Current mood:	blah
Current music:	Spoon, "The Way We Get By"
Entry tags:	books, movies

Random recs
I picked up an advance proof of Salman Rushdie's new novel Shalimar the Clown at the bookstore where I worked this summer . I don't know enough about current events to draw the parallels as tightly as I should, but as far as I could gather it was a political fable. Anyway, despite my own lack of understanding, I found myself completely blown away by this book, which basically tells the story of a young lover's descent into terrorism, but with lots of interweaving and parallel stories about his family and the family of his oppressors and victims. Starts slowly, but it builds a smoldering kind of power and then just explodes on you in the last third or so. It won't be released till September 6, but it's way, way more intense than the other Rushdie novel I read a long time ago, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, although the latter was more accessible (I read it in middle school). Highly recommended.

And The 40-Year-Old Virgin is possibly the funniest movie I've seen all year. I thought I was going to have an asthma attack, no joke: and I'd actually been afraid I'd hate it. I don't like movies that take such obvious and pathetic targets as a 40-year-old virgin, but this one ended up being a much more generous movie where everyone is pathetic in their own ways, whether they get laid every weekend or have never gotten laid at all, and everyone serves as the target of a joke at different points. It was sometimes smart humor, sometimes stupid humor, but pretty much constantly funny and a little poignant. Oh, and who knew Catherine Keener was such a hottie? Er, I mean, for an older woman...