Since South Riding has come and gone on PBS and I missed it entirely (it's now in my Netflix queue), the race to get the book read has passed with it. I do have every intention of continuing with my reading, however. Rohan's recent post on Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain makes me want to pick it up sooner rather than later, though (wish I had more reading time, but then don't we all). I seem to do better with deadlines often--self imposed or otherwise (like library due dates). The minute there is no rush to finish a book I become a very lazy (distracted) reader.
Case in point--I've got a stack of interlibrary loan books that I'm slowly trying to read before they need to go back to their regular homes. Camilla Ceder is winging her way back now, so next up is Liza Marklund's Paradise. I really thought I had done my homework and was requesting her first book, but it seems as though Paradise was simply the first to be translated into English (or something like that). Since I'm getting sucked into the story, I think I'll have to keep going and will look for her previous book later. Annika Bengtzon is a sub-editor on a Swedish newspaper who is still reeling from the death of her fiancé, a death she was implicated in but not charged with murder. She obviously has an interesting history that I'm curious about. The book opens with the murder of two men, possibly emigrants, in a port on a particularly harrowing night as a hurricane hits Swedish shores. There's much more to the story, and as I am a mere fifty pages in, I'll write more about it later, but I like the grittiness of the storytelling. I was looking for a good edge of your seat thriller, so perhaps this is it.
I'm also reading Valerio Varesi's River of Shadows, which is on the shortlist for the CWA International Dagger. I happened to request this before it made the cut, but I fully expected not to get my hands on a copy as there are so few copies floating around in the US and I'm trying not to buy hardcover books let alone those published in the UK. Just as I was giving up hope a copy came from the Library of Congress. I had no idea we could actually get books from there. It's really pretty cool but the book came with all sorts of restrictions--I can't take it out of the library and I can't renew it. So I've been reading it over my lunch break. Somehow it doesn't feel like the best reading circumstances, but maybe this is an excuse to take an afternoon off to sit quietly in some corner and simply read. The story fits in well with my other Italy books as it is set in the Po River Valley where it has been raining incessently and the Po is threatening to overflow its banks. Sort of fitting since we're experiencing very unusual flooding conditions where I live at the moment, too.
I've also started reading Elizabeth Berridge's Across the Common, which was published in 1964. It has been reissued by Faber as one of their Faber Finds titles. I admit that the categorization as a crime/thriller novel did catch my eye, but it's not so in the way that the previous two books I've just mentioned are. This is much more subtle and I'm not even sure where Berridge is going with the story, but I like what I've read so I'll keep on with it.
I'm not a big fan of shoot 'em up types of movies, but I saw one over the weekend with the ever so easy on the eyes Clive Owen called The International. It's a thriller about an international bank with sinister motives doing all sorts of nasty things but covering their tracks (killing the people who might give evidence) and thus getting away with it all. Clive Owen plays an interpol agent who teams up with a NYC district attorney (Naomi Watts) who thinks they might have just what they need to prosecute the men in charge. This will likely sound nuts but my favorite scene in the movie, which is also probably the bloodiest, takes place in the Guggenheim Museum. I've never been to the Guggenheim in NY, but the architecture is quite distinctive. Clive and one of the detectives he's working with have followed an assassin into the museum and just when they're ready to grab him, more bad guys stream out of the woodwork to take out the assassin and whoever gets caught in their line of fire. The central area of the museum is circular with an open space in the middle so shoots ring out up and down the levels, and in a momentary switch of alliances Clive and the assassin try and get away. I don't really know anything about what makes a film good, and I'm not sure this is even considered a good film (though I will say I did enjoy it), so I won't comment on that, but this scene was so wonderfully choreographed it caught my attention. In the background there is all this contemporary art--much of it media related performance art so the visuals were stunning. Anyway, I didn't mean to go on about it, but days later I am still thinking about it.
One more thing (sorry, meant to keep this post short), I just received my next postal reading group book in the mail. If you're curious you can see it here. I have plenty of time to read it as we mail every two months, but I have already started dipping into it--very much up my alley and I can think of a number of readers who would like this! I've really been enjoying this group and love getting a surprise read in the mail every couple of months.