Books
The Dead Zone by Stephen King. I enjoyed this relatively short book, and James Franco’s reading of it was exactly right. I could see him playing the early 20’s, earnest-but-slightly-goofy protagonist. As a part of a complete Stephen King read-through, I’d say it’s a quite tolerable offering, but I don’t think I’d recommend it otherwise. It includes one of King’s hysterical middle-aged evangelical woman characters, offensive on several levels, which I can only half accept as a standard horror trope. There’s a new show out based on this, which I might like better than the book.
The Long Walk by Stephen King. I think this might technically be some kind of snuff fiction?! It’s in the Battle Royale/Hunger Games lineage of young people dyeing until only one is left. Analysis by the “Just King Things” podcast highlighted some sort of homoerotic tragic themes that I didn’t pick up in reading. The best thing about it was the very quiet worldbuilding that I got to read between the lines, the more compelling for only being hinted at.
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. This is my first Sanderson-standalone, and it was just delightful. Think Princess Bride sort of tone, without the angst. The fantasy world was super interesting, the main character brave and relatable, and the plot genuinely took me by surprise several times (though that is not hard to do). I put it on Stringbean’s Kindle and she loved it as well. Now maybe I should go read the Kingkiller Chronicles again now that he’s written a few more volumes…
Echo Burning by Lee Child. I’ve been interspersing other reads with the Jack Reacher series. Thrillers like this are my literary potato chips. How one man with a very particular set of skills keeps getting into very particular situations is what we don’t talk about. Each book ends up with a specific sense of place that I really enjoy, and this one is set in an isolated part of Texas. Child absolutely never lets up telling you how hot it is all the time, which made me feel good about being curled up in bed in arctic mid-April. What follows is a mystery of murder and lies and racism that kept me guessing. I do like this.
Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. I put a bunch of Stephenson’s books on hold after my brother-in-law told me he was his favourite author. Cryptonomicon broke my brain last year but in a fun way. Snow Crash has so far been both more outlandish and a bit easier to follow, though Stephensons books are always a bit dense with ideas. Plus there’s the brain-tangle of reading an older book that had amazing technolocial foresight, but couldn’t imagine wifi. The result is a feeling of retro-futurism alternate reality that wasn’t intended by the author, but I accept it as part of the vibe. There’s an anthropological slant to this one that is completely implausible, but it’s something I can grasp much better than all the computery stuff, so I’m clinging to it. I haven’t actually finished this one because I got really distracted by the next few but I’m sure I’ll get through it. Also, this book is probably the origin of the term Metaverse?
Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park by Conor Knighton. I go through phases where I obsessively dream of visiting all the national parks in both the US and Canada. There are spreadsheets of course. Finally it occurred to me that there are probably people who have already done this, through whom I could live vicariously. Knighton’s book is a really lovely combination of documentary and memoir (because no adult manages to go on a journey like this without a Reason). He groups the parks thematically rather than geographically, covers tons of topics, and gives lots of specific flavour. Read with feeling by the author. I was sad when this one was over.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trial by Cheryl Strayed. I borrowed this one because Knighton talked about having read it while he was on an off-grid backpacking trip in Isle Royale National Park. This is a much more memoir-heavy story of Cheryl’s trip up the Pacific Crest Trail, back in 1995. She was 26, newly divorced, recovering from addiction, and grieving her mother and the breakup of her family. This is backpacking from a different time, when books, payphones, cash, and hitchhiking hadn’t yet been replaced by internet guides, cell phones, GPS, and Uber. Beautiful and sad, I can see why it took almost twenty years after the trip for her to put this story to print.
Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgeman. I only know Hodgeman as a podcaster, and didn’t realize he was A Little Bit of a Big Deal in comedy and writing. Of course, he read it himself. This is basically a memoir about midlife crisis and white upper-middle-class guilt. Considering that the traveling fixation that led to the previous two books is basically a form of midlife crisis, this was a gentle landing to read next. Hodgeman is a pretty super storyteller. Though I wonder if the main trait of being a good storyteller is having a lot of bizarre things happen to you. His basic incompetance at homeownership was deeply relatable.
Movies
We decided to swap our Netflix subscription for Disney+ for a season, so before the former ran out, we were motivated to squeeze in as many Anime films as we could. Rather than complete the non-Miyazaki Ghibli catalog, we took some wild swings based on descriptions, and found some treasures.
