GEORGIA BOTTOMS by Mark Childress, 2011.

Full of charming small town humor and quirky characters, the story concerns Georgia Bottoms (family name was previously Butts) in Six Points, Alabama, a good looking woman who makes a living serving as the mistress to six important men in the town. She's a great cook, faithful churchgoer, a superlative hostess, and she takes care of her mother who has borderline dementia as well as watches out for her bum brother. Each of her gentlemen callers is unaware of her relationship with the others, and so her life is a juggling act that she has totally perfected and she makes sure that everything stays on schedule. Her callers leave her weekly generous gifts (money) to help with her lifestyle. However, when the preacher (her Saturday night lover), feeling a huge burden of guilt, threatens to spill the beans on their set up, her world begins to come crashing down. Then her annual September luncheon is totally ruined by 9/11, and when things just can't seem to get any worse, a strange young man arrives at her front door, and Georgia realizes the jig is up and it's time to face the music. Even her best friend and co-conspirator Krystal, the town's mayor, can't help her, as she has problems of her own, and one of them involves her own feelings about Georgia. This novel is all about human frailties and failings and misplaced values, done with great humor and insight.  A light, fun read, on the order of Fannie Flagg and Clyde Edgerton.

I enjoy watching the old 90's sitcom "Home Improvement" (thank goodness for cable), and I like Tim Allen's humor on that show, so I decided to check out his first book, DON'T STAND TOO CLOSE TO A NAKED MAN (1994). I don't read a lot of strictly humor books, so this was something different for me. I decided that while I really like his show, reading an entire book of his humor was just a bit much. Maybe that's the way I'd feel about reading any comic's book of humor. Anyway, Allen's humor is good on TV, where he's interacting with other characters and it's in small doses. It just didn't come off as funny on the printed page--at least, it didn't give me consistent chuckles while reading it.

I decided I would watch the theatrical version of "Brideshead Revisited" (2008), after putting it off a while. I had viewed the original PBS series (from 1981) a short while back, and enjoyed it quite a bit--made when Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews were so young and John Gielgud was still actively working. I had read that this movie version did not stand up so well next to the PBS version, but I like Emma Thompson and thought I'd give it a shot. Well, next to PBS's miniseries, the film came off as pretty shallow. Of course, a film cannot accomplish as much as a miniseries can, but this film didn't have much character development or motivation, seemed rather murky at times, somewhat disjointed, and not very involving. Didn't draw me into very well. Emma Thompson as the brittle and very Catholic Lady Marchmain and Matthew Goode as the ambitious Charles Ryder were about the best things in the film; Michael Gambon was not very good, or Ben Whishaw or Hayley Atwell. In terms of chemistry, the only ones who had much chemistry together were Goode and Whishaw and Goode and Thompson. Sometimes the dialogue was a bit dull, which made the whole movie go rather slowly. Andrew Davies has certainly done better scripts than this (a little too much concentration on the gay thing for me and the whole Catholic/atheist issue seemed very shallow). Beautiful location shooting (Castle Howard in England, which was used for the original, too), very gorgeous sets, but not much depth here. Not terrible, but not consistently good or very enthralling.