By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 23, 2014
Lately, entirely by coincidence, I’ve been reading and reviewing book and movies from 2012: Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, Ben Affleck’s Argo, Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night and (back in September) Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Now, entirely by coincidence, this week, I’ll have two blog posts connected to Canadian novelist Yann Martel.
Why? Coincidence.
On my last trip, to Las Vegas, I packed four books: A volume of J.D. Salinger, the novel Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott, a volume by Yann Martel and Don DeLillo’s Point Omega. I had a fantastic time on the trip — I played some cards, I did some sightseeing along the Las Vegas strip and I did a bunch of reading. Unfortunately, because a cable in my laptop failed, I wasn’t able to write — or not comfortably, anyway — and I fell behind in my blogging, even though I had a fair amount of free time that could have been devoted to that activity.
After I returned from Las Vegas, I was given a DVD set of four movies, one of which was (of course) Life of Pi. While I was in the midst of struggling to write intelligently about two H.G. Wells novels, I took a break by watching Lee’s excellent movie. Then I wanted to compare fact and fiction in the exfiltration escapade depicted by Argo, and I got engrossed by Angelmaker, and I did some free association about pronunciation, and I banged on my keyboard about coincidences, and I decided it was time to knock out some thoughts on Point Omega, and and and and —
And then it was finally time to write about Life of Pi.
And now it’s time to write about Yann Martel’s first book. I mean, after a quick blog post about my tour of popular culture of 2012… After that.
After that, then it’ll be time to write about Yann Martel’s first book!
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