Tale of Princess Kaguya. OK, this is Ghibli, but it is quite different from their usual. This is a retelling of a traditional Japanese folk tale in a minimalist hand-drawn art style. Like many traditional folk stories, this one is pretty sad, but there’s a lot of growth and beauty in it. Not at all surprised it was an Oscar nominee.
Cosmic Princess Kaguya. This is the film the kids actually wanted to see, but I made them watch the first one so we could have some context. It takes that same tale and slams it full-force into modern Japan, with a Metaverse slapped onto it. The first two thirds of the film are boring and repetitive with a lot of whining in a weird codependent relationship. Then the last third does the best fakeout I have ever seen in a film and goes BONKERS hard into an ending that had me laughing with delight at how out there it was. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but it’s sure unique.
Child of Kamiari Month. This is an introspective story that has a young woman traveling through Japan on a magical mission, filling a role that her mysteriously disappeared mother had filled before her. This includes the emotional beats you would rather expect, but it’s well done. I think I’d get more out of this if I knew more about Japan! At least there was no morose young man in this film.
Bubble. I found this film thoroughly uncompelling. The parkour sequences were cool-looking, but the world-building was empty, the moody male protagonist was vacuous, and the manic-pixie-dreamgirl was a nothingburger. As empty, I suppose, as a bubble. Empty enough to make me feel clever about that obvious yucky simile.
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop. Another coming-of-age drama with a moody male and bubbly girl, but otherwise completely different. It all takes place in a mall, during one summer of these young peoples’ lives. The girl is a young influencer who is overwhelmingly self-conscious about her new braces, while the boy deals with the complexities of his life by writing haiku. Both are genuinely good kids with real issues, who come together to solve a little mystery for an elder. Far from vacuous, these bubbles reminded me of what it felt like to be a young person doing their best.
My Oni Girl. The last entry in our anime binge was another film about two young people, but this time the moody young man has weird boundary issues with his friends. He befriends a needy girl who turns out to be a demon, but demons are just a different kind of people. And you can be born one, or you can turn into one by repressing your feelings – which of course this boy is doing in spades. It’s a funky tale with some expected beats and some wildly unexpected beats. There are some deeply relatable emotions baked into this one.
Oppenheimer. This is the last entry (until The Odyssey comes out this summer) in Jared’s and my very slow watch-through of the films of Christopher Nolan. We saw it in theatres during the summer of Barbenheimer. It left me wanting to read American Prometheus, the book the film is based on. Nolan is ultimately sympathetic to Oppenheimer as a person, despite his numerous flaws, and that makes me want to know more. This is a masterpiece film. Emily Blunt takes the cake for me.
The Loveless. Following in the footsteps of my favourite movie podcast, “Blank Check,” I’m starting in on the films of Kathryn Bigelow. She codirected this first outing, which captures a moment in the life of a young biker gang passing through rural Georgia. It has the sort of romance of a biker gang story, but portrays them all as genuinely nasty people. I wonder what actual bikers think of it. Willem Defoe’s first film role is as the star in this film, and gosh it’s weird to see the weirdest grin in film on such a young face.
Near Dark was Bigelow’s first solo directing project, and it’s a vampire movie that never uses the word vampire. It’s got those wandering-around-Oklahoma Twister vibes to it. Lance Henrikson and Bill Paxton are both in it, and my one laugh-out-loud moment is when they’re in a town and you see a theatre in the back of a shot that’s showing Aliens. (Not only were these two actors in that film; Bigelow was at this time married to James Cameron, director of Aliens.) It’s a genre film that does a lot with a little. It doesn’t really earn its happy ending, but it was campy enough that maybe it fit?
Blue Steel is a film about Bigelow being a woman in a man’s industry. Which she portrays by having a young Jamie Lee Curtis play a cop in NYC. I loved this movie. You watch the beginning and know exactly where it’s going – but then it arrives halfway through, and the rest of the film is how a simple problem is made horrifically complex by being a woman. This movie bombed because of some stupid stuff with the studio going bankrupt or something, but golly it’s excellent.
