I respect Scorsese and have found many of his films to be brilliant. The production values in this film were exceedingly high (and the only thing that kept us going for as long as we got; my wife loved the costume and the authenticity), but the artifice was taken too seriously and completely ran over the story. Seems anti-Wharton to me.

Thinking about it, I have put my own wife off a couple of books by talking about them too much as I went through them, I now try to avoid it, it’s a sad irony when your own enthusiasm becomes a barrier to someone else’s enjoyment. Easily done though.

She’s better than I am at conveying “this is great, you should read it” without overdoing it or giving too much away, I really must read some Stefan Zweig actually, one of her favourites (Emma, my wife, is very big on Pushkin Press).

That aside, I somehow missed half the comments on this blog entry before. No idea how. I work in the corporate world, more precisely I’m a corporate lawyer, and it is a world poorly captured in literature mostly because very few writers have any real experience of it.

John Self’s old favourite, Something Happened isn’t bad, I don’t recall Bonfire having that much on the actual corporate side of things, really though it’s non-fiction where the best stuff is. Barbarians at the Gate is excellent, Liar’s Poker is rightly famous, those two would be at the top of my personal recommendations pile.

I thoroughly enjoyed Atonement.

I’ll say it, you killed Atonement for me

And I’ve heard that enough from you now that you have ruined it for me too. I now have to read it in secret.