Illustration Inspiration...

Every once and a while I have to write about my favorite children's book author Maira Kalman.
Her illustrations are amazing - a mix of whimsy and painterly panache, she's one of those people who can write books for kids and adults alike - and both will enjoy them equally.
However, I would be remiss not to mention that she is not only an author but a graphic designer and a product designer who had had her images on the cover of numerous New Yorker magazines and the NYC subway amongst many other projects. Recently, she illustrated the new version of Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I happened upon this at the library originally, and immediately had to own it - it's a staple for any writer but the illustrations make this a 'must have' for any designer, artist or illustrator's library too.


Three covers from The New Yorker and her children's book collection.


Product Design, the 'Ichi' clock available at the Museum of Modern Art and online.



For more information on Maira Kalman visit www.mairakalman.com

Nine Foreign Films I recommend

There are a lot of great foreign films. Below is a short list of a few that I recommend. Not on the list are films like Amelie, The Bicycle Thief, La Dolce Vita etc. just because most people already know about them. There are ones on this list that you may have seen too - but if you haven't, you should.
In the Mood for Love and Blue are two of my all time favorite movies - and not just in the 'foreign film' category.
Rather than write my own synopsis for each one, I went the easy route and hunted and gathered on the internet for sake of efficiency. Enjoy.

Diabolique
Legend has it that Henri-Georges Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock to secure the rights to this novel, which proved to be a veritable blueprint for an icy masterpiece of murder, mystery, and suspense. Véra Clouzot plays the sickly wife of a callous headmaster of a provincial boarding school going to seed, and the commanding Simone Signoret is the headmaster's mistreated mistress. Together they plot and carry out his murder, a brutal drowning that director Clouzot documents in chilly detail, but the corpse disappears, and a nosy detective starts sniffing around the grounds as threatening notes taunt the women. Clouzot's thriller is as precise and accomplished a work as anything in Hitchcock's canon, a film of grueling suspense and startling shocks in an overcast, gray world of decay, but his icy manipulations lack the human dimension and emotional resonance of the master of suspense. The film has been accused of being misanthropic by many critics, and Clouzot's attitude toward his characters is bitter at best, contemptuous at worst. The viewer is left on the outside looking in, but the razor precision and terrifying twists deliver a sleek, bleak spectacle worthy of attention. -Amazon Reviews

Belle de Jour
A young Paris housewife, Séverine, grows bored with her stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to work there--but only during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967 film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born director Luis Buñuel, whose career forms one of the greatest and boldest arcs in cinema. By the time of Belle de jour, Buñuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which not only leaves the motivation of Séverine a mystery (despite a few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first classic, Un chien andalou, was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali), Buñuel suggests that what we see may be real, or simply Séverine's imagination. Because he was the least pretentious of directors, Buñuel keeps his material playful, wicked, yet cutting. As Séverine, the impossibly lovely Catherine Deneuve uses her cool demeanor to great effect--she never breaks her deadpan, either. In 1995, after having been out of official circulation for years, Belle de Jour was re-released in America and became an unexpected art-house hit. -Amazon Reviews


The Lives of Others
Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, this is a first-rate thriller that, like Bertolucci's The Conformist and Coppola's The Conversation, opts for character development over car chases. The place is East Berlin, the year is 1984, and it all begins with a simple surveillance assignment: Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe in a restrained, yet deeply felt performance), a Stasi officer and a specialist in this kind of thing, has been assigned to keep an eye on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch, Black Book), a respected playwright, and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck, Mostly Martha). Though Dreyman is known to associate with the occasional dissident, like blacklisted director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), his record is spotless. Everything changes when Wiesler discovers that Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) has an ulterior motive in spying on this seemingly upright citizen. In other words, it's personal, and Wiesler's sympathies shift from the government to its people--or at least to this one particular person. That would be risky enough, but then Wiesler uses his privileged position to affect a change in Dreyman's life. The God-like move he makes may be minor and untraceable, but it will have major consequences for all concerned, including Wiesler himself. Writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck starts with a simple premise that becomes more complicated and emotionally involving as his assured debut unfolds. Though three epilogues is, arguably, two too many, The Lives of Others is always elegant, never confusing. It's class with feeling. -Amazon Reviews

In the Mood for Love
Hong Kong 1962, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), a journalist, rents a room from Mr. Koo. He will live there with his wife, a hotel receptionist. It's sheer coincidence that he moves in the same day that Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) moves in next door, at Mrs. Suen's place. Lizhen works as a secretary to Mr. Ho (Lai Chin), the boss of a shipping company. It's also a coincidence that both of them are moving in without help from their spouses. Chow's wife is working her shift at the hotel at the time of the move. Lizhen's husband, Mr Chan, is away on a business trip; he works for a Japanese company, and is often abroad. Despite having convivial and neighbourly landlords, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan often find themselves alone and lonely in their respective rooms.

