Quick Reviews and Stuff: July

Hi. It’s been a busy month but I still managed to churn through more stuff than I’d expected to. How was your July? Was it fun? Did you go on a cool vacation? See a good movie? Tell me what you’ve been up to!

Books

1. One True Outcome, K.D. Casey — Sometimes when I’m tired or busy or can’t focus on meatier books or just want to read something fun, I dive back into romance novels, and this one finally came in on my library holds queue after a bunch of Twitter friends recommended it. It’s a romance story between a veteran baseball player and a rookie, and I’m absolutely a sucker for that trope, and even moreso for the “my body is breaking down and I am getting old but I don’t know who I am if I’m not an Athlete” trope so it’s like this story was made just for me. I loved Mack and Jamie’s journey together and I loved this book.

2. The Sleepless, Victor Manibo — Set in a future version of our world where a pandemic renders a sizeable chunk of the population “sleepless”, AKA they have no physical need for sleep anymore. Lead character Jamie, a journalist, gets caught up in a mystery when his boss turns up dead. Overall the book was fine. I liked the plot — I love mysteries, I love a good whodunnit, I still love pandemic stories — but I felt like I had a really hard time connecting to this one emotionally, and I never really got sucked in to the point where I’d just sit and read all night. I actually thought the last few chapters/sections were more interesting than a lot of the whodunnit that was the majority of the book. It was entertaining but not one that I’ll think of too much after returning it to the library.

3. Unwritten Rules, K.D. Casey — Dipping back into romance, this one focusing on two catchers who develop a relationship that implodes when one won’t do the work he needs to do to be comfortable coming out, even just to friends. (That’s not a spoiler, that’s in the blurb.) It is a bit of a journey to get to the happily ever after for Zach and Eugenio. Zach can be incredibly frustrating as he struggles to overcome his fears of coming out and struggles to be a good partner to Eugenio. The book was sometimes hard for me to follow because it skips back and forth in time between the past, when the guys first met, to the present, when they’re seeing each other again for the first time in years. The ending felt a bit rushed, although I wonder if I’d feel that way if the story had been told chronologically? Not sure. Anyway, this was fine and I’ll definitely be reading Casey’s other books but I wish this was just a little bit better.

4. Scythe, Neal Shusterman — YA dystopia set in a future world where humans have conquered death and are all functionally immortal, so people are appointed as scythes, a role that exists outside of the law to end lives at random to keep the population under control. The premise is startling and very well executed (pun not intended) and I generally enjoyed Shusterman’s writing style. I did raise an eyebrow at the “the algorithm that determines everything about our lives has no bias and is perfect and infallible” — can’t wait to see if that angle comes back to haunt anyone by the end. There were a few aspects I wasn’t wild about (your standard YA love story angle) but overall I loved the worldbuilding and the intrigue and trying to figure out what was going to happen next. This was an engaging read and I’ve already put the next book in the series on hold.

5. The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller — I originally read this more than 10 years ago and revisited it for a book club. I love it slightly less than I did back then, probably largely due to the fact that in 2023, the wealth of choices when it comes to fiction centering queer characters is much greater than it was in 2012. Miller’s retelling of the story of Achilles and Patroclus gives us the latter as our narrator. If you’re a mythology purist, you’ll probably be angry a lot as I understand (from 10+ years of Goodreads reviews) that she’s changed some things to suit her needs. If you’re like me, with a truly pathetic amount of mythology knowledge, you won’t care at all. (Side note: thinking about all the other media I’d have caught foreshadowing on if I had a stronger mythology knowledge base. Knowing Protesilaus as the first of the Greeks to die would have set off some very specific alarm bells while reading Gideon the Ninth, for example.) Miller has a very lyrical way with words that carries you along through the story and the last few chapters still have the power to make me cry.

6. Babel, R. F. Kuang — I understand why people loved this book. I understand why people hated it. I’m mostly meh on it. It’s basically 600 pages of tormenting characters of color with the racist society that they live in — is all that trauma porn necessary? Kuang invented a magic system that is interesting but this story also could have been set in the real world and very little would have had to change. There’s very little nuance; Kuang loves to explain everything to you. You don’t get to read between the lines and just when you think you might be left to extrapolate a little on your own she just tells you anyway. And yet — I sped through this book in just a handful of days. It’s very readable, for something that spends long stretches explaining the intricacies of language and translation and etymology to you. I don’t have any sort of linguistics background, aside from a general enjoyment of studying languages for fun, so the thought exercises on what makes a good translation, and is translation doing violence to the original source, and is there any way to do an accurate translation that doesn’t lose something along the way — all of that was fascinating to me. The book is ambitious and you can tell Kuang is clearly knowledgeable and passionate about language, which comes through very clearly. Ultimately though this just Wasn’t Really For Me.

7. Girls Like Girls, Hayley Kiyoko — YA novel by singer Hayley Kiyoko, based loosely on her music video of the same name. If I read this book when I was 17, I would have loved it — it captures the messy moody nature of being a confused teen very well. Instead I’m 40 now and am just exhausted by the drama and hijinks these kids get up to. I do appreciate Kiyoko letting her teen girl characters actually be horny. Hormones are real! Also, excerpts from Livejournal entries appear throughout the book, making me feel absolutely like the cryptkeeper here. Do teens even know what Livejournal is? Is there a reason this book takes place in 2006 aside from the fact that it’s when the author was a teenager? Overall I didn’t love this but I’m not the target audience so my opinion is irrelevant here.

8. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel — A classic in terms of autobiographies, Bechdel’s graphic novel looks at her upbringing, grappling with her father’s death, which is intertwined with her own coming out. Bechdel connects dots as an adult that she couldn’t while she was a child/teen/etc. as she tries to make sense of her childhood; you can practically feel the realizations being made as you progress through the book. I particularly liked her chronicling of the evolution of her childhood diary — the flip-flopping from being confessional to elusive, dramatic to matter-of-fact. You could look through my own diaries and find much of the same cycles of obfuscation and pouring out of secrets.

Movies

1. Mission: Impossible — Belatedly, I’m trying to watch all of these before going to see the newest one. The 1996-ness of this one really shines through, particularly in the stunts and visual effects. It’s fine, I guess? It’s hard when you’re comparing it to the more recent installments. There’s a lot of truly obnoxious camera angle choices, too. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of Ethan Hunt over the course of approximately eight thousand hours of movies. The scene where he has to be lowered into that computer room still slaps, though.

2. Stoker — I love that Matthew Goode started his career in teen-y rom-coms and now just plays weird little freaks. Visually gorgeous (as if anything Park Chan-wook works on would be anything less), hot in a way that makes you sort of uncomfortable afterwards, challenging. I’d like to watch it again sometime just to wallow in the visuals of it all.

3. Mission: Impossible 2 — I know this is a John Woo movie but there is so much slow motion. So many shots of the same thing from different angles. So many slow slides across a floor while shooting guns. I get that the original vision for this franchise was to have different directors to give different feels (like TV episodes!) to each installment but man I can’t wait until I get a couple of movies in and Christopher McQuarrie takes over as director. There are some neat action sequences in this but overall I like the M:I movies better when they’re about Tom Cruise doing dumb stunts and less about trying to turn Ethan Hunt into James Bond.

4. Barbie — Look, this was an incredible time. Highly recommend seeing it with an audience full of people who are laughing until they’re crying just like you are. From a critical standpoint — yes, the pacing isn’t great and it’s heavy-handed and I think tries to do Too Much for its short run time — but I pretty much laughed for two hours straight. Margo Robbie and Ryan Gosling are perfectly cast and their performances make up for any script weaknesses. The set design and costumes are absolutely fantastic and are alone worth the price of admission.

5. Oppenheimer — No, I did not do the double feature; that is too much movie and too much emotional whiplash. This is a very good movie weakened only by the typical Christopher Nolan indulgence of making a story more convoluted than it needed to be. Cillian Murphy should rack up awards for playing the supremely haunted J. Robert Oppenheimer and he will deserve every one of them. The usage of sound, or at times lack thereof, is fantastic — think, particularly, in the Trinity test scene, the long lack of the sound of the explosion, letting the scene linger in near-silence, until the sound all comes in at once. Just fantastic.

6. Mission: Impossible III — First of all, I’d like to fight whoever keeps changing the naming scheme of these movies. Anyway, after the aggressively mediocre second installment, this one picks up several years in the future, with Ethan Hunt retired from the field and getting engaged and if you thought “oh wow surely that is a thing they wouldn’t just drop on you at the beginning of a movie with no context” then you haven’t met a J.J. Abrams story. Philip Seymour Hoffman is fantastically creepy as the villain, and the introduction of Simon Pegg’s Benji helps move the franchise into being something with a little more character and charm rather than just a straight action movie.

Oh the Places I’ve Gone!

So I got in my car and drove in an enormous lopsided figure eight around the midwest. Over to Iowa, up to Wisconsin, then down through the south — Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas — before heading home. I did it, as I usually do, in service of meeting up with some friends in various cities and seeing my favorite band. The final tally?

• 16 days

• 11 states crossed

• 3,145 miles driven (plus an additional 793-mile side quest)

• 11 Mountain Goats shows

• 9 songs I’d never heard live before (yes I have a spreadsheet)

• 1 barn in the middle of nowhere

• 1 excessive heat warning

• 1 late night rooftop hotel pool

• 1 shelter-in-place due to tornado warning

Here’s some pictures from the adventure:

What’s Next?

• I continue to make my way through the Mission: Impossible movies so I can see the newest one. Yes, I know this is unnecessary but I’m going to do it anyway.

• August is going to be a big month for me hanging out at the Music Box Theatre here — they’ve got the 2023 Cat Video Fest which I certainly am almost contractually obligated to attend, they’re doing a 70mm screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they’ll also be playing Passages, which stars Franz Rogowski (who was fantastic in one of my top movies of 2022, Great Freedom) and Ben Whishaw (just always good) that I’ve been looking forward to seeing.

• Jacqueline Carey revisits her Kushiel’s Dart series with a book looking at the events of the first book through Joscelin’s point of view, which I slammed the preorder button on as soon as I knew it existed; it landed in my mailbox today and I am immediately dropping any other book I had in progress to read this instead.