It's time for the 1999 awards! The envelope please....
Book Awards
1999 awards are given for books read by Kevin in 1999, regardless of publication date. The winners are...
- Best fiction: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. This was by far the best piece of fiction I read this year, a complex, funny, and nuanced story that weaves a tale of World War II codebreaking with a subtly related story of a modern day Silicon Valley startup. Stephenson just gets better and better with every book he writes. Two honorable mentions go to Why Not Me?, by Al Franken, a pretty good sendup of presidential campaigns (and eerily prescient in its supposedly absurd theme of oppostion to ATM fees) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling, which just goes to show that books really can be as good as TV, even to a ten year old. A mixed recommendation goes to The Unburied, by Charles Palliser, which shows (as usual) that he's a terrific storyteller, but unfortunately also shows off his penchant for insanely complex plots.
- Best science fiction: Golden Globe, by John Varley. An excellent, very human tale of the near future that stars an itinerant Shakespearean actor with a cloudy past, it's Varley's best work in years. And unlike last year, this year also has several honorable mentions, topped by A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, a good, solid piece of hard science fiction with a genuinely interesting premise. Other solid reads this year included Reave the Just, an uneven collection of short stories from Stephen R. Donaldson, and Slant, a decently written book of the near future by Greg Bear.
- Best nonfiction: It's a tie this year! A slight edge goes to The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Rich Harris, a genuinely compelling book that challenges common sense notions about just how much impact parents really have on their children. Harris argues convincingly that when you factor in heritable traits, the effect of peers, and the combined effects of schoolteachers, TV, other adults, etc., the impact of parents on their kids is actually fairly small. It's one of the few truly eye opening books I've read in the past few years. Only slightly behind it is The Corner, by David Simon (a writer) and Edward Burns (an ex-police detective), a superb piece of reporting about inner city drug culture. Using a West Baltimore ghetto as their canvas, Simon and Burns paint a picture that's both grim and convincing--and that shows just how pervasively drugs control the people and the economy of our inner cities. Anyone who cares about reality (as opposed to ideology) really needs to read this book before forming an opinion about the war on drugs and how best to fight it.
- Honorable mention nonfiction: Other good nonfiction books this year include Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe's classic 1969 essay about the New York liberal establishment, and Why We Buy, by Paco Underhill, an interesting (though uneven) book about the astonishingly detailed research that Underhill's company does to discover the buying patterns of American consumers. A mixed review goes to The Age of Extremes, by Eric Hobsbawm, a history of the "Short Twentieth Century" from1914 to 1991. It's an interesting take on the broad currents that have affected this century, but suffers from an involuted writing style that makes it truly a chore to read.
- Worst book of the year: I'll Never Get Lost Again, by Linda Grekin. It's probably a little unfair to pick on this slim volume, but it purports to be "The Complete Guide to Improving Your Sense of Direction" and turns out to be little more than a bunch of anecdotes about people getting lost. A close second goes to Cordelia's Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold, a single-volume compilation of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. It's not as if it's the worst thing I've ever read, but it's just incomprehensible to me how she could have won three (!) Hugo awards if the banal plots, flat characters, and graceless prose of these two books is any indication of the quality of the rest of her work
A complete list of 1999 books, in the order read, is below:
| Title | Grade | Kevin's opinion |
| Radical Chic, by Tom Wolfe | B+ | Good, biting satire of the liberal establishment in New York City circa 1969. |
| The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, by Tom Wolfe | B | Pretty good collection of early essays written around 1965. It starts to seem a little glib after a while, but overall a good read. |
| The Nurture Assumption, by Judith Rich Harris | A- | Fascinating, closely reasoned hypothesis about what really affects children as they are growing up. But you really have to keep an open mind about the subject to get anything out of the book. |
| Golden Globe, by John Varley | B+ | Varley's best novel since Titan. |
| Dr. Freud, by Paul Ferris | C+ | Decent biography of Freud, but somehow seems a little thin and superficial. |
| Why Not Me?, by Al Franken | B+ | Not as funny as Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, but nonetheless pretty amusing. |
| The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks | C+ | A disappointing book that turns out to be little more than a collection of short essays about Sacks' patients. Only a few are interesting, and none them really offer any interesting insights. |
| The Testament, by John Grisham | C | Standard Grisham, a little less interesting than his average effort. |
| The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester | B | A somewhat interesting story of a mential patient who contributed thousands of words to the OED, but it barely even justifies its very short length. |
| George Washington, by Willard Sterne Randall | B- | There's nothing wrong with this book, but it just never really grabbed hold of me. However, it did confirm my suspicion that Washington is a bit overrated.... |
| Consilience, by E.O. Wilson | C | The moral of this book is that everything is reducible to the laws of physics. If you already believe this, the book is uninteresting. If you don't, it won't convince you. |
