Quick Reviews and Stuff: January
Happy 2024?
I didn’t get to do as much this month as I’d wanted, but I also watched (at the time of writing) at least 18 episodes of Dimension 20, which is basically like watching 18 movies. Furious that I’ve been missing out on this entertainment for so long. Highly recommended if you’re interested in actual play D&D content with people who are genuinely funny and can tell great collaborative stories. Episodes are generally under two hours long so it’s not a huge time sink if you’re not doing what I’m doing, which is trying to catch up on several seasons worth of content so you can watch newly airing episodes.
Books
The Littlest Yak, Lu Fraser (writer) and Kate Hindley (illustrator) — A friend bought this adorable book for a nephew for Christmas and I took the opportunity to read it while she was wrapping gifts. A super cute children’s picture book about a tiny yak who wants to be big like all the other yak, but of course, her smallness ends up being an asset. The message (you’re perfect the way you are) is great for kids, and the illustrations are absolutely fantastic. Currently furious that I cannot own a plush littlest yak of my own.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe, Emma Törzs — Contemporary fantasy centered around two families and a world of magic books. This book would make a much better movie. It’s a decent enough debut from Törzs and while the worldbuilding and magic system creation is great, overall the plot and characters are somewhat underdeveloped. Characters largely just exist as tropes (tough sister who’s secretly sensitive! sheltered sister who’s not so secretly sensitive! posh British guy! gruff Boston guy!) and don’t get much depth, and the last like 25% of the book is a flashback infodump that could have been handled so much more gracefully. There’s also a romance here that gets shoehorned in at the end of the book that just came truly out of left field. It felt like one of those “the author wants the characters to be together, so they’re going to be together” moments rather than something organic. I love the magic system here, I love the twists and turns in the plot, but the execution was lacking.
Role Playing, Cathy Yardley — Cute contemporary romance about two Gen X nerds should have been absolute catnip to me but overall this felt like a solid second draft that needed a bit more poking before publication. I loved the older adult representation, the bi/ace/demisexual representation, and the way that our two leads develop a friendship that turns into something more. The supporting cast is largely deplorable — meanspirited, homo/biphobic, racist, interfering jerks. I’m all for introducing conflict that isn’t the standard romance novel miscommunication trope, but oh my god this was Too Much External Conflict and I was rooting for Maggie and Aiden to just do a “goalie said fuck it and left”, stand up for themselves, and then ditch these jerks. Maggie spends a lot of time focusing on how socially awkward she is (she thinks she can’t carry a conversation! she always says the wrong thing! she’s too blunt! etc!) and I’m like, girl these people all SUCK, it is THEM, not YOU, you are basically FINE. You can’t carry a conversation on with any of these people because they’re all conniving, self-serving jerks who aren’t actually interested in you! God! I’m very fond of Maggie and Aiden as a couple but the book that surrounded them made me incredibly frustrated.
The Vanished Northwest Passage Arctic Expedition, Lisa M. Bolt Simons (writer) and Eugene Smith (Illustrator) — A good, basic introduction to the Franklin expedition and the key players in both the expedition and the search for the lost ships. Probably perfect for a tween/younger reader who can handle some heavier thoughts (disappearing in the Arctic is pretty depressing, not gonna lie) and who are also curious about ships, exploring, the Arctic, etc. Obviously people who are experienced Polar Nerds are not going to learn anything new, but you (we) are not the target audience here.
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, Candice Millard — This was a fascinating look at a period of time that I knew essentially nothing about. So starting as a fairly blank slate of a reader, Millard’s examination of the big personalities of the British explorers who sought to find the source of the Nile was engaging from the start. It was a bit of a slow read at times largely because there was a lot of new information to take in, and a lot of people/places/things to remember, but it was certainly never boring. The extreme hardships, often self-induced, these men experienced in search of the source of the Nile are absolutely wild to read about. I certainly would have quit immediately, which is why I have a little email job where I type my little emails all day long. The figures in this are all fascinating, complex, horrible men, and when, like, the guy whose anthropological beliefs helped prop up white supremacy comes across as the least horrid person of our main figures, I mean, uh, I guess welcome to colonial England, huh. Millard, a former National Geographic writer, has several other books out that I’m looking forward to diving into.
