january media

[latespring]

Look at this, on time for once! I have other dreamwidth commitments to get to, so I needed this to be done.

Movies

Boys in the Boat (2023)
This is an adaptation of the novel by Daniel James Brown. It's a good time, and well shot. The movie covers the lead up to the 1936 Olympics (being just before WWII, tensions were high), and the journey of one particular University of Washington team towards gold.

(I did keep thinking about the way sports function as a point of national pride throughout this; it's very effective in that vein.)


The Cat Returns (2002)
This was a rewatch with a friend. It's still cute!

Books

Russian Olive To Red King by Kathryn Immonen (2015)

• why I read it: Saw it at work and picked it up.


• thoughts: This is a graphic novel that parallels a couple separated by the Russian wilderness. One of them dissolves at home in her absence, one of them struggles to remember anything of him at all as she struggles through the snow. It was compelling on an art level but the ending is deeply weird in that it splits from the graphic novel style entirely to be a prose poem about an unknown narrator and their obsession with a dead elephant. There is a running panel of photographs of shattered glass that accompany this. I didn't really understand what the author was going for with that.

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (2023)

• why I read it: I really loved the concept and a friend picked it up and said it was good!


• thoughts: This was fun, I liked the house, it was pretty much exactly up my alley in terms of books. It's not really the most surprising story ever, but the dynamics of the main characters were compelling, and I deeply appreciated the house.

System Collapse by Martha Wells (2023)

• why I read it: This is book seven of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series.


• thoughts: This book picks up pretty shortly after the events of book six. Murderbot is still with ART and they're trying to save the people on the planet. I was pretty confused for the first 20% of the book, partially because it's been a while since I read book six. Overall it was an enjoyable read! Not my favorite of these books, but Wells continues to pull threads that make me interested in the development of Murderbot's relationships. I think the next book will need some larger changes to the state of affairs if it wants to keep developing as a series.

Talking on Eggshells: Soft Skills for Hard Conversations by Sam Horn (2023)

• why I read it: Another book I saw at work. I then put it on hold and it took a metric age to come in, we really do not have too many copies of this huh.


• thoughts: This is a corporate-wrapped language book on social skills (how to get what you want and be assertive without people labeling you as Rude). It's interesting from a technical perspective and useful for writing emails, I also will be grabbing some of it for talking to my bosses. The brunt of the book is aimed at corporate speak, but there's a couple useful reminders for regular life too (a lot of it is common sense, but Horn has a knack for phrasing things in ways that make you think--an aptitude that is probably why she's writing this book in the first place).

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein (2020)

• why I read it: I've been reading more about masculinity recently.


• thoughts: Orenstein is writing primarily from a series of interviews she did with boys and men ages 14-22 on the above topics. I found it interesting but not always enlightening. She makes an effort at making the book intersectional, including interviews with trans boys and boys of color, however the majority of the book is focused on breaking down a particular flavor of white masculinity enforced in college and high school. She does acknowledge her limited scope, which I appreciated.
  
  The interviews for the most part circle back (with her analysis) to the violence masculinity enforces, and the way young men are (or often aren't) trying to define something new within those expectations. This is not a particularly ground breaking or hopeful book, but it does present its information in a very approachable manner.

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (2020)

• why I read it: I saw Ash read this back in 2022, and I've had it on my tbr since.


• thoughts: I thought it was kind of amusing that I was reading two books about girls inheriting mysterious houses in the South in one month (Starling House being the other). The comps this book offers are Knives Out meets Cinderella, and I found that to be pretty accurate. Avery, the protagonist, inherits a fortune from a mysterious billionaire who loved puzzles, with zero explanation, and the book follows her trying to figure out why.
  
  It's an Extremely zippy book; Barnes isn't interested in spending a lot of time in any one place, even when it might have served her to set up character dynamics or backstories with more depth. It was a quick read for that reason, and for the same I'm not sure if I'll pick up the second book. The character dynamics were compelling and contained some nuance, but I don't feel like I ever really knew any of them, or really cared when they were in danger.

Lightning at Dinner by Jim Moore (2005)

• why I read it: There's a poem (Teaching the Dog Not to Nip) in this book that I read online, and I wanted to see if the rest of the book lived up.


• thoughts: Okay so the book didn't really live up. This collection is primarily Moore processing his mother's passing, with a section at the end that shifted to broader themes. I didn't really click with Moore's poetic voice, while he has a knack for language, oftentimes his conclusions felt surface level, and without any real twist. He has a lot of poems that kind of said "this thing happened", without much more to say beyond that. The words were beautiful, often, but it felt fleeting and hollow as a collection.

The Magical Language of Others by E. J. Koh (2020)

• why I read it: My local library was doing this book for a book club, and I had already read Koh's book of poetry.


• thoughts: You can tell, reading this, that Koh writes poetry. This is a memoir of hers, framed around her translating her mother's letters to her that she found in a box. (Her parents left her and her brother in America while they returned to work when Koh was fifteen). I don't think this is necessarily The Next Book, it's too scattered for that, and doesn't really come to a point (while a person's life isn't a story and doesn't have a point, I think if you're writing a book about your own life, you're obligated to narrativize to your experiences). The section on her thoughts on poetry was extremely well written.
  