| A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge | B+ | Very solid hard sf with an interesting concept in the "focused", people whose brains have been modified to make them completely focused on a single thing that they will perform to the exclusion of all else. |
| Little Green Men, by Christoher Buckley | B- | Occasionally amusing, but only occasionally. |
| Reave the Just, by Stephen R. Donaldson | B | About half the short stories in this collection are very good, the other half are a little weak. Overall, however, worth reading for the good stuff. |
| Darwin's Black Box, by Michael J. Behe | C- | This turned out to be just another moronic anti-evolution screed by a biochemistry professor who believes that eukaryotic cells are too complex and "irreducible" to have been formed by natural selection. It's a tired argument, and the only difference this time around is that it's aimed at a more microscopic level than usual. |
| Why We Buy, by Paco Underhill | B | An interesting book about the detailed buying habits of American consumers. |
| The Universe and the Teacup, by K.C. Cole | C | Another one of those very thin books that have become so popular recently. There's no real topic here, and nothing new either. |
| The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman | B | Interesting biography of Paul Erdös, an itinerant master of number theory who lived out of a suitcase his entire life. |
| I'll Never Get Lost Again, by Linda Grekin | D | Uninteresting and unrevealing. If you've gotten lost before, this book won't keep it from happening again. |
| Slant, by Greg Bear | B | Pretty good sf about a near future society in which virtually everyone is under psychiatric care of some kind. |
| The Corner, by David Simon and Edward Burns | A- | Fascinating close-up look at the open air drug market and how it literally defines every aspect of life in a typical inner city ghetto. |
| The Unburied, by Charles Palliser | B | Not bad, but be prepared to be completely confused.... |
| Cordelia's Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold | C- | She's won three Hugo awards...? |
| Fermat's Enigma, by Simon Singh | B | Pretty good exposition of how Fermat's Last Theorem was finally proven. |
| Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson | A- | Top notch story about encryption and codebreaking both in World War II and the present day. |
| Confessions of a Crap Artist, by Philip K. Dick | B | Not science fiction, and not bad either. |
| Spin, by Tom Lowe | C+ | A Republican version of Primary Colors, except not as good. |
| Seizing the Enigma, by David Kahn | C- | Should have been an interesting subject, but the obsessive attention to detail simply became too much to bear by the second half. |
| Executive Orders, by Tom Clancy | B | Standard Clancy. Good for long trips.... |
| Football Crazy, by Greg Williams | B- | A British novel about the breakdown of a soccer star. In the end, it didn't really reveal much about either soccer or the book's characters. |
| Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough | C | Unfortunately, it turns out that Theodore Roosevelt's childhood was fairly ordinary.... |
| The Boat of a Million Years, by Poul Anderson | C- | The premise is interesting (a small group of immortals live here on Earth) but the execution is weak. It's really little more than a collection of vignettes about each one of the characters. |
| Across Realtime, by Vernor Vinge | B- | It took months to finally get a copy of this, and it wasn't worth the wait. Vinge has definitely gotten better as he's gotten older. |
| The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton | C- | This story is one that just doesn't hold up well.... |
| Eyes of a Child, by Richard North Patterson | B | Good airport book. Patterson's stuff is fairly ordinary legal thriller stuff, but the writing is pretty good and the characters interesting. |
| The Promise of Sleep, by William C. Dement | B | Interesting book about sleep research over the past few decades. It was a little light on sleep recommendations, but worth a read if this kind of thing interests you. |
| Foundation's Fear, by Gregory Benford | C- | A truly bizarre and unlikely take on Hari Seldon's youth. Not a welcome addition to the Foundation series. |
| Foundation and Chaos, by Greg Bear | B- | A little better than the first part. |
| Foundation's Triumph, by David Brin | B | And a little better still. Overall grade for the trilogy is B-, so don't bother reading it unless you're a diehard Asimov fan who just can't stand not to know what it's about. |
| Personal Injuries, by Scott Turow | B | Very solid, fast read about a guy who agrees to cooperate with the FBI and destroys many of his friends in the process. |
| Take Back Your Government, by Robert A. Heinlein | B | Interesting from a historical perspective, but that's about it. This is Heinlein's advice about how to get involved in local politics circa 1947, and virtually none of it is meaningful today. |
| No Safe Place, by Richard North Patterson | B | Another tight thriller from Patterson. |
| Measuring the Universe, by Kitty Ferguson | B- | Not that bad a book, really, but I didn't learn anything new from it. |
| Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear | C+ | Mediocre book about a strange type of virus that triggers evolutionary changes. |
| The Age of Extremes, by Eric Hobsbawm | B | Interesting take on the 20th century from an old liberal warhorse who's lived through it all, but it sure is a slow read. Some of the sentences feel like they go on for pages.... |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling | B+ | Top notch children's fantasy. |
| Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker | B | Pinker has written an entire book about irregular verbs to shed some light on how the brain works. Interesting, but perhaps just a bit too long for such an esoteric subject. |
| Visual Explanations, by Edward R. Tufte | C+ | Mediocre book about a miscellaneous variety of visual things from charts to artwork. It seems a little too much just a bunch of personal opinion to be really interesting. |
Movie Awards
1999 awards are given for movies seen by Kevin in theaters in 1999, regardless of production date. Here are the 1999 winners...
