Books: Wonderdog by Inman Majors. Dev Degraw is the 33 year old teenage son of the governor of Alabama. Despite being a father himself, he's never gotten beyond the stage of making prank phone calls and getting into bar fights. He's an incipient alcoholic, a former child TV star (perhaps the worst actor in the history of the medium), and has a deep-seated, probably psychopathic, hatred of weiner dogs. He is cornered into taking on a political career after being a lawyer is a tad too taxing for him. He is the representative protagonist of a genre one review calls "loser lit", characterized by A Confederacy of Dunces and Wonder Boys. Despite all this, the story, wandering a drunkard's path, is engaging and amusing and you almost want the reunion of the cast of the childhood Bayou Dog series to be a success.

Small Town Odds by Jason Headley. Another underachiever, Eric Mercer, also a divorced dad of a young daughter living in a small town surrounded by painful memories of all the wrong decisions he's ever made, is quieter and more subtle than Wonderdog (and completely lacking in the cruel, but funny, baiting of weiner dogs). Mercer is not exactly a loser, although he seems to think he is, after making the choice to give up a scholarship at Brown to stay in his West Virginia hometown and work at a funeral home so that he can be a part of his daughter's life. Between living through one week in his life, and experiencing several critical events from his childhood, you become of part of the claustrophobic atmosphere that is a small town. (I have to admit that the reason I took this book out from the library was the cover - a photo of a pickup truck seemingly stuck in a tree - which made me want to find out just what odds it would take to get into such a predicament.)

Movies: May. I think I put this on my Netflix list months ago when Caitlin mentioned she watched it as part of a film class she was taking. I must not have paid attention to the fact that it was the HORROR movie sample. I do not generally watch movies of this type because they tend to be predictable ("Don't go into that dark basement with a serial slasher on the loose!"), gory (fake blood always looks fake, but the sound editors usually succeed at providing way-too-realistic squishy sounds of knives and hacking and bludgeoning), and just plain ass stupid. This was not predictable (until toward the end when you realized that the sum of the parts is way worse than you can possibly imagine), was not stomach-turningly gory (although there was a fair amount of blood), and while not stupid, was so totally out-there bizarre that you have to worry about the mental health of the director/writer. I'm really glad I lost my doll collection years ago.

Crash. It is very rare that I come out of a movie actively wanting to go right back into the next screening so that I can watch it again to catch everything I missed in the first viewing. Memento may have been the last movie in that category. Crash draws incredible performances from all of its actors and asks a series of questions that make you stop, move your head slightly to buy some time to think, and then realize you have no idea what the answer is. There is no plot, only a set of interconnected stories that grow out of anger and racism and cowardice and heroism and human touch. This is one to watch and think about and watch again.

Fever Pitch. Although it follows the usual formula - boy/girl meets boy/girl, misunderstandings and/or sheer idiocy and/or karmic coincidences occur resulting in pair being torn asunder, giant insight smacks the forehead of one or both of the pair who end up in a hazy fade-out that will lead to marriage or civil union depending on the state - this movie was slightly meatier because of the Boston Red Sox appearing as the third partner in the menage-a-trois. Drew Barrymore is competent, but Jimmy Fallon *is* the maniacal Red Sox fan who spends the season with his "summer family" at Fenway Park. Having been in the presence of these fans on more than one occasion, the only note that rings entirely false is that Fallon would sell his beloved behind-the-dugout season tickets for a mere $125,000.