Neither of them ever finds out how it began, but Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan discover that their respective spouses are having an affair. The discovery shocks both of them. Chow, feeling hurt and wishing to understand how the affair happened, begins finding excuses to spend time with Mrs. Chan. They begin rehearsing what they will say to their spouses when they confront them with what they know. Then Mr. Chow invites Mrs. Chan to help him with a martial-arts series that he is writing for the newspaper. Their meetings are discreet, but people begin to notice. There seems no possibility that they, too, will drift into an affair. But Mrs. Chan's emotional reticence begins to haunt Mr. Chow and he finds his feelings changing. It's almost like being in love.

Four years later, as a Singapore-based reporter covering General De Gaulle's visit to Cambodia, Chow Mo-wan finds himself remembering an old story about a way of unburdening yourself of a secret you don't want anyone to know. -Rottentomatoes.com

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
This colorful hit put director Pedro Almodóvar on the international map and cemented the reputation of its star, Carmen Maura. The film is a peppy little soap bubble as TV actress Pepa (Maura) wakes up to find a note from her lover, Ivan (Fernando Guillén), informing her he is leaving. Desperate to tell him some important information, Pepa almost kills herself with sleeping pills, burns her bed, and spends most of the movie trying to track him down. Her adventures put her in contact with Ivan's insane ex-wife (Julieta Serrano), his handsome son (Antonio Banderas), and the son's fiancée (Rossy de Palma). They all descend on her penthouse apartment in a deliriously comic extended scene, complicated by a pitcher full of narcotic gazpacho and her friend Candela (María Barranco), a ditzy beauty wanted by the police for associating with Shiite terrorists. Through it all, the indefatigable Pepa fights gallantly against her crushing heartbreak. As a testament to the resilient beauty of women, this free-spirited film rings true and is a treasure. Also appearing are Chus Lampreave, Kiti Manver, Yayo Calvo, and Guillermo Montesinos as the hilarious driver of the Mambo Taxi. - Rottentomatoes.com

Picnic at Hanging Rock
Weir's (TRUMAN SHOW, DEAD POETS SOCIETY) exotic story employs tranquil surrealism and lush cinematography to explore the interconnected relationships between nature, eroticism and repression. While out climbing rocks, three girls from a posh finishing school vanish without a trace. In an attempt to find them, a geometry teacher climbs the rock and follows them into oblivion. A young man who has seen the teacher running up the mountain in a pair of bloomers, decides to spend the night on the rock, in hopes of finding the girls. But in the morning he is discovered with a wound on his head and no recollection of what happened. And when one of the girls later returns she's also wounded and dazed. A truly alluring, enigmatic film. -Rottentomatoes.com

Hong Kong 1962, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), a journalist, rents a room from Mr. Koo. He will live there with his wife, a hotel receptionist. It's sheer coincidence that he moves in the same...

Blue
In the first part of acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's extraordinary THREE COLORS trilogy, BLUE represents Liberty (of Equality and Fraternity) in the French flag and national motto. Julie (Juliette Binoche) is a young, musically gifted Frenchwoman who has just lost her daughter and renowned composer-husband Patrice (Claude Duneton) in a tragic car accident. During her long physical and emotional convalescence, a journalist questions Julie about the widespread rumor that she's the actual composer of all Patrice's work. She rebuffs the journalist's inquiry regarding her husband's music, but she does not deny it. Upon leaving the hospital, Julie takes a flat in Paris and struggles to start anew--but not until she destroys Patrice's final unfinished work: a huge symphony for twelve orchestras, to be played at a gala celebrating the upcoming unification of twelve European nations. But another copy surfaces, and gradually, as Julie discovers some surprising secrets about her husband's life, she's drawn back to the music, and the pleasures of existence. Kieslowski uses color as metaphor ingeniously, adding immense emotional depth to the story that is unfolding on screen. As Julie, Binoche is a striking cinematic presence. Her transition from a destroyed widow to a woman who has learned to embrace life gives BLUE the heart and soul that makes it a powerful, moving work.
-Rottentomatoes.com

