In my romanticized version of Europe, after I've eaten ravioli in Roma, and sipped cappuccinos at a stand-up cafe, then I will stroll along the Seine and stop at booksellers with used treasures they sell along the river. In my romanticized version of Europe, the French and the Germans and the Albanians, they all drink good wine and smoke Gauloises at will. They eat thin slices of excellent cheese and talk about interesting things and deep things and not what they watched last night on TV. They talk about politics and paintings, they discuss books and don't care what Oprah thinks. The men read fiction and care about it. The women dress well but are also smart as hell. Together the men and the women, before they go off to have tantric sex on old-fashioned beds, they have long slow dinners at long wooden tables, or perhaps they are small round tables at an outdoor cafe on a cobblestone walkway, some Van Goghian starlight to brighten the evening, to sparkle off their bread knives.

This place I imagine is not real, I know. Oprah is shown around the world. Michael Bay films are global monsters and we stopped lighting the night with stars a long long time ago.

But then I read Muriel Barbery's "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" and all the intelligence and philosophy and the wit and the hope and pathos of the European, of the French, becomes real again. Barbery isn't afraid to discuss Marx and issues of class that continue today, she philosophizes on death and the meaning of life, but then she also discusses her love of Ridley Scott sci-fi movies and she quotes Eminem.

Yet for all its brainy seduction, the book is no lecture, the story no bore.

How many times did I stop at my local Indigo bookstore to look at the beautiful blue of the cover and the sheer perfection of that title. But it takes so much more to buy book, to read book, to trust all those hours to turn all those pages to force all those neurons. So I must thank a dear friend, poet, writer, and philosopher for the suggestion that pushed me over that less than precarious edge. She told me I had to. And we all have friends like these. When they tell you you have to - you have to.

So I did. And now I recommend it to you.

1. Because Andre has angst (he has always hated tennis, since the very beginning - see point 4), and angst is interesting. Agassi doesn't ever skimp on the fast food binging, drug doing, getting love wronging details;

2. Because at heart this is a love story. And Andre, for wife and the school he set up for underprivileged kids, has a hell of a big heart;

3. Because like in any great book (fiction or non) you CARE about the characters. And really, who gives a crap about a meat-head musclebound trainer named Gil? Me. You fall in love with Andre Agassi's physical trainer the way you fall in love with Mickey, Rocky Balboa's trainer. Hint: it has to do with loyalty;

4. Because Andre's father is your worst nightmare of the athlete parent bastard breed and 'father was a bastard' stories are interesting, especially when Daddy was this callous, selfish, wrong, complicated. 'Father was a bastard' stories are even better when son of said bastard becomes a world champion tennis player and not a bastard himself; and

5. Because the book is aptly titled. Andre gives every Brooke Shields-doubting-the-marriage (even while making the proposal) details. His gives of all the details, tells the stories you'd want to hear. Anecdotes like this one:

Agassi and his coach, Brad Gilbert, are having dinner at a favourite Italian restaurant after a match. By chance, Pete Sampras and his entourage are also at the restaurant, on the other side. As Pete leaves he comes by to say hi to Andre and Brad. After he goes, Brad tells Andre he'll bet him anything Pete didn't leave more than 5 bucks to the valet parking guy. Andre isn't as keen on finding out but Brad pushes and asks the teenager valet how much Pete gave him. The kid looks down, wants to do the right thing, doesn't want to tell. Brad pushes.

One dollar, the kid says. Pete Sampras gave the kid a dollar.

Commenting on this, Andre says, there is a world of difference between him and Pete.

1. It co-stars:
a) Robert Downey Jr.
b) Tobey Maguire
c) Katie Holmes
d) Frances McDormand (who makes more out of her 11 minutes of screen time here than Josh Hartnett has managed in his entire career)

2. Playing way, way, way, against type Michael Douglas is Grady Tripp, a professor who smokes dope, wears bad glasses, and occasionally dresses in a pink women's gown

3. It was written by Steve Kloves, the guy who wrote & directed "The Fabulous Baker Boys"

4. It features the immortal line: "I never forget an Oola"

5. Almost a decade later and I'm writing about a movie that couldn't break 20million at the box office

Scene:
[James Leer is eating a box of white-powder donuts]
James Leer [Tobey Maguire]: These are incredible. Incredible!
Grady Tripp [Michael Douglas]: Finish the rest of that joint, James, you can start chewing on the box.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd

Like a best play you'd see on Broadway (or Stratford, Ontario for that matter).

It's different, unpredictable, odd, beautiful, scary, sad, strange, funny, which is exactly what Joaquin Phoenix's performance is. Forget the Letterman nonsense. This must be the performance of the year.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd

WARNING: This movie is NOT for everyone

It's not fast-paced.

There are no transforming machines.

There are long stretches that have no dialogue.

