Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1989, and three others: Best Actress (Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy, at 81 the oldest ever winner), Best Makeup, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost in five categories, all to different films; that year's Hugo winner, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, won one (Best Screen Editing) and lost two.

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Second paragraph of third chapter:“Where’s Daddy?” his mother asks.
I loved this book, a brilliant (maybe a little long) story of environmental activism in the USA, with eight central characters whose paths into and out of each other's lives and the protection of America's forests weave together to make a really gripping tale. There's also a ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro), stormed the towered Schloss of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the ( Read more... )

All the King’s Men won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1949, and Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. The other nominated films were Battleground, The Heiress, A Letter to Three Wives and Twelve O'Clock High, none of which I have heard of.


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Second paragraph of third chapter:She [Scarlett’s mother, Ellen O’Hara] would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on the ears of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal ( Read more... )

You Can't Take It With You won the Academy Award for Outstanding Production of 1938; there were nine other nominees, but the only one I was aware of was the Pygmalion with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. It got nominations in six other categories, Frank Capra winning for Best Director.


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The Hugo nominations took a lot of what would otherwise have been reading and blogging time so far this year, so I am only now beginning to catch up. Here are four Hugo-eligible books which I read as the votes were coming in, which did not however make the final ballot. It's some time since I read each of them, so my notes are fairly cursory.

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This was given to us by a dear Alaskan friend in Bosnia back in 1998, and I read it pretty avidly then; my other half, however, gave it up as too awful after the second dead baby. (The second is not the last.) Rereading it, I still think it's a tremendous tour de force, an agonising story of poverty and how Ireland can wreck your family; I am ( Read more... )

My grandmother's step-brother, explaining how New England in the early nineteenth century saw an extraordinary outburst of literary talent, which he attributes in part to the region developing its intellectual resources through Harvard and proximity to Europe, while at the same time it became increasingly politically and economically sidelined as ( Read more... )

The gut-wrenching story of agricultural and economic disaster in the late 1930s, and how vulnerable people get exploited both in general and in particular. A tough read in places; the imagery of the final scene particularly lingers. Deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize in its day and helped to secure Steinbeck's Nobel.