Under the Sand
Francois Ozon's haunting UNDER THE SAND stars the remarkable British actress Charlotte Rampling, who plays Marie Drillon: a strong, attractive, professional, independent middle-aged woman trying to get her life back on track after the sudden disappearance of her husband. Even for a superwoman like Marie, the shock of the tragedy is psychologically traumatizing. Marie isn't sure what happened to her husband (Is he dead? Did he run off with someone else?) and she's in denial about him being gone. At Parisian dinner parties with her supportive, careful friends, Marie still talks about her husband in the present tense. At home, she still imagines that he is with her; she pours two cups of tea in the morning and she reminds him to set the alarm clock before going to sleep at night. At the university where she teaches English, she reads to her students from the melancholy book THE WAVES by Virginia Woolf. Through all of this, Ozon's camera caresses Marie and encourages her, always casting her in cold, confident light. Using film language such as the repeated double reflection of Marie's face in the mirror, audiences come to understand Marie's innermost thoughts and feelings. She is a woman confronting herself (her identity, her age, her body, her sexuality, her emotions, her intellect) with brutal honesty. UNDER THE SAND is beautiful, sad, languorous film that includes some unforgettable images of the rolling ocean waves near Marie's beach house in Landes, France. - Rottentomates.com

Midnight Lace
The beautiful Kit Preston becomes disconcerted when she starts receiving crank calls claiming that her life is in jeopardy. Although She tells police about the messages, her somewhat hysterical manner leaves them convinced that the danger is all in her imagination.... or fakes, in order to get attention from her neglectful husband. However, two people know that the peril is very real, indeed. - Amazon Reviews
note: One of the few 'thrillers' Doris Day was in. This movie is hard to find, as the DVD is only available in a Region 2 edition.

The beautiful Kit Preston becomes disconcerted when she starts receiving crank calls claiming that her life is in jeopardy. Although She tells police about the messages, her somewhat hysteric

Books worth listening to...

I have a semi-long commute to work, almost 30 minutes each way. Because of this, and because the news tends to run the same stories over and over, Glen, Pinch(our dog) and I, enjoy listening to audio books. Our library has loads of them, and they're very up to date on their purchases.
Now, one thing that I have found after spending many hours 'reading' with my ears, is that, unlike a traditional book, the audio book can be somewhat enhanced or drastically de-hanced by a reader.


Usually the reader is someone from stage or screen. Some can read a book with just the slightest change of accent or tone and it will be a success. Other readers can do a myriad of voices, making each character sound completely different. I loved the audio version of Ruth Rendell's The Rottweiler - a collection of quirky characters nestled together in a British thriller - each with a very distinct voice. I'm hoping The Water's Lovely also by Rendell will turn out to be as good.

In critiquing a reader, another quality I look for is how well they can do the voice of the opposite sex. To me, if I start to notice it, it's a bad sign. Some readers try too hard and it's either cheesy or ...well, I guess it's just cheesy.

The following is a list of some recent audio books I would recommend- I'm not listing the bad ones. Though I will say this, I got through about 1/8 of an audio book read by Linda Evans - besides the main character, everyone else had the same creaky, squawky voice. My ears can only take so much, after all.

The Lemur, Benjamin Black
A short 4 book CD. The story was pretty good - but I thought this was a case where the reader enhanced the book. The voice for protagonist John Glass is a wonderful Irish brogue and the voices for the other players are terrific too. Especially a reporter who has a 'put on' pronounced southern drawl.

Love Over Scotland, Alexander McCall Smith
I really like these fun little vignette stories. They're filled with memorable characters (some more interesting than others) and offer a lighthearted and witty companion to your ride to or from work.

The Rottweiler, Ruth Rendell
Excellent mystery audio book! I really enjoyed this story and the reader captured an amazing array of different British voices keeping each character straight in my mind.

Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
Another BB book, this time with Timothy Dalton narrating. Complex characters, complex story, moody reading - especially good on a rainy day trip.