It's filled with beautiful music and stunning visions of nature as it was in Virginia, America sometime in the 17th century (and which has a striking resemblance to blessed glorious Algonquin Park in Ontario).

The story?
A modern take on the first white people to live in America, and their encounters with the Native Indians who already lived on the land. Modern because the white people aren't portrayed as angels.

The beauty?
Malick ("Badlands," "The Thin Red Line") is so assured in his film making he is not afraid to take a minute and let camera linger, to let camera stop and fixate on the nature of water as it rolls on over a rock. Or to follow a paddling canoe up a river cutting between marshland, just the sounds of the paddles hitting water, the crickets in the marshes, the birds fluttering. Or the way he sets up a score of horns and symphony buildup to highlight the moment a few grand British ships and their powerful sails were sighted from a green forest shore between trees by the Indigenous people of that land, of America, and all the ominous tragedy of what was to come.

Need I say more?
Yes. Just the charm, spirit, wonder, wisdom and beauty of the girl they chose to call ...

Pocahontas.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd

Go away to an island, a place of myth based on real. A fable story that has a "Little Prince" ability, a Haruki Murakami ability to get your imagination flowing but is also political without being big P political. I.e. Interesting, but still fiction-story-stunning. That magic that was the transporting reason you went to books as a kid. That kind of book. But for grownups.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd
[...]

"The Catcher in the Rye" made me feel less lonely at a time (15 years of age) when all I touched, as Salinger put it in one of his legendary nine short stories, seemed to turn to complete loneliness. It's the reason I started writing.

THE INFATUATION
For the longest time I tried to keep my obsession with Salinger's only full-length novel to myself. Oh I would tell people I loved the book, or that Salinger was my favourite writer, but I honestly tried to not go further with it than that, to put a lid on it. I'd never have admitted that it wooed me to falling in love with New York forever, never mind the number of times I have read it, not including random flips for favourite passages. Or the fact that I somehow managed to write my Masters thesis on it, when my Masters was in applied linguistics not English literature.

That first 15 year-old time was not for school, which may be the key to everything. I read it fast, just a few days and I was not (and am not) a fast reader. Holden Caufield's breezy first-person narration was so much like conversation you just zipped through. The book's famous opening:

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The book read so fast, so easy, so true I was convinced it was pure autobiography. Not even, cause autobiography still implies some semblance of putting together, of structure, work, effort. 'Catcher' to me that first read, and the way it stayed in my mind long after (cause I wouldn't re-read it for at least five years, afraid of tainting that first read experience) was, I was sure, simply, if beautifully, Salinger writing his thoughts and experiences in a journal. The book was a particularly fascinating series of diary scribblings. This to me was profound because it felt like the true heart of a person, which has always captured me more than the mind, and the gimmicky tricks it can play (much as a twist ending is always exciting it's not the kind of thing that'll make it to my desert island).

WHAT LIES BEYOND POP IN MUSIC, AND HARRY POTTER IN FICTION
"Catcher" was not a story, not in the Narnia, Hardy Boys sense. "Catcher" spoke the truth about things that I was living, that I was struggling with. The "Hardy Boys" was like a Coke treat. "Catcher" was water. I NEEDED it.

HIS TRUTH
Holden spoke of things I'd never heard anyone say. He spoke the thoughts I had in my head. About the phoniness of people. About dishonesty and how hard life can be. And somehow, in travelling with him as he sneaks out one night to leave Pencey Prep forever (the school he is about to be kicked out of anyway) and trains it to New York, I felt less lonely. This kid was searching for something as I was, as so many kids do as they hit that age when they start to become aware of the world. And what I love is that the novel is as much about grand philosophies, on death, and what it means to live, and about losing the innocence of childhood, as it is about the simpler (or maybe more complicated) things. Like girls.

"I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."

Great art is about connection. At 15 I was sure I was Holden. In my twenties it was Salinger I wanted to emulate most. The real point though is about what makes a book great, what makes something worth re-visiting. Holden, of course, says it better than I can:

"What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

This is the end of Part I.
-Bookworm, Movie Nerd
For Part II:
[...]

Often the stories that make us feel the most, the ones most memorable are fictitious, imagined, about people who never were and yet who live so much more real in your mind's eye, springing as they do grotesque-evil or salt-of-the-earth-beautiful off that page.

The true stories we read, while generally stimulating often fall short somehow. I'd argue this is because news reportage and less crafted non-fiction typically stick so closely to the "facts" they bypass the feelings behind them. Writers of literary fiction, on the other hand, focus much of their attention on the reaction to events, rather than on the events themselves. The now very in-fashion genre that bridges the gap, that Truman Capote made famous with his utterly brilliant "In Cold Blood," is often termed literary non-fiction. That is, a true story written not by a person that can type, but rather by one who has spent the better part of their life learning how to write.

"Zeitoun" is a book of literary non-fiction. As such, it's a gripping story and it is also beautiful, the kind of book you feel proud to own.

