There's a boom-boom in your eyes...

Our work server is down, so I'm taking this opportunity to blog about something nonpolitical lest I start to sound like a liberal harridan. (Which I am.)

The Sopranos are back! 15 minutes into last night's episode, it was as if the two-year hiatus never happened. I was immediately sucked into Tony and Co's new lives: Uncle Jun with Alzheimer's, Carmela's sushi addiction, Janice with a baby...just listening to Tony's horse-like heavy breathing made me feel oddly happy and calm.

"Big Love," the new HBO drama about a polygamous family, was promising -- plenty of gripping, uncomfortable moments. It reminds me of a mishmash of Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood. Not sure yet if Chloe Sevigny's acting is just not up to par with the others or whether she's doing something with the character of the Machiavellian second wife that I don't get yet. Harry Dean Stanton is really, really creepy as the "patriarch."

Although I'm glad to have good TV to watch once again, I have realized something lately: the fewer magazines I read and less TV I watch, the happier I am. Books -- particularly nonfiction right now -- and good movies seem to be much more nourishing and provide a lot more food for thought, the whole mental junk food versus spinach thing I suppose.

What I've consumed in the past month and really enjoyed:

Tell Them I Didn't Cry, Jackie Spinner's account of a year in Iraq for the Washington Post. She starts out an annoyingly perky little vegetarian and rapidly turns into a battle-hardened correspondent, peeing in Gatorade bottles in a moving HumVee filled with soldiers. Her heartbreak over the beating she gets from right-wing bloggers is very compelling too: "I'm not here to serve my country, I'm here to serve the story" she says, and I at last understand that it might be possible for reporters in Iraq to do so even if they have to work through translators as they sit inside a car wearing an abaya.

Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which I didn't finish the first time around but this time really, really enjoyed. (I have the galleys for his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, for an interview in early April.) Where else can you learn about how the cannabis plant chose humans to fulfill its evolutionary destiny, and how Johnny Appleseed was a barefoot freak who sold apple plants so that pioneers could make alcoholic cider and fell in love with an 11-year-old girl?

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. As good as the hype. Although I found Didion's narrative distance a little emotionally chilly at first, I was soon completely gripped by the intensity of her self-inspection. And I can't believe her daughter ended up dying after the book was done...it's just brutal.

The Calligrapher by Edward Docx. "Dick Lit"! Like a more intellectual -- John Donne's poems figure prominently -- Bridget Jones' Diary from a male point of view. Somewhere in between Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. Plot machinery starts to creak in the last third, but it's sure to make an excellent movie starring Hugh Grant or someone similar who is simultaneously charming and loathsome.

The servers are back up....and it's back to work pour moi.