The Hanged Man's Song, John Sanford
Part of the 'Kid' series about a computer hacking/painter protagonist who reads tarot cards every now and then. Generally the stories revolove around some kind of computer related espionage or murder.

Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
Wonderful novel read by the author. Barbara Kingsolver's voice and inflections put you right into the thick of rural Appalachia, leaving your city or suburban commute far behind.

Another Curious Crash Dream

Last night I had another crash dream (a frequent occurance in my nightlife). This one started out with me in an old white Datsun - a car that belonged to my friend's mother back in highschool. Anyway, I was careening down this really steep hill, filled with hairpin turns. As I reached the bottom I saw a big pool of water, I tried to avoid it, but was going too fast and got caught in the middle. I had to get out and push the car to the side, all the while other cars were zooming past me left and right, just missing me.

Finally, I got the car out. I went to turn onto the main highway, when I saw the stoplight was flashing green to red really fast. Like 1 second per color. I gunned the engine and flew thru, just as a police car appeared in my rear view mirror.
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a bucking two-toned brown and white stallion came galloping towards me down the road the wrong way. There was a girl on its back, but she was unable to control it. Whenever I turned, it turned too, while still coming at me at a frenzied pace. Finally, it was right on top of the car with his front hooves about to crash thru the windshield. I made a sharp left hand turn to avoid him and flew off the road over a ten foot ledge and over the sea (in the dream the road was the one that parallels the water at Alki in West Seattle). I looked ahead - from out of the water rose an old, jagged concrete pylon right in my flight path - once again it looked like something was going to crash thru the windshield. But it didn't. I skimmed it, just missing the craggy obstruction and landed in the water.

I didn't wake up here - but the dream went to a 'commercial station break' and suddenly there was a serene picture of a docile horse in a meadow being feed carrots by a little boy and an announcer said "There are so many things in life that can kill you - but they're the same things that make life beautiful."

Food Network Kitchen Designs

The other day I was watching the Food Network and I realized I am initially swayed into watching a program not for the chef featured, but for the television kitchens they inhabit. Initially. I won't continue to watch a program if the recipes don't jibe with my personal taste or if I find the cooking personality annoying or what not.

The shows that I tune into or tape on a regular basis are these four:
Ina Garten
Michael Chiarello
Giada DeLaurentis
Tyler Florence


The kitchen that I would most like to have belongs to Giada. I like the airiness and brightness - it looks like a happy place. Ina's is similar - and I love Ina Garten's house and garden.
Michael Chiarello's kitchen was almost my first choice because it has such a warm feel, this would be a great kitchen to eat in at night. It looks like a red wine kinda space.

The life I would most like to have would be a tie between that of Michael Chiarello and Ina Garten - MC lives in Napa and has a Vineyard, Ina has abodes in the Hamptons, NYC and Paris and she's married to someone it's apparent she's crazy about. I don't know anything about Tyler Florence, though I think I did see an episode where he was opening up his own store - so that's cool. Giada? Well, she has a pretty great life too, being the granddaughter of Dino DeLaurentis. I think I read that her husband was a clothing designer for Anthropologie - and she's very pretty.
Btw, contrary to what it sounds like - I don't actually spend a lot of time reading about Food Network stars - I've just come across this info over the years.

Anyway, back to the kitchens.

Tyler Florence's kitchen really looks like a chef's kitchen, more commercial less residential. It looks like it's in a loft. The only thing that I don't like about it is that blue paint that's sort of rubbed onto the brick wall. I couldn't find a picture of it. It reminds me a little of new jeans that are sold with the 'dirty' well worn look. If that splotch of blue wasn't there I'd like it a lot more.


The one show that I would probably watch more if I liked her kitchen is the Rachael Ray show. I really dislike the somewhat kitschy-ness of it. But I think she's great.

NOTE: It was hard to actually find good full pictures of the kitchens - sorry!

100 Greatest Novels of All Time...according to the Observer

This list is from The Observer and though it's a few years old (2003) after looking at number of other top 100 lists from Time magazine, The Modern Library and various individual books on the subject, I thought this one was the most interesting. And I just like lists.

How many of these titles have you read?

1. Don Quixote
Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.

2. Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.

3. Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

4. Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.

5. Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.

6. Clarissa
Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.

7. Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.

8. Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

9. Emma
Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

10. Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.

