Threes

On my trip I read three of Dave Eggers' books: A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, You shall know our velocity, and What is the What?. The first and last are wonderful, mind-shifting. The middle one is a tale of uncomfortable travel and didn't interact well with my state of uncomfortable travel. Not a plane book. For more on What is the What?, a wrenching and beautifully voiced novelized autobiography of a Sudanese "Lost Boy", have a look at the website. Eggers is really trying to change the world.

On the plane home I watched three movies: Atonement, Juno and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Of the three, I'd have to vote Juno the best, particularly for the character sketches and funny, snappy dialogue. Atonement was competent and aesthetically pleasing but fell far short of the impact of the book: it was hard to care. Elizabeth: well, I'm a sucker for epic historical drama, but it needed a bigger screen to work at all. I usually love Clive Owen but at 1 inch in height and with a strange vaguely antipodean accent, he was completely unconvincing as Raleigh.