| Murphy's Romance | A deliciously simple, May-December romantic comedy w/James Garner and Sally Field that treasures the virtues of adult romance and mature love. |
| Desk Set (Spencer Tracy & Katherine Hepburn) & Pat and Mike | In Desk Set, Tracy falls in love with Hepburn's character because she's smart. I'm bound to like this because she's a librarian, but she's a librarian with style. In Pat and Mike, he falls for her because she's a terrific athlete. In both, he loves her for being so wonderful at what she does. Now that's the kind of man any woman can appreciate. And no man could ever question Tracy's manliness. |
| Rear Window | Alfred Hitchcock's best film. He plays to the peeping Tom in all of us, the part of us that makes us look into other people's windows and into other people's lives. |
| The Thin Man | A 30's era private-eye mystery with a witty, sexy married couple as the detectives. These two make being married and solving crimes glamorous and fun. |
| Casablanca | A great romance, but also a story about friendship; the hidden treasure is the witty writing. The story has many more funny moments than people remember. |
| Young Frankenstein | Quite possibly the funniest film ever made. Certainly one of them. |
| Silence of the Lambs | One of the finest horror films, because of what you don't see. You actually see very little violence — most of it's in your head. The core of the film is the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, and our identification with Starling's heroism. She is smart enough to be afraid, but brave enough to do what needs to be done. |
| Jaws | Not just a chew-em-up horror film, this is an adventure movie of the first order. Spielberg's first major film is one of his very best for the simple reason that he had yet to fall into any of the habits or sentimentality that mar some of his later works. The constraints of the production actually work to make the film better by forcing the story onto the actors and away from the effects. |
| The Lord of the Rings | One of the great epic film cycles. A wonderful adventure and a great fantasy, it shows how movies can tell stories that are both great and intimate, fantastic and real. |
| The Bone Collector |
| Winnie the Pooh & The House at Pooh Corner | Not the Disney stories, these contain real truths and wonderful humor |
| Ramona the Brave, etc. | Any Ramona book is a treasure, Ramona is one of the few real kids in books and Beverly Cleary truly understands the difficulties of ordinary childhood. |
| Treasure Island | Ignore the prettied up film versions of this novel and go for the real thing — Stevenson understood that even bad men could be good and that was part of what makes pirates so appealing. His story still chills and thrills. From the terrifying Blind Pew to the complex Long John Silver, it remains a terrific read. |
| Encyclopedia Brown | The books in this series hold their own over time because the premise remains so delightfully right — what kid can resist matching wits with the 10-year old detective and his tough sidekick Sally as they solve puzzles in which all the clues are fairly presented? And what kid hasn't had to deal with a Bugs Meany or 2 in their life and can't appreciate seeing Encyclopedia and Sally cope with him time and again? |
| My Side of the Mountain/Hatchet | Two versions of the same story. A boy alone in the wild struggles to survive. In the first he is there by choice, in the second, it is the result of an accident. Both are stories of courage and triumph, the second arguably more realistic, the former more of a dream. But both are page turners. |
| The Hobbit | Not as heady stuff as the Lord of the Rings, yet satisfying to those whose appetites have been whetted by the movies. This is the tale of how Bilbo met Gandalf and first went adventuring and so discovered both Gollum and the ring. |
| Just So Stories and the Jungle Books | The language is the thing in these stories, which tell the origin of various things. For example, readers how the elephant got its trunk and the rhinoceros its wrinkly skin. Read these out loud to hear the way Kipling plays with the language and lets it roll off the tongue. In the Jungle Books, which most emphatically are nothing like the version Disney tells, Mowgli, the man cub, grows up in the jungle among the animals. Written with respect for the creatures and a sense of place that captures India perfectly, you will never see Kaa the python the same way again after you have read his story if all you're familiar with Disney's pale fool. |
| Complete Tales of Uncle Remus by Julius Lester | Julius Lester has rendered the world a service by reclaiming the wonderful Brer Rabbit stories and producing them in form that modern readers can understand and relate to. Replacing the awkward dialect and contemporizing the narrator's references in spots, Lester makes the stories hip and funny, just as they should be, so that kids will chortle their way through the whole lot. |
| Daddy Long Legs | A wonderful novel told in letters. The young orphan narrator must write letters to her benefactor, who she knows only by the shadow she saw once on the orphanage wall. Since he never writes back, her entirely one-sided correspondence takes her wherever she pleases as she imagines his reactions to things. |
| The Oz books | I haven't included Harry Potter because everyone knows about it. But not too many people know about these books anymore. Forget the movie. Not that the movie isn't wonderful. I love it too. But the books are an entirely different thing. They are full of funny jokes and crazy characters like the Gnome King and Jack Pumpkinhead. The only unfortunate part is that some of the overly cute names, such as the land of the Winkies, haven't held up as well, but kids will forgive that because the other characters are funny and much of the wordplay is clever. |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens' richest novel. If you're ever having trouble with a lawyer, this is the book for you. Filled with Dickens' usual rich cross-section of English society, the humor and humanity of the characters pay off the reader's time and effort. |
| any Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mystery | Beginning with The Crocodile on the Sandbank, this series relates the adventures of the indomitable Amelia and her archeological family as they investigate ancient Egyptian culture and chase murderers and master criminals with equal panache — very funny. |
| any early Charlotte Macleod or Alisa Craig mystery | the two names of the same author, this whimsical mystery writer's early novels are a delight. The final couple in each of the longer series leave much to be desired, however. The early ones are the work of an author who loves to play with words and language, who believes in good people getting good things and bad people getting what's coming to them. |
| Moby Dick | No, it's not just about whales. It's about life. About being human. About nature. About God. About power. About the ocean. Oh yeah, and it IS about whales. It's one of the few books that manages to be about the big and the small and the altogether all at the same time. |
| Little Women | Typically thought of as a children's book, this is actually a story that is primarily about adult women and the choices that they make. |
| All Creatures Great and Small | James Herriot's account of his early experiences as a vet in Yorkshire capture a place and people and a time so completely that he romanticized an entire profession for a whole generation. For me, this book held a special place because there were echoes of people from my own family in it. |
| The Color Purple | A story of triumph over adversity so extreme that you almost can't bear it. The end of this book practically sings of love and joy. It's not a perfect book, as many times as I've read it, I still find the section on Africa far weaker than Celie's story and wish Walker had recounted it in a much shorter space and brought us much more of Celie instead. If you've seen the movie and not read the book, then you've seen an entirely different story. |
| Gaudy Night | Dorothy Sayers wrote a number of mysteries. They aren't everyone's style, partly because they are extremely British and very 1930s. They practically require translation in some respects today. That said, this one remains a favorite because it is the culmination of the slowly evolving relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey, her detective, and Harriet Vane, the woman of his dreams. |
| any Martha Grimes Inspector Jury mystery | These are moody, melancholy mysteries that somehow retain a rich sense of humor that arises from the family of regular characters that appear from book to book. Grimes writes characters so well that its hard to believe that these people don't really exist somewhere. |
| The Name of the Rose | This is not a book for everyone. For example, it is very annoying that Eco includes passages in latin without translation — kind of a nanny nanny boo boo I'm so much smarter than you gesture. Nevertheless, this is one of those books that swirls around big ideas and plays with them in a variety of ways, teasing them out in the form of a medieval murder mystery. And at the core of it all is a single question, just how dangerous is laughter? Comedy? I think it is that whole aspect that makes this book hold such interest for me. This is one of the few books where I actually recommend people watch the film in conjunction with the book. |
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