Point Break. This is a classic that I’d only heard of because of Iron Man calling Thor “Point Break” in some Marvel movie. I’d classify this film as “high bromance.” Keanu Reaves as an FBI learning to surf in order to go undercover and find a gang of bank-robbing surfers. Patrick Swayze as a surfing guru genuinely convinced of his righteousness as his world melts down around him, revealing the terrible person he is. The plot is a roller coaster that jumbles together dudes being awesome with dudes making stupid mistakes. It is, perhaps, nihilistic in the end, but it sits with an ambiguity that feels so, so right. Plus that shot of Keanu jumping out of a plane is ICONIC. Going to talk Jared into watching this one with me.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. My friend kindly rented this film as soon as it came out on streaming, and had a bunch of us over with our kids to watch it. It was a great party. I kinda watched about two thirds of it? Jared and I played the heck out of the first Mario Galaxy game a decade and a half ago, and I appreciated too all the references to Mario Wonder and Mario Odyssey that our kids enjoy today. But like… it still didn’t quite feel like a movie? I felt like this about the first new Mario movie. There’s somehow nothing in it that makes me care. Maybe if I’d really watched it I would like it more? I suspect not. That’s OK – despite liking the games, this really wasn’t made for me.
Hoppers is the new Pixar film that bounced out on streaming a couple weeks ago, and we were stoked to watch it last Friday. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it turned out to be a really strange movie about environmentalism – or about personal loss disguised as environmentalism, running into the abject greed and lies that we know is behind corporate interests and politics these days. This film was at its best when it leaned hard into being completely demented and nonsensical. The problems depicted were real, and in our real world feel insoluble, so the solution presented (because it’s a kids movie) were of course contrived. How could they not be? We have to imagine a better future for our kids, even if that imagination is weak because of how bad things are. So this movie was really weird, but honest. I’m really curious what others think about it.
Video Games
Titanium Court. Yeah man, I bought a second brand new game this year! I think this is a record! I mentioned it in my essay about knitting and video games, so I won’t wax too poetic. Chris Plante of the “Post Games” podcast brought the games creator, AP Thompson, onto his podcast to talk about it. Then Plante started a “book group” on his patreon page. So of course I had to jump in there – I’m really enjoying the super-niche gaming compunity that is the Post Games Patreon. Anyways, this game stole my heart. It’s a game that actively wants you to stop playing it. It’s a game where you discover that you, the human person playing the game, are the antagonist. It’s a game about killing what you love to spend more time with it. It’s a game that respects those of us who are suckers for match-three games by turning it into a complex strategy mechanic. It answered a deep question I had about how video game achievements make me feel, even if I find myself occasionally incapable of acting on the answer. It’s a really good game that hates you a little, like all good pretentious art. It’s the first game I’ve played that inspired me to write a thank-you letter to its creator.
Dave the Diver. Jared picked this one! I had heard about it, but he was the one who really wanted to scoop it up when it went on sale. This has been our evening couples game. You play a diver hunting for fish in a weird magical cenote that changes its layout almost every day. So there’s a roguelike aspect to it, one dive to another, but lots of progression. In the evening, you serve at a sushi restaurant! So Jared plays the dives, and I play the restaurant. The diving is sufficiently interesting that I’m motivated to follow it (unlike when he plays RPGs which I want to follow but struggle to stay engaged with), and because of the sushi bar, I have some input in our strategy. There are lots of beautiful underwater mysteries too, and some hilariously colourful character; nobody is boring in this world. We’re many hours in and there are still new areas and mechanics being introduced. Plus, the weird 8-bit + 3D minecraft aesthetic is gorgeous.
Blue Prince. This was last year’s indie darling, and took over Jared’s and my evenings for a solid 4+ months. We rolled credits and found tons of secrets together, but finally petered out after getting 100 stars. I’d tried Curse Mode and Dare Mode, but found them too hard to bother with. Recently I picked it up again, because while Curse Mode is brutally hard, the days are also really short, which made it easy to pick up and put down in between things. Well, I got sucked in, and in short bursts I FINALLY BEAT CURSE MODE! Lemme tell you, that was an unbeatable dopamine hit. Stringbean came up with an excellent trick to get good Dares, so I’m progressing through that mode as well. I don’t know if I have it in me to try for the Day One trophy, but I might try. This game is still so good. Russ Frushtick of “The Besties” is finally playing it too, so it’s elsewhere in my consciousness again.
Thanks for coming along for this run-down! I listen to so many reviews and critiques that I need to have my own little contribution to the conversation, and I sure appreciate that there are any humans on this earth who would give a few of their life-minutes to read my thoughts. I hope the formatting wasn’t too bad; I at least made sure all the images were .jpg this time.
How about you? As spring has sprung, what stories have met you?
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