What I'm Reading + 3 Movies

Can't take time to write much now--ms due this coming Weds-- just the right amount of pressure to make this final stage fun! 

Out of the pile below, I'd most highly recommend Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo, translated from Finnish. 
It's starts like a normal fellow-finds-wild-pet story, like Rascal or Born Free, except it's a gay man who falls in love (? sort of) with a young troll,  and it gets progressively more unsettling, and yet never loses that "this is the normal world" feel.

Also "Nobody Asked for a Toaster Critic" < links to the opening essay in cultural critic Ian Bogost's How to Talk About Videogames.
He starts off saying videogames are like toasters--just mechanical things we use--and then he considers how they are also soooo much more. He says a bit about toaster design and how toasting is the chemical process of amino acids interacting with sugars. "I am among my tribe," I thought as I read. So nice. 
QUOTE:

"How to talk about videogames? Like a critic, not a reviewer, for one, but also: like a toaster critic, not just a film critic. To do game criticism is to take this common-born subject as toaster and as savior, as milk and as wine, as idiocy and as culture."

3 Movies: Monsieur Lazhar is so lovely, it could serve as a reason not to destroy humankind.

Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains is a documentary about Carter's book tour in 2006 for his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.
It was fascinating & inspiring––also downright shocking to consider the difference in US presidents and their opinions on walls. Recommended.

Blazing Saddles made me laugh, but I got bored after 20 minutes.