I was engrossed throughout and don't remember ever getting bogged down, so … my experience is clearly different from yours. It did get less weird and more overtly political as it went on, but not less dark.

I liked the Chaos Walking trilogy, thought each book genuinely opened out the world a bit more, even as the political allegory became over-obvious. But in general, yes, it's a ruinous trend, and I've heard the publishing industry is now moving back toward standalones in YA.

I suspect generation matters in appreciating the HP books. If I'd grown up with them, I might have loved them, but I encountered them as an adult, and all I can think about is how the obscure Diana Wynne Jones did magic school (and many other things) a great deal better.

The scene with Dean Norris and the barrel. Surely McCarthy is too cultured to admit to watching a lowly TV drama, or I'd say that was a Breaking Bad allusion.

All I could think of was Pynchon's take on "woman fucks car," which made more anatomical sense. (In V, I think.)

Yup. Though my biggest problem was the thudding, relentless obviousness of the message, not the message itself.

Yes. Please.

Phillips lives in Vermont but was born in Mass., I believe. My boss interviewed him and says he has a Boston accent but claims he doesn't. We don't talk like that in VT.

Matt clearly wasn't involved in the sex ring, but it does seem like something he should have known about, given his position in the town. His interactions with Al made me think they had all the dirt on each other, but apparently not. (If I were Al, I would have avoided recruiting Matt's daughter for the "program,"…

Trivia: This was one of the last Hollywood movies shot in Vermont, which lacks a tax credit for film production. I've been told it was only shot there because Ford wanted to fly his plane to the area, or something such.

I try to minimize generic evaluative language in reviews ("masterpiece," "dud," "turkey," etc.) because it's so damn … generic, and I prefer something more descriptive of the kind of masterpiece or dud it is. Besides, very few movies fall at the ends of the scale in my view.

You never know; he might agree with you.

It can be a chore when you have to see Adam Sandler movies and the like (and who's going to care if you pan them anyway?), but I remember to appreciate it every time I meet a new person who says, "I wish I had your job."

You may be on to something. If I had to describe the type of fiction I like to read and write for pleasure, it would be "Philip K. Dick with an updated setting and stronger female characters." For some reason, this doesn't seem to sell in current SF, but it does in YA, where all sorts of near-future, trippy,…

Tell me about it. I'm not a climatologist or anything, but a verdant, thriving forest habitat by day and a tundra wasteland by night? "Hot spots"? The landscape frosting up around the kid was a beautiful image, but where I live, nightly frost kills green stuff eventually.

Yeah, I was expecting the father-son relationship to at least … get a bit more nuanced or something. It did not. Because Will Smith has no fear and can smell a damaged spaceship and is the best mentor a kid can have.

I thought I didn't like anything Abrams did until I got into "Fringe." But my change of heart didn't make me like STID, though they have the same writers (minus the Lindelof factor).

There were gasps and shouts at the revelation when I saw it last night, so it seems to have worked on somebody. Biggest reaction I've seen since "Eeeee, they killed Carlisle!" at the last Twilight movie.

While the symbolism is a touch heavy-handed (made worse by well-intentioned English teachers who won't let it alone), Fitzgerald doesn't even come close to equaling Luhrmann's level of garish. Compare the book and film scenes where Gatsby makes his first appearance to see what I mean.

I kept getting bored during Mud, yet by the end I realized I really liked it. It was weird. It's one of those slow-paced, literary-ish movies that can put you in a bit of a trance if you go with it. Story-wise, nothing original, but great atmosphere.