It’s not a great story: it’s full of cheese and melodrama. And the acting’s nothing special. But it looks gorgeous. Beautiful lighting, great construction of frame, and amazing colours. It’s just an hour and a half of beautiful visuals. Worth seeing if you like the cinematic aspects of film and can separate it from the story.

...but close. The Trial is the story of Josef K., who awakes one morning to be told that he’s under arrest yet free to go about his daily activities; he has no idea of the nature of the crime that he’s been charged with but he still declares he’s innocent, and everyone who’s supposed to help him with his trial indicates that there’s no way that he can possibly win, but he has to keep trying anyhow. The story overall is brilliant and absurd; the book itself is incredibly uneven.

But I suppose that’s exactly what you’d expect from an unfinished novel; I found parts of it simply brilliant while other parts just lagged and let me down. Then again, that might have been Kafka’s intention, to have the reader be as overwhelmed by the protracted discussion of the intricacies of Kafka’s legal system, and frustrated by the apparent lack of a possible resolution. (There’s also quite a bit of relatively “racy” material here, too, which I don’t quite know how to interpret. Maybe that Kafka was sexually frustrated, or sexually liberated, at this point in his life.) The humour comes from the inconsistencies that Josef K. discovers in the ridiculous system, as well as the outrageous characters that see nothing ridiculous about the system. This book highlights both the comedy and tragedy inherent in bureaucracy, and how impossible it is to escape once immersed or surrounded by it.

The Trial is worth reading, if you can handle Kafka’s combination of the absurd and the mundane. I still prefer The Metamorphosis, but The Trial definitely has its brilliant moments.

P.G. Wodehouse writes novels and stories that are easy to read and fairly thin on plot, but that doesn’t mean that his books don’t have substance. It’s the way he writes that’s important: the deft characterizations, the dialogue, and the quick wit that’s on display in every page that make his books so immensely readable. Very Good, Jeeves is a collection of the Jeeves & Wooster short stories, each of them showing idle bachelor Bertie Wooster involved with some sort of very upper-class tragedy that somehow goes even further downhill, but is always pulled out of the soup by his ingenious “gentleman’s personal gentleman”, Jeeves. This third volume of the Jeeves & Wooster stories is, like all the others, worth reading, especially if you like Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, both of whom were influenced by Wodehouse’s writing style and sense of humour.

This one fell a little flat in comparison to the first book in series. It wasn’t bad per se; there were some interesting plot developments and the characterization was spot-on as always. It just seemed like it was repeating itself. I found myself getting bored as I read some of the chapters, as the story felt like it was covering a lot of the same ground. Still, not a bad read by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not like I’m not going to read the third book. This one was just a lull in the story before the third act. Hopefully it picks up a little bit.

How I Met Your Mother is not your typical sitcom. In complexity of plot & production, cleverness of writing, and themes, it’s a lot like Coupling (one of my very favourite sitcoms ever), except maybe not quite as ambitious or clever. That’s not to say that HIMYM isn’t a good show. It’s actually very good. The pilot episode does a fantastic job of establishing the characters and their environment, leads you along nicely, and then does a 180 on you at the end. Just a beautiful inversion of the “Sam and Diane” cliche. The rest of the episodes pick up the ball and just run with it, growing in cleverness and complexity as the season goes on. The plot twists and turns on you, dropping hints and leading you down garden paths; the rug is pulled out from under the audience a number of times. There are lots of surprises and shocks about who the titular mother may or may not be, and the writers keep you guessing but don’t come off as overly tricky. The actors are teriffic, particularly Neil Patrick Harris as Barney (the breakout character of 2005). This show is definitely recommended if you like a little more heart – and brains – in your situation comedies.

Oliver Sacks has long been one of my favourite science authors; he weaves together the human and the clinical elements of his case stories with grace. Musicophilia, though, is RIGHT up my street. It combines a number of subjects that I’m interested in: psychology, neurology, language, and music. There are so many interesting stories and concepts from it, like the musician who had a stroke and then lost the ability to percieve music as music, just noise, or theories of how absolute pitch works in the brain. It’s a little short on the human aspect, which was a little disappointing. Overall, though, the combination of music and science really worked for me.

I read this book in less than 24 hours; it was a quick read, but not a fluffy one. There’s a lot going on here, a lot more than one would predict from the opening few chapters. And I will say that, while it’s good, it’s not exactly what I was expecting. The book starts off as a murder mystery with a twist: the investigator – and author of the book – is a fifteen-year-old boy with Autism, and the murder victim is his neighbor’s dog. But the book is about much more than that; to put it another way, there’s more than one mystery going on (and to say anything else would be spoilerful). Author Mark Haddon’s technique is really good, bordering on almost too tricky-cute sometimes, but it really helps the reader get into the mindset of a narrator with Autism as best one can. Though some might disagree, I thought it was a very eye-opening, if not entirely authentic as the author is not, himself, Autistic. It’s good, but a lot different than I was expecting, and I don’t think as deserving of some of the hype it had recieved when it was released. It’s good, but not life-alteringly so.

I love Elmore Leonard, but Up In Honey’s Room might be the first of his books that I’ve found disappointing. It might be due to the fact that he keeps referencing another one of his books (The Hot Kid) all the way through it; if I’d known that this was a follow-up to that novel I would have read it first. Or it might be because the characters just don’t pop the way they do in books like Rum Punch, Mr. Majestyk, or Out of Sight. The story’s interesting enough: a top-notch FBI agent tries to catch a German POW in the last days of WWII, and gets tangled up with a spy ring, black market beef, and a sexy and complicated blonde. Sounds like a great combination for Leonard, but it’s not nearly as good as he’s capable of. On its own merits the book is decent, but I was expecting more from a writer of Leonard’s caliber.

Michael Moorcock is one of the best-loved British fantasy writers, and I think if you like the genre you should read some of his work, but this is probably not the best place to start. Behold The Man is a re-imagining of the Christ legend involving time travel, existentialism, and sexual frustration, not exactly tried-and-true fantasy stuff. But even though I was taken aback by the book at first, I really enjoyed Moorcock’s writing style; he’s definitely a talented user of the English language. By the end of the book, I was expecting a little bit more – the book unravels with very few twists and turns – but it was still a great piece of writing, and I would like to try out another one of his books to see what he can do with a more “traditional” fantasy story.

I’d had the novel If Beale Street Could Talk (by James Baldwin) on my bookshelf for a while; it was one of the many books I rescued from my parents’ storeroom before they gave them all to Goodwill. When I finally read it, I found it was not what I’d expected from the cover. “A masterpiece about the love between a man and a woman…” it said on the cover: not my idea of a great read, if you want to know the truth. It made it seem like a high-class romance novel. It is decidedly not. It is about love between a man and a woman, but it is also about race and family bonds in lower-class New York City. It wasn’t something I really liked, per se, but it was a well-written book. While I can’t speak for the book’s authenticity, it really seemed like Baldwin had captured the setting rather well, and the dialogue was top-notch. A good book, but not something I’d necessarily want to read again.