midwestern man accidentally discovering that he has an African-American ancestor.

Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
Fictional account of the repercussions of a new bride turning into a fox.

Independent People by Halldór Laxness
Fictional account of an early 20th-century rural Icelandic family struggling to survive against totally surmountable odds. All the dude ever wanted was his independence.

Great Tales From English History by Robert Lacey
Bite-size historical niblets of the events that shaped England’s history, now in one handy volume.

54: Number of books I read.
5: Number of books I’m currently reading.
1: Number of books I abandoned midway.

Bonus

The one best book Stephan read this year:

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.
Non-fiction accounts of the ordinary lives of six North Korean defectors.

1: Number of books Stephan read.

The King’s Speech (2010)
A reluctant king (George VI) conquers his stutter with the help of a speech therapist. We accidentally saw this at the Odeon Leicester Square, the super fancy London theatre that usually hosts movie premieres. Neither of us could figure out how to operate the taps in the restroom(s), so I can only imagine all the unhygienic starlets wandering about the the place on a regular basis. So the movie was also really good, wholly deserving of its numerous accolades, and appropriate for parental viewing.

True Grit (2010)
A teenage girl in the West avenges her father’s death with the help of Jason Bourne and The Dude. In general, I disapprove highly of remakes, but this one was fantastic (and wholly deserving of its numerous accolades and mostly appropriate for parental viewing).

A Town Called Panic (2009, French)
Housemates Cowboy, Indian, and Horse enjoy multiple adventures with the help of assorted friends, underwater monsters, and mad scientists. A surreal (and hilarious) stop-motion film.

How To Train Your Dragon (2010)
A gentle Viking teenager heals centuries of inter-species misunderstanding with the help of an adorable dragon. Un-hamfisted life lessons with amazing visuals.

Bjarnfreðurson (2009, Icelandic)
An eccentric Socialist with five university degrees comes to terms with his past with the help of two unlikely friends. The film caps an Icelandic TV series—great on its own, but brilliant as the final chapter of the series.

Honorably mentioned films that have less to do with dogs than one might think:
My Life As A Dog (1985, Swedish). Bittersweetly coming of age in Sweden.
Dogville (2003). Good and evil in a small town.
Dogtooth (2009, Greek). A Greek family’s alternate reality. Quirky and quite dark.

Things Are Happening, People.

First, I started a brand new shiny job today! An actual one, where I have to go to an office five days a week. And also do things like get out of bed at six a.m. and regularly brush my hair.

I’m probably not going to tell you much about it because, well, that’s not a thing that I do. But I will tell you that it’s proposal graphic design at a UK-based consultancy focusing primarily on socioeconomic development in developing and transitioning countries. Oh, and that it’s on the outskirts of Nottingham and just up the street from a bit of what’s left of Sherwood Forest!

So after clearing out the backlog of two-month-old posts left unposted, I’m officially diverting my writing energies away from blogging and toward finishing the first draft of the book I’ve been working on for months now. This may or may not result in fewer blog posts, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you!

And in the meantime, I (perhaps counterintuitively) started a tumblr, which is more my (micro)blogging speed these days. It’s over here, but I should warn you that it’s for my own entertainment only—just bits and bobs I’ve been magpieing (you know—collecting shiny things like a magpie!). I can’t promise that you will like it at all (for instance: I would not rule out the possibility of swears), but I’ma be honest: I don’t really care. All for me!

2. The blue whale’s heart pumps 5 or 6 times per minute, pumping 10 tons of blood through 1 million miles of blood vessels. And more than I ever wanted to know about the southern right whale’s reproductive organs.  Thanks, David Attenborough!

The Movies List is a compilation of eight of the American Film Institute’s “100 Years” lists. Lots of them are included on more than one list (The Wizard of Oz is on five), so the grand total of films is 409. [Current tally: down to 171.]

Because I don’t get to pick the movies, I’ve been watching lots that I would normally not choose myself, particularly older ones.

What I’ve learned since I started watching older movies that I normally would not have been compelled to:

1. Most remakes fall somewhere between “unnecessary” and “desecration.”

2. Elizabeth Taylor was a stone cold fox. See also: Marilyn Monroe’s appeal.

3. You need to watch more Sidney Poitier films.

4. Even Alfred Hitchcock has his off days. Ditto Steven Spielberg.

5. Musicals are excellent accompaniment for ironing.

6. The good Westerns are really quite good.

7a. If I never have to see another Mel Brooks movie, it will be too soon.

7b. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Realize That No, I Get It, I Just Don’t Think It’s Funny. I even watched it twice, just to make sure. The third funniest movie of all time? Really?

7c. I’m very glad that Woody Allen is now too old to be considered a viable love interest and he’s forced to stay behind the camera where he belongs.

8. Lots and lots of pop culture references.

This has been my report on The Movies List. Tune in next time for: more than you ever wanted to know about The Books List.

