40,39

This month is going pretty well and I've lucked out on a couple of finds.

Time and Tilting Earth: Miller Williams - As a poet, Williams took a few pages for me to warm to. The father of Lucinda Williams and a very likely friend of Bill (He read a poem at Clinton's second inauguration), he came sort of recommended, but his verse seemed a little sing-songy: He rhymed. Jeez... and I thought that was practically forbidden these days.

But his poems grew on me, though I think he's definitely in the Emily Dickinson camp as far as his approach (whom, I don't much care for). I liked the way he carved up little slices of truth and really came to enjoy what he was doing.

Let The Right One In: John Ajvide Linqvist -I really love movies. In particular, I loved this one: a weirdly hopeful vampire movie from Sweden. Let me put this out there. The Swedes aren't best known for vampires or for hopeful movies, but this one got to me.

The book is a good read, fun and weird.

Let The Right One In is the story of Eli (a vampire, who looks to be about 12) and Oskar, a fat and very much bullied school boy roughly the same age. The two are incredibly lonely. Eli has been kicking around for about 200 years and his only company has been mostly the usual cretins attracted to 12 year-olds. Oskar is bright, socially inept, but, quite possibly, also a blossoming sociopath. He steals, fantasizes about murder and keeps a scrapbook of violent crimes reported in the paper.

The book is far more graphic and gory than the movie. As expected, the characters are more rounded, though the comparative difference isn't as startling as in some American books and their adapted films.