In 2006 I read only 31 books (a couple of reviews aren’t up yet). This is even worse than the 36 I thought was so scandalously low last year. All the same reasons apply.

We did do some pretty cool things this year that might have eaten some of my reading time.

We also watched a bunch of movies, so like I posted last year, here’s what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc.

rating Title Notes
**** Capote
**** The Fifth Element repeat
**** The Ice Storm repeat
**** An Inconvenient Truth T Karen, Erik
***+ Breakfast On Pluto
***+ Brick
***+ Broken Flowers
***+ Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
***+ Match Point
***+ Wordplay
*** The Aristocrats
*** Batman Begins
*** Brokeback Mountain
*** Cars T B
*** Charlie and the Chocolate Factory R
*** Clerks 2
*** Donnie Darko
*** Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
*** Friends With Money
*** Hard Candy
*** Iron and Silk
*** King Kong T R
*** Little Miss Sunshine T Steve, Hazel
*** The Matador T
*** My Neighbor Totoro
*** The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio
*** Proof
*** Reefer Madness
*** Saved!
*** Shadow Voices: Finding hope with mental illness
*** Shopgirl
*** Sin City J
*** Slacker repeat
*** The Squid and the Whale
**+ The Bishop’s Wife B
**+ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) repeat
**+ Calendar Girls
**+ Casanova T B
**+ Code 46
**+ Connie and Carla
**+ Corpse Bride R
**+ Dickie Roberts B
**+ Duck Season
**+ Elizabethtown
**+ The Family Stone B R
**+ Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle
**+ I Am Trying To Break Your Heart Rod
**+ I’ll Take You There
**+ In the Realms of the Unreal
**+ Junebug
**+ Memoirs of a Geisha
**+ Monster House T Steve, Hazel, Rosalind, R
**+ Night And Day B
**+ Prairie Home Companion T
**+ Sketches of Frank Gehry
**+ Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
**+ Something New B
**+ Super Size Me
**+ Thank You For Smoking
** The 40 Year Old Virgin
** Art School Confidential
** For Your Consideration T Larry, Ann
** Freeway
** Fun With Dick and Jane
** People Will Talk B
** Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest T R
** Reefer Madness 1936
** Scotland, PA
** Stage Beauty
** Superman Returns
** Topper Returns B
** Topper B
** The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
** X3: The Last Stand
* The Brothers Grimm R

That’s 75 movies (only 10 in the theater) and doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before. We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll blather on.