The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Most of the second season of Life on Mars. It's very good - I recommend watching it instead of waiting for whatever travesty of it NBC settles on producing. Of course it's a Brit series, so it's 16 total episodes and the story's over. But, as I said last week about Sandman, the story can't be told till it's over... John Simm is excellent in the lead role, and Philip Glenister is startlingly brilliant. Can't wait to see how they end it. Well, obviously I can wait, but if I didn't have to get up so early tomorrow I wouldn't.

TV: Got sucked into what turned out to be a three-hour program on Biography Channel about the Planet of the Apes. I didn't finish it - three hours! - and really was only watching it because I adore Roddy McDowell and could listen to him for a long time (if I hadn't had to get up so early in the morning I'd've watched the last hour, too...) Ghost Rider - tolerable, but I'm glad I didn't pay for it.

Read: Archer's Goon, because I found it looking for something else and I love it. Bone, by Fay Myenne Ng, a new author to me (she seems to have only written two novels) and I love her work. Bone is an elegantly crafted exploration of family, loss, and love. Scream for Jeeves, an "HPG Wodecraft" pastiche, putting Bertie and Jeeves into three Lovecraft stories (Rats in the Walls, Cool Air, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). It's funny, but it fails the way most Wodehouse pastiche fails: Bertie is an idiot, but the stories he narrates are examples of virtuoso story-telling. That's not easy at all, to write so lightly and cleverly in the voice of a moron, and PH Cannon doesn't quite pull it off. Persepolis - brilliant and intense. And The Stranger (read that in one go after getting trapped in a 2.5 hour traffic snarl Thursday morning. One of the good things about mass transit: you can read in a traffic jam.)