- Best drama: The Red Violin. This is a tough choice, since there weren't very many dramas that I really liked a lot this year. Still, it was surprisingly enjoyable and engaging, even if the ending was a little awkward.
- Honorable mention drama: Life is Beautiful was as good as everyone said, even if I suspect that Roberto Benigni's act is pretty one dimensional and doesn't bear up under multiple films. (You can also count me among the people who have trouble with comedies about the Holocaust, no matter how well done.) Magnolia was maddening in its deficiencies, but the good parts are so good that it's worth seeing regardless. The Sixth Sense was standard Hollywood but well crafted, with a surprisingly surprising ending. I also saw The Third Man in London this summer, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
- Best comedy: Being John Malkovich. This was a terrific and original movie, another great role for John Cusack, one of my favorite actors. I sure wish movies like this could win Academy Awards....
- Honorable mention comedy: Rushmore was the only other comedy that I really liked this year, and it was a very close call between it and Being John Malkovich. It was offbeat and engaging, never predictable, and had a good performance by Bill Murray (another of my favorite actors, even if he misfires about as often as he hits). No other comedies really hit the jackpot for me, but there were a few other decent ones, including Shakespeare in Love, Election, Dick, and Toy Story 2.
- Worst movie of the year: This is an easy choice: South Park was the worst mainstream movie I've seen in a long time. (It wasn't quite as bad as Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, but at least that film was meant to be disgusting and stupid.) It's true that I just don't get South Park, but even so the humor in this movie was just juvenile, predictable, and dumb. I actually fell asleep for about 30 minutes, which hasn't happened for at least a decade.
A complete list of 1999 movies, in the order seen, is below:
| Title | Grade | Kevin's Opinion |
| Prince of Egypt | C | Where did this whole myth about Moses floating down the Nile come from anyway? The Bible is pretty clear that his basket was just set in the reeds and didn't actually go anywhere. I'm just curious, that's all..... |
| Pleasantville | B | No pun intended, but this was a pleasant movie. It might have made its point a little more heavy handedly than it had to, but it's still pretty watchable. |
| A Civil Action | B- | Lots of potential, but it just ground on and on and finally lost me. |
| Shakespeare in Love | B | I might be underrating this film. It was wittily done and enjoyable, but in the end the characters just didn't grab me. |
| Life is Beautiful | B+ | Does a superb job of walking the knife edge required to make a comedy about the Holocaust. |
| A Simple Plan | B- | Well acted, but the screenplay begs for more work. The characters are just too stupid to be believable. |
| Rushmore | B+ | Offbeat in the best sense of the word. |
| Analyze This | B- | I'm just not sure that Robert De Niro is really cut out for comedy. |
| Entrapment | C | I don't care if it does star Sean Connery, it was still a very dumb story. |
| The Matrix | B | A decent movie, really, with good tight direction and interesting special effects. If they had just taken another 30 seconds to think of something better than humans as batteries it would have been even better. |
| Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace | B- | Yeah, I know, it's hard to reproduce what I felt 20 years ago, but still this film was a disappointment. I was hoping it would advance the mythos of the Star Wars universe, but it didn't. Maybe Part 2 will be better.... |
| Election | B | Offbeat in a similar way to Rushmore, but not as good. |
| A Midsummer's Night Dream | C | I've never liked the play much, and this movie didn't do anything to make me like it any better. |
| Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me | C- | No, it wasn't better than the original. |
| South Park | D | Paralyzingly stupid. |
| Tarzan | B | Surprisingly good. |
| Notting Hill | B | Nothing special, just your basic romantic comedy. Still, decently crafted and acted. |
| The General's Daughter | B | Decent thriller. |
| The Third Man | B+ | Very good movie about murder in post-war Vienna. But hey, isn't it about time they colorized it? |
| An Ideal Husband | B | A good role for Rupert Everett, and overall pretty enjoyable. |
