Property of a Lady

Deborah Lipp goes on about Wicca, politics, movies, Paganism, and cats. Not necessarily in that order.

I’m stealing this from Evn.

How it works: these are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I tag everyone. Go read.

All solved!

(more…)

Iron Man (2008) 7/10
Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a boy-genius weapons developer and one of the richest men in the world. In Afghanistan to demonstrate a new missile, he is kidnapped and ordered to build the missile for his kidnappers. With the equipment his captors provide and the assistance of another imprisoned scientist (Shaun Taub), he invents a device to keep the shrapnel in his chest from invading his heart and killing him, and creates an Iron Man suit to effect his escape. Directed by John Favreau.

I could totally review The Apartment, but here I have that rare occasion when I’ve actually gone to a blockbustery movie on a holiday weekend, and okay, not “the” blockbustery movie, but whatever. So I feel obligated to review Iron Man.

There is something about the Iron Man comics that has always been a little stiff, a little stodgy, a little “establishment.” Tony Stark is that rare creature among superheroes; his job is basically not threatened by his secret, nor is his day to day life made particularly more difficult. Okay, sure, heart condition. But the iron suit helps that, it doesn’t cause it. Iron Man comics, even when they were a brand new thing, somehow seemed Old Guard; he’s about America and Industry and he’s got that kind of Bruce Wayne wealth and power and butler and women, and all of that adds up to, “They made a movie? Really? What for?”

On the other side of the equation is Robert Downey, Jr. Hollywood was clamoring to Give That Man a Franchise, which was a damn good idea. Downey is at the peak of his watchability in this film, he is infinitely entertaining to just slap up on the screen and let him do his thing, which Favreau (a talented director who tends towards the very-good-but-not-great) is smart enough to let him do.

Most first superhero movies have 3 parts; the origin, the becoming a hero, and the actual adventure. And most such movies spend too little time on the actual adventure. Iron Man definitely suffers here; the origin in Afghanistan could easily lose twenty percent; the invention of the super-sophisticated suit back home could lose thirty. But for all of those scenes, Downey is on-screen approximately one hundred percent of the time, and every time your mind wanders he pulls you back.

This is a good cast; Terence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow are both far better than they have the right or reason to be, Jeff Bridges phones it in, but his telephone work is better than most actors live. Shaun Taub is wonderful. But this is a one-man show and the movie would, in a word, stink without Downey.

Everything that isn’t Downey is technology and effects, and they are damn good. The suit both looks like the comic book version and is believable; it blends with the rest of the action, and that’s not easy; we’ve seen plenty of movies screw that up. The script avoids several clichés that had me cringing when I thought I saw them coming; only the villain is cardboard.

There’s an ending that kind of irritated me and charmed me in equal parts, and then a post-credits bonus ending that is delightful. So stick around for the very end.