With the kind of simplicity that only a master craftsman can achieve (the 10,000 hours +++ or, in writing terms, the more than 1,000,000 words it takes), Dave Eggers' "Zeitoun" manages, like a world class film composer's score that you don't notice it is so seamlessly thread through the film, to make this true story strictly about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American man who remains in New Orleans during Katrina and afterward. The writing doesn't once point the finger back at the artist, at Eggers, who is, by now, a massive literary personality in his own right. It takes a good deal of ego to become a master of anything, and a great deal of humility to then cut down and spit-shine your writing so hard as to wipe off any of that egotistical grease you might be tempted to leave behind.

Plain, direct and with my favourite kind of simplicity (the Hemingway-made-famous deceptive kind), what makes this story so compelling is that not only do we get the immediacy of the Katrina debacle as seen through the eyes of a man who lived through it, but as with any heroic story, we get the kind of intimacy that only a book - in novelistic story sense - can provide, spending a few hundred tense yet often tender pages with Zeitoun; we get to know his family, his wife Kathy, an American who converted to Islam before she met her husband (itself a fascinating tangential story that Eggers is clever enough to slow down and tell in detail).

Like reading any great story about any great hero from a world not our own, like reading about a family from India, or a book about a young Jewish man coming of age in Montreal, this work of non-fiction brings us on side with a heroic Muslim man, which seems to me like fair retribution - this kind of empathy inducing tale - when considering the post 9/11 treatment so many Muslim-Americans, and, for that matter, all brown skinned Americans have had to endure in the paranoid post 9/11 world.

"Zeitoun" would be a fascinating story no matter who told it, but with Eggers at the helm, you get a great story told with economy, humility and with the killer critical element - the ability to take you, for instance, onto that metal canoe with Abdulraman, so that you paddle down the streets of New Orleans with him, so that you endure all that follows with him. So that you too can know what this storm did and what abhorrent actions the Bush administration took, and what critical ones they were foolish and heartless enough not to take.

Great imagination is rooted, they say, in empathy. For years I mulled this one over not exactly sure what it meant. I can articulate it now, after having read this powerful story. Eggers digs deep into the life experience that one family endures and in so doing allows us to live those experiences with him. The best books don't just let us escape, nor is it just that they make us think; it is the feeling, it's the empathy that's key because if we don't get to care deeply about the characters involved, why complete five pages of the thing.

I completed 335, and fast.

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd

Who is Amelie Nothomb?
-massively successful author from Belgium who now lives in Paris but was born in Kobe, Japan and spent first five years of life there, raised by a Japanese nanny.

What's "Tokyo Fiancee" About?
-a Belgian woman named Amelie who was born and raised in Kobe by a Japanese nanny returns to Japan in her early twenties. She tutors French and has relationship with her only student, a shy, young Japanese man named Rinri.

So It's Really About:
-the nature of love - but a very modern love where the independent woman is the one trying to keep her lovesick boy at bay
-Japan (Mt. Fuji, ramen noodles) but in a lived there honest way

Why Read?
(i) - Unabashed Honesty.
Amelie goes to art exhibit, approaches haughty artist of show that all have been fawning over but who's work Amelie finds dreadfully boring.
"Excuse me, but I cannot seem to understand your art. Could you explain it to me?"
"There is nothing to understand, nothing to explain," he replied with disgust. "It is meant to be felt."
"Precisely - I don't feel anything."
(ii) -Captures Japan but exactly, as well as the less talked about sides of love.
"On the boat a loudspeaker was broadcasting sappy songs. We docked by a torii, disembarked and set off along a well-marked poetic path. Couples stopped in spots specifically conceived for the purpose and gazed with emotion at the view of the lake through the torii. Children whined, as if to warn all lovers of the future that awaited them after so much romanticism. I was having a good time."

-Bookworm, Movie Nerd

An all time fave. Why? Because there is next to no ego in the last book John Steinbeck ever wrote. You finish "East of Eden" and you remember the characters not the writer. You remember Lee, who is so selfless and good and wise; you remember the two sets of brothers, Adam and Charles, and Cal and Aron; and with a series of spinal shudders you find you cannot forget Cathy (or Catherine) who has to go down as one of the most sinister - and interesting - characters in all fiction.

No tricks, no overly clever plot-twists or wordplays, this is just a straight-ahead, old-fashioned, fascinating story about the greatest biblical theme of them all: people's struggle with good and evil. But that's not all. It's so much more than that. [Ok, nerdy confession time:] I drew up a list of all the great themes "East of Eden" covers but have since scrapped it because Steinbeck does precisely that in the book's appropriately humble epigraph, delivered as a simple letter to a dear friend:

"Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, 'Why don't you make something for me?'
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, 'A box.'
'What for?'
'To put things in.'
'What things?'
'Whatever you have,' you said.
Well, here's your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts - the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
John"

What more need be said?

-Probably Because I Have To