So much of my life is spent in the dark watching flickering images on a screen. Not that I am complaining; it is a life I wouldn’t trade for the world, but I do enjoy being outdoors. My wife, my two daughters and I live 50 miles outside of Toronto in a small country village called Seagrave in a century home. With about an acre of property, we have a large deck and a swimming pool for the girls. I hear friends talk about moving or buying a new home, but we will die here. Never will this house be sold as long as I am alive, and the plan is to allow the girls to have it, share it as a summer home when Sherri and I are gone.
We spend a lot of time on the deck reading. Sherri, the classics and latest best sellers, me, all things cinema. Once in a while I will read a book that is highly praised or recommended to me by one of my girls — “The Lovely Bones” was the last one, I think, and a superb biography of John Adams — but for the most part all I read are books about cinema.
Biographies tend to be the ones I read most, though I am becoming much more difficult to please when reading a biography of an actor or a director. I like explorations of genre and have in the past enjoyed collections of criticisms, the best being those by Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Kenneth Turan and John Simon. This summer, as I am working at home on my own next three books, I had the chance to do quite a bit of reading, and I thought I would share some of the better ones with you today.
The best book I read last year (and have picked up from time to time over the summer) was the superb biography “Victor Fleming: An American Master” by Michael Sragrow, which quite superbly explores the little known career of the man who directed “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Loved by actors, admired by producers, and well thought of by critics of the time, Fleming is perhaps the least known of the directors of the Golden Age. This was one of those books I loved because I was learning something throughout, which to me is the best kind of book to read.