Movies
Memory — Drama/romance that hones in on two people with very different issues around the concept of memory. A touching film but somewhat underdeveloped. There’s no clear sense of the passage of time, the climactic ending scene just sort of… ends, and the viewer knows mostly that these characters care for one another because we’re told that they care, rather than seeing a more natural development of a relationship. Jessica Chastain is great in her role as Sylvia, a woman who you can tell is dealing with Something Big, even before we learn her backstory. The way she seems uncomfortable in her own skin, leaning away from contact, very deeply afraid of everything around her — Chastain does such an excellent job of portraying someone in deep pain.
The Zone of Interest — The banality of evil, indeed. Jonathan Glazer’s look at the Nazi family who lived literally next door to Auschwitz doesn’t have a real plot arc, per se — characters don’t grow or change or learn any lessons — but it is a chilling slice of life portrayal of the way that life just goes on for people even while they’re committing the most atrocious acts. The violence of Auschwitz is never visually captured on screen, aside from glimpses of smokestacks, but you hear it — the rumble of trains, barking dogs, shouting, the crack of a gun — which makes it even harder to stomach, to hear all of this going on just below the surface, while the Höss family is just enjoying a nice picnic or whatever. There’s a lot of food for thought in here about what it looks like to be willfully complicit in an atrocity, and what it looks like to be a cog in the machine that moves that atrocity forward.
The Wrestler— Just real sad stuff, man. The themes of ageing, of your body failing you when you need it most, are themes I often find myself returning to in fiction, both in intake and in my own writing, and this captures that fear of “what do I do when I can’t do the only thing I’ve ever known” so well. The characters themselves are fairly cliche but Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei do a great job of selling the viewer on their characters. Rourke is perfectly cast as a past-his-prime wrestler who’s facing a reckoning in his own life, and who simply cannot overcome his own issues to make his life something new and better.
All Of Us Strangers — It’s hard to talk about this one without spoiling it. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal are both heartbreaking as men who meet in a creepily empty high rise building, Scott as the awkward and closed off Adam and Mescal as the quietly hopeful Harry. I left the theater thinking a lot about liminal spaces, I’ll just leave it at that. I think it’s a movie that packs an even stronger emotional punch if you have at all fraught relationships with your family of origin, particularly around queerness; as such, some of the emotional pull didn’t quite land for me, but that’s okay.
Cool Friend Shoutouts
When I introduced my ko-fi support program, one highly underrated perk, if I do say so myself, is shouting out any of my cool friends who happen to give me dollars. Anyway, shout out to Elisse, who shares delightful book reviews on Instagram as well as on her own ko-fi page. If you, like me, enjoy adding an endless amount of books to your own to-read list, you should absolutely check out her stuff.
What’s Next?
Already starting February off on a meh note, as being sick (non-COVID-edition) has me kind of down for the count. I just picked up Brooms, a graphic novel about witches in 1930s Mississippi, and am flipping back and forth between a few other books but don’t currently have the attention span for much more than silly romance novels.
I’ll probably write more about it next month, I want time to think about it a little more, but given that the show leaves Chicago in a few weeks, just a heads up that you absolutely need to go see Illinoise, a dance musical (is that a thing) featuring the music of Sufjan Stevens. It’s absolutely incredible, whether you’re a fan of musicals, dance, theater in general, or just Sufjan Stevens songs. The show transfers to NYC in March, so if that’s your neck of the woods, you should keep an eye out for it.
Other Stuff
Hate to end on a downer, but in case you missed it, I said goodbye to my best boy Spats at the beginning of the month. We had just under 13 years together, full of cat snuggles and mischief and veterinary bills. I miss him terribly and still half expect to see him in his usual spot on the couch when I come in. It’s a real bummer and I want you to go hug your pets, especially your old cranky ones, a little tighter in his memory.
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