11. Nightmare Abbey
Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.

12. The Black Sheep
Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.

13. The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.

14. The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.

15. Sybil
Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.

16. David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.

17. Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.

18. Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.

19. Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.

20. The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.

21. Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.

22. Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.

23. The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.

24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.

25. Little Women
Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.

26. The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.

27. Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.

28. Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.

29. The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.

30. The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.

31. Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.

32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.

33. Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.

34. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.

35. The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.

36. Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.

37. The Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.

38. The Call of the Wild
Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.

39. Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.

40. The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.

41. In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.

42. The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.

43. The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.

44. The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.

45. Ulysses
James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.

46. Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.

47. A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.

48. The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.

49. The Trial
Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.

50. Men Without Women
Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.

51. Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.

52. As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.

53. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).

54. Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel

55. USA
John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.

56. The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.

57. The Pursuit Of Love
Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.

58. The Plague
Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.

59. Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.

60. Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.

61. Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.

62. Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.

63. Charlotte's Web
E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.

64. The Lord Of The Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!

65. Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.

66. Lord of the Flies
William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.

67. The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.

68. On the Road
Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.

69. Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.

70. The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.

71. Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.

72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.

73. To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.

74. Catch-22
Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'

75. Herzog
Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.

76. One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.

77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.

78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.

79. Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.

80. The Bottle Factory Outing
Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.

81. The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.

82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.

83. A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.

84. Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.

85. Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.

86. Lanark
Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.

87. The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.

88. The BFG
Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.

89. The Periodic Table
Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.

90. Money
Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.

91. An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.

92. Oscar And Lucinda
Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.

93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.

94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories
Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.

95. LA Confidential
James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.

96. Wise Children
Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.

97. Atonement
Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.

98. Northern Lights
Philip Pullman
Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.

99. American Pastoral
Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint. Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.

100. Austerlitz
W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.

The Maids...a play by Jean Genet

Yesterday we went to the play 'The Maids' at the Writer's Theatre in Glencoe. The production ran 1 hour and 40 minutes with no intermission and the house was sold out.
Now, a few thoughts - one, the venue is at the back of a book store. I say that not to diminish the theater, as it is set up very professionally and is in a separate space - it's not like you're nestled against book shelves or anything.

No, the reason I mention this particular fact is because I felt, in this case, with this particular play, it did a disservice to the drama.

Why?

Well, okay, let me explain where we were sitting and a little bit about the stage.
Glenn and I were in the front row on the far left, but because it was such a small space, everyone in the house had a good seat. However, being so close to the production was a detriment. I was too close to the actors - so close that I didn't get a feel for the overall atmosphere of the play. Does that make sense?

The stage set was a French boudoir with wardrobes that when opened became an integral part of the scene. In an otherwise fairly dark set, the open closets provided bright splashes of hot pink that illuminated the scenery. They were also equipped with mirrors that provided reflections of the actors when their backs were toward the audience.

But - since we were so close, we missed some of this and I couldn't help but keep comparing in my mind the play as it was being done in that space vs. imagining the play being seen at, say, the Steppenwolf's smaller theater. I think had I been in the back row of the theater, I would have hand a much different experience.

Another thing that I found bothersome with the close proximity was the size of one of the actors. She was large -not heavy, I don't mean that - I mean she was just really tall and big. And being so close I felt like she was almost acting on top of us (through not fault of her own, I thought her actual acting was very good).

Lastly, there was one scene where one of the maids picks up a chair and swishes it through the air - Glenn and I both jumped back in our seats - I swear it came within 8 inches of our heads.

What about the play itself?

I thought the play was intriguing, I thought it was well acted. But I couldn't help imagining myself walking up four steps and inserting myself into the middle of the drama as it was going on. I got so carried away with this daydream, being so close to the action, that I began imagining a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David accidentally drops his playbill (is that what the booklet is called?) on the floor and it slides into the play. Then, as the actors are in conversation, he sidles onto to the stage to retrieve his booklet and mayhem occurs.

I doubt that's the reaction the theater was looking for in their audience.

Here's the text from the Writer's Theatre about The Maids:

When the mistress is away, the maids will play. Two women in service to a younger socialite pass the moments of their day in playacting and fantasy. As the line between fantasy and reality begins to disintegrate, their games take a deadly turn. Jealousy, resentment, sexual tension and murder converge in this 1947 classic French thriller. Jimmy McDermott, one of the city’s most exciting young directors, brings his trademark edginess to this seminally rebellious play.

www.writerstheatre.org