Saturday

[nightdog_barks]

Into the last hot days of summer. Another opossum was roaming through our backyard last night, trundling down onto the deck in search of bugs. This one was about the size of a large house cat, with sleek fur and those little starfish paws. He (it was a he) nosed around behind the Meyer lemon tree and the ficus tree, finally disappearing under the fence.

About halfway through Horne's Fall of Paris and loving the fascinating details he drops into the narrative, such as the cause of war being Prussia's insufficiently-sincere apology (in France's view) for trying to put a Hohenzollern prince on the Spanish throne. And how the Empress Eugénie managed to escape Paris with the help of her American dentist. And how the French used hot-air balloons to convey dispatches from besieged Paris, but one of the flights went awry, and when the freezing pilots finally bailed out into a snowy pine forest, they found they'd traveled nine hundred miles in fifteen hours and were in Norway. :D

Watched Anna Karenina on HBO the other night. The sets and cinematography were stunning, and we really liked Jude Law and Matthew Macfadyen and Emily Watson and Domhnall Gleeson, but Keira Knightley seemed ... idk, a little young to be Anna. And Aaron Taylor-Johnson was supposed to be Vronsky, but he looked about fourteen, and that blond Peter Frampton mop and fuzzy porn-'stache didn't help at all. BUT ANYWAY. Did I say the sets and cinematography were stunning? Because they were.

Comments

[taiga13]

I saw the ads for Anna Karenina and thought "yeesh, I'd take Jude Law over the blond mustached dude any day", and Keira Knightley looks nothing like Anna Karenina who was described as womanly and volumptuous. Did you ever see Atonement? KK wears this beautiful green dress and you could see every vertebrae in her spine. It was genuinely disturbing.
I went hiking this afternoon and we found this little container that had paper and crayons in it. We opened it thinking a child had left it there, and it was a geocache. I was delighted.

[nightdog_barks]

The funny thing is, the blond porn-'stached dude is AMAZINGLY HOT in his other IMDB photos! Unless Vronsky is described as blond in the book, I don't know why they didn't let him keep his dark hair.

I have not seen Atonement, but I did notice that the guy who directed Keira Knightley in Anna (Joe Wright) also directed her in Atonement and Pride and Prejudice.

That is so cool about finding a geocache! And you weren't even looking for it. :D

[danalwyn]

Maybe I should pick up a copy of Fall of Paris if I see one. It sounds like a good book for me to read.

[nightdog_barks]

I am really enjoying it! There are the inevitable paragraphs that function as sort of info dumps, but Horne manages to keep the focus on the human story with his details about the Empress, the hapless balloonists, the sauces the Parisians had to concoct to serve with dog and rat and cat during the starving days. It's a war that I knew only the vaguest outlines of -- I think it tends to be forgotten in the blinding glare of the Great War.

I got my copy from Amazon, along with Horne's companion volumes Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 and To Lose a Battle: France 1940. I haven't seemed to have had a lot of luck with fiction lately, so I thought I'd concentrate on history for a while.