| Dick | B | It's hard not to like a film that has Richard Nixon saying "let me handle this, Henry, I know how to relate to young people." |
| Bowfinger | B- | In the yo-yo career that is Steve Martin's, this is not a movie that will stand out. |
| The Red Violin | B+ | Elegant film that traces the history of a violin over three centuries. The story is told in Italian, German, French, and English, so just about everyone needs subtitles for this one. |
| Yellow Submarine | B | Probably interesting more for its historical value than anything else. Still, the music is good. |
| The Sixth Sense | B+ | Very well crafted thriller with a good twist ending. |
| Double Jeopardy | B | Sort of a low budget Fugitive, but overall not bad. |
| American Beauty | C+ | I guess I just didn't get the nuances of this film. It just seemed like a bunch of mid-life crisis whining to me. |
| Run Lola Run | B | Fairly interesting German film in which the same story is told three times with slight variations causing big changes in the ending. Not great, but worth watching. |
| Three Kings | B | Pretty good film for the first hour, but then becomes sort of absurdist and bizarre. The last half hour lost me. |
| The Minus Man | B- | Not very good, but an interesting performance from Owen Wilson as a strangely passive serial killer. |
| Princess Mononoke | B | As the critics said, it really does raise the bar for animation. Still, it was overlong and would have benefited from some disciplined cutting. |
| Being John Malkovich | B+ | Highly original and unpredictable screenplay, and good performances from everyone. First rate. |
| The World is Not Enough | B- | Standard Bond, but a little sillier than some. |
| Toy Story 2 | B | Not quite better than the original, but pretty good nonetheless. |
| The Green Mile | B | Pretty decent potboiler, worth a watch. |
| Magnolia | B+ | Very frustrating movie with lots of brilliant scenes but seemingly nowhere to go. Brilliant scripting in places--there's just no payoff. |
| Anna and the King | B- | Mediocre costume drama. |
The final 1999 Top Ten Movie list looks like this:
- Being John Malkovich
- Rushmore
- The Red Violin
- Life is Beautiful
- Magnolia
- The Sixth Sense
- The Third Man
- Dick
- The Green Mile
- Toy Story 2
This is probably a little bit better list than 1998, but still fairly mediocre. There are a decent number of good movies, but no great ones.
Book and Movie Statistics
The total number of reviewed books was 48, way up from last year's 27, and they broke up as follows:
- General fiction: 13
- Science fiction: 13
- Nonfiction: 22
The total number of reviewed movies was 37, up from 26 last year. Grade distribution for books and movies in 1999 was as follows:
Note: a grade of B- is the cutoff point for recommendations: anything above it is recommended, anything below it is not, and anything that received a B- is on the edge.
Tennis Awards
Best overall record goes to Dave Dvorman, with a 77% win rate and a record of 55-16 for the year. Complete 1999 tennis statistics are below:
| First Set | Second Set | YTD Score |
| 6-3 | 1-6 | 1-1 |
| 1-6 | 7-6 (7-0) | 2-2 |
| 1-6 | 5-5 | 2-3 |
| 0-6 | 1-6 | 2-5 |
| 3-6 | 1-6 | 2-7 |
| 4-6 | 6-6 | 2-8 |
| 6-3 | 2-6 | 3-9 |
| 3-6 | 4-6 | 3-11 |
| 0-6 | 6-7 (2-7) | 3-13 |
| 1-6 | 6-4 | 4-14 |
| 4-6 | 5-7 | 4-16 |
| 4-6 | 5-7 | 4-18 |
| 0-6 | 4-6 | 4-20 |
| 2-6 | 3-6 | 4-22 |
| 3-6 | 4-6 | 4-24 |
| 2-6 | 4-6 | 4-26 |
| 3-6 | 6-2 | 5-27 |
| 3-6 | 7-5 | 6-28 |
| 3-6 | 1-6 | 6-30 |
| 0-6 | 6-4 | 7-31 |
| 2-6 | 6-7 (4-7) | 7-33 |
| 7-5 | 2-6 | 8-34 |
| 6-4 | 0-1 (ret.) | 9-35 |
| 2-6 | 6-3 | 10-36 |
| 1-6 | 6-3 | 10-38 |
| 4-6 | 4-6 | 10-40 |
| 0-6 | 3-6 | 10-42 |
| 2-6 | 3-6 | 10-44 |
| 6-7 (2-7) | 6-2 | 11-45 |
| 6-2 | 2-6 | 12-46 |
| 6-4 | 13-46 | |
| 4-6 | 13-47 | |
| 2-6 | 6-4 | 14-48 |
| 5-7 | 3-6 | 14-50 |
| 2-6 | 3-6 | 14-52 |
| 6-7 (7-9) | 14-53 | |
| 6-4 | 6-4 | 16-53 |
| 2-6 | 3-6 | 16-55 |
Kitten of the Year
The Nash family had a couple of contenders this year, especially Quinn, their extremely sociable deaf white cat, but the competition was pretty stiff and Quinn was able to garner only second place. Grayson Siegall won third, and the unanimous choice of the judges this year for Kitten of the Year was Inkblot, the adorable new Drum kitten. He sure is cute!
Wife of the Year
Yes, I know it must be discouraging for everyone else out there, but for a record ninth year in a row Wife of the Year goes to:
Marian!
It's just incredible.