Michael Chabon is Awesome.

I just breezed through The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon. He is a wonderful writer... sometimes succinct and humorous, sometimes wordy but beautifully descriptive, always evocative. It was about an elderly detective (retired) and his investigation of a theft of a parrot and a murder, which were connected. The parrot was the friend and companion of a young mute Jewish German boy and had a connection to the British WWII intelligence effort... the "final solution" refers to the deportation and murder of jews throughout Europe, and although it inspired the title of the book it was tangential to the plot of the story. That is something I love about Chabon though -- his ability to connect tangents in a wonderful web. I have another of his novels on my bedside table and I'm going to hit that next; he doesn't disappoint.

Hawaii is beautiful

Tonight I went out to see The Descendents, with George Clooney. It started out by showing a montage of scenes from around the islands in Hawaii, with the voice over explaining that it wasn't paradise for the people who lived there -- it was just a place where life happened. Off to a good start, I thought.

I'd heard good things but was afraid it would be sappy. It was certainly sad, and I had to borrow a kleenex (well, not really borrow because you'd never try to give it back later) from a friend of a friend because I was actually crying at one point, as opposed to the tearing-up I'd been doing earlier. It saved itself from being sappy by being realistic; the teenagers were kind of jerks and the 10 year old was kind of weird and the adults were all complex, so that you liked them in some ways and despised or pitied them in others (except the Brian Greer character -- he was a douchebag through and through). I would definitely recommend this film; it was very well done.