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Fictionista, Foodie, Feline-lover

Showing posts with label George Chesbro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Chesbro. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Separated at birth--Aaron Sorkin and Peter Dinklage

Ever since I saw Station Agent, I've had the nagging suspicion that Peter Dinklage  looks like somebody I' know and today when I saw this picture of Aaron Sorkin on the Deadline Hollywood site, it finally came to me.  Peter Dinklage and Aaron Sorkin look alike. I have worked for John Wells' Productions, the company that made West Wing, and have seen Sorkin a couple of times.  He's got real charisma.
He's also a fantastic writer as everyone who saw Social Network knows.  (He also wrote Moneyball, a movie that was full of fine acting and great moments.)
Like everyone else, I could watch Dinklage play Tyrion Lannister the rest of his life. (Only one more episode of Game of Thrones this year?  Noooooooo.) But the project I really hope is still alive is the one based on George Chesbro's books about Robert "Mongo the Magnificent" Frederickson. The book optioned was the third in the series, Affair of the Sorcerers, and Dinklage was attached to play Frederickson.
It's a great role. Frederickson is a criminologist who moonlights as a private investigator, often helped by his brother Garth, who's a cop. "Mongo" was his stage name when Frederickson worked as an acrobat in the circus and his best friends still call him that.
The books started out very real-world, but as the series went on, they got more and more out there.  The last of the books, called Lord of Ice and Loneliness (all the books have really poetic titles) is only available in a French translation; it has never been published in the U.S.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

It's a numbers game

I am lately obsessed with numbers--my weight (lower is better), my followers on twitter (higher is better) and two lists of things have attracted my attention. I've been adding movies to my NetFlix database so the AI can make recommendations (they keep telling me I'll really, really, really like Speed, and I so don't believe them). I have close to two thousand films listed.

Meanwhile, over at GoodReads, I'm trying to fill out my list of books because I'm now obsessed with listing EVERY SINGLE BOOK I EVER READ. And that is a really large number. I've read several books a week since I was a kid and that hasn't changed. (Except nowadays, people PAY me to read books) I've only got 671 books listed on my GoodReads shelf. Around a quarter of what I listed for movies. (And it's not that I am ashamed of admitting I've read a lot of crap. I read Gothic novels as a teen, and moved on to romance. I read every vampire book ever written except the The Shiny Metal Grin.

I just can't remember every author. I went through my mother's Nero Wolfe books and her Agatha Christies and kept going. Robert Barnard and Liza Cody and more.

But what this enumeration exercise has done is remind me of all the writers I stopped reading but who haven't stopped writing. Why didn't I read all the George Chesbro novels about Mongo? (Because they started getting really odd and fanciful around number 7.) What about all those Elvis Cole books I haven't read? This is definitely a summer to catch up with old friends. And then I'll list the books on my GoodReads shelf.