Seeing as people have been known to actually give me money in exchange for graphic design services, I thought maybe it was about time for a wee little blog redesign. It’s only been four years.

I don’t know about you, but while I generally catch every cold going, I usually don’t get the flu. Let me tell you: it is an entirely different ballpark.

A cold is a minor inconvenience. The flu is like that Bill Cosby routine when he talks about painkillers:

“Sir, have you ever had a headache?”
“Have I? One time, it ate my foot right off!”

Is kind of how I feel. I’ve spent basically all week passed out on the couch. Oh, and did I mention the part where our boiler is broken for reals this time, so the entire house except the two rooms with space heaters is freezing and I can’t bathe or do any laundry?

Not the most auspicious beginning to a new year. Good thing I’m not superstitious.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
by Amanda Foreman

This is the book The Duchess film was based on, and it’s probably the best biography I’ve ever read. Plenty of scandal and intrigue, yes, but also a Woman Ahead Of Her Time who took an unprecedented role in political campaigning, using her considerable social power and charisma to influence the politics of the day—a day that included the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. A close friend of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) and Marie Antoinette, she was also hopelessly addicted to gambling, the source of many of her life’s worries. Of course the movie’s focus is on the part where her cold and distant husband takes her best friend as a mistress and moves her right in to their household, but the book Georgiana is a bit more amenable to this idea. It’s all done up quite tastefully (perhaps in part because Georgiana’s dutiful Victorian descendants saw fit to censor her letters after her death—ugh!).

What the Dog Saw
by Malcolm Gladwell

A compilation of Gladwell’s New Yorker articles, this is my favorite of his books. I read The Outliers around the same time, but this is the one that I lay on the dining room floor all weekend reading. It’s like he knows exactly the sorts of things I’m interested in reading about.

How Green Was My Valley
by Richard Llewellyn

Tell me you don’t want to read a book that starts with, “I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.”

The story of a Welsh mining town on the cusp of change, as the bottom falls out of the labor market at the turn of the 20th century. As the novel progresses, the slag heap from the mine at the top of the hill grows ever larger, until there is no longer any green in the valley and the miners’ houses are under constant threat of being crushed by the debris. How’s that for a metaphor?

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
by Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything for the domestic set. Highly enjoyable, well paced, packed full of those little nuggets of trivia that my brain just loves to retain at the expense of, oh, important dates and numbers. My only quibble, and a minor one at that, is the ethnocentrism in only talking about English and American houses. He rarely makes it so far as the Continent. Still delightful.

Number Five Would Have Gone Here

So I don’t really have a fifth book. There were a number of books that I really wanted to like (The Hidden Landscape, Dry Store Room No. 1, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Zookeeper’s Wife, Possession), and a number of books that I almost liked well enough to be number five (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Howard’s End, Bonk), but in the end nothing that I was terribly excited about for this slot.

I am currently in the midst of five(!) books—not quite sure how that happened—but it is looking unlikely that any of them will be finished by the end of the year:

The English: A Portrait of a People by Jeremy Paxman
A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

So…four excellent books, a handful of really good books, lots of just okay books, and if I hadn’t been repeatedly burned this year by books I thought I would like and then didn’t, I would say that White Teeth has a good chance of clinching spot number five.

Giant (1956)
I’m not sure why I like this so much; alls I know is I didn’t want it to be over because I wanted to see what would happen next. Some might call it a gripping multi-generational saga of wealth and greed and other stuff. James Dean’s last movie, and, in other news, Elizabeth Taylor was a stone cold fox.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
So pretty. Good thing too, because there is not a whole lot of talking: something like 25 minutes before the first word is spoken. Enthralling, regardless.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Probably my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie. Gratuitously violent, of course, but I appreciate the believable amount of non-English in a movie set in Occupied France. An overall enjoyable plot perhaps because of its gross historical inaccuracy—you can’t really enjoy a realistic war film, no matter how well done.

This Is England (2006)
British film that I’m sure has been referred to as “gritty” more than once. A bullied schoolboy is befriended by a group of apolitical skinheads (I didn’t even know there was such a thing) and, when the group splinters, dabbles in some hostile nationalism. It’s set not too far from where we live (though in an unnamed location), and I still had to concentrate to get through the accents at first. Totally worth it.

Let the Right One In (2008)
I have no idea why they felt the need to make an American version (Let Me In) of this really quite good little Swedish movie. And I really have no idea why anyone would watch vampire movies like Twilight when there are vampire movies like this one out there. This movie taught me that vampires aren’t allowed to come into your house unless you ask them to—who comes up with this stuff? Talk about an Achilles’ heel. Who needs cloves of garlic and wooden stakes when you can just foster your natural impoliteness, rampant agoraphobia, wariness of strangers, and/or open disdain of all mankind?

So…strangely, no actual funny movies this year. Although Brad Pitt trying to pass as Italian by Texas-drawling “arrivederci” was pretty hilarious (Inglourious Basterds).