  However, as a book that is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, I think it was well done. The formatting worked against it often times (the letters were not especially well integrated into the book, which made it feel more like a university experiment than a finished manuscript), but on the whole its ending pulled it together, and the writing taken section by section was well written and engaging.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi (2023)

• why I read it: This is John Scalzi's (well published scifi author) latest book, and I admit I read it for the cat on the cover.


• thoughts: I really liked a previous book of Scalzi's (Red Shirts), so my expectations for this were pretty high. This is fine as a book. The concept is that a man inherits being a supervillain from his late uncle, and then deals with the fallout.
  
  It's very light in tone, and the writing is similarly quick to read. I wasn't especially struck by it, but it was not unpleasant. Scalzi spends most of the book poking gentle fun at the idea of supervillains operating in the modern age; it reads like a book someone would really like if they spent time on reddit and TVTropes.

Eat the Rich by Sarah Gailey and Pius Bak (Illustrator) (2021)

• why I read it: I read part of this while compiling a display for work.


• thoughts: This is a graphic novel in four chapters, detailing Joey's introduction to her boyfriend's rich family. Everything super fine and normal! Except that her boyfriend's family also eats their staff. Good luck to her with that one.
  
  This is pretty much the novel you expect it'll be, but the art is snappy, and Gailey and Bak do a great job making the world feel lived in without making it drag. I really liked it! I'd previously read "Magic for Liars" by Gailey, and found it entertaining.

Book Hubris Progress: 10/100

I've enjoyed this so far! I have a bad habit of dropping books halfway through instead of giving them a chance to reach an interesting end, so it's been useful to have a reason to finish them.

TV

Dungeon Meshi (2024)
I watched a couple episodes of this, and it's cute. (About cooking monsters in a dungeon, basically.)

MISC

I've been reading a couple of articles on loneliness/ being online/ the therapy-ization of language here and here!

In Progress

I was reading Harrow the Ninth this month, and finished it the day after the month ended, so I'll have thoughts on that next month. I started Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang as well, and had to return it to the library, so hopefully my hold will come back and I can finish that as well.

I'll probably continue Dungeon Meshi, it's been cute.

Poetry

If Night You Were a City by Adam Wiedewitsch

Bogeymen by Amanda Johnston

Peridot by Richard Scott

Jesus in the Wilderness by Malika Booker

This dark is the same dark as when you close by R. A. Villanueva

The Lord’s Corner by Tyree Daye

Hermaphrodite by Rickey Laurentiis

And You . . . by Jason Allen-Paisant

Montpeyroux Sonnets by Marilyn Hacker

Dead Boy by Mutsuo Takahashi

Interview by Jordan Kapono Nakamura

My face is an iteration, but the song in my belly is ancestral by Mahogany L. Browne

[Song into holiness] by Jay Wright

Music

SCROBBLES: 2,568

SCROBBLES PER DAY: 82

I can't say that I was listening to anything new tbh. I listened to a lot of Skz, and a lot of Ateez. If you've never checked out Cosmo Sheldrake, his album is fun!

Artists:

1. Stray Kids - 466
2. ATEEZ - 437
3. Hozier - 157
4. Paramore - 97
5. Vienna Teng - 85
6. TAEMIN - 65
7. WayV - 60
8. Cosmo Sheldrake - 56
9. Fall Out Boy - 47
10. THE BOYZ - 46

Albums:

1. Unreal Unearth by Hozier - 135
2. THE WORLD EP.FIN : WILL by ATEEZ - 99
3. THE WORLD EP.2 : OUTLAW by ATEEZ - 77
4. SKZ2020 by Stray Kids - 70
5. THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT by ATEEZ - 65
6. SKZ-REPLAY by Stray Kids - 54
7. The Much Much How How and I by Cosmo Sheldrake - 52
8. On My Youth - The 2nd Album by WayV - 49
9. IN LIFE by Stray Kids - 45
10. Dreaming Through The Noise by Vienna Teng - 43

Songs:

1. De Selby (Part 1) by Hozier - 20
2. LALALALA by Stray Kids - 17
3. BOUNCY (K-HOT CHILLI PEPPERS) by ATEEZ - 16
4. Silver Light by ATEEZ - 15
5. Wake Up by ATEEZ - 14
6. Cyberpunk by ATEEZ - 13
7. Emergency by ATEEZ - 13
8. WE KNOW by ATEEZ - 13
9. De Selby (Part 2) by Hozier - 13
10. Eat Your Young by Hozier - 13

Comments

[infrequencies]

I also read The Magical Language of Others this month! I thought her using the letters was interesting, but I agree that it felt disjointed at times, especially when the narrative switched over to talking about her grandmother - though I guess that the thin thread is meant to be language and the things we carry.

Super interested in the Orenstein book! I've read Cinderella Ate My Daughter (which felt dated even when I read it in 2014 - it was published in 2011), and she's def one of the more digestible voices. Other voices in masculinity studies if you haven't gotten to them yet I think would be Michael Kimmel (his talk on privilege often went viral on Tumblr via gifsets, and he has a 2018 book called "Healing From Hate" about American male extremism), and CJ Pascoe, maybe Regina Bradley's Outkast Reader for Blackness and gender? (Still working on identifying something for Asian masculinities that isn't Sun Jung's book from 2011)

I've also had Starling House on Hoopla for weeks now and I need to just read it!

[latespring]

yeah! I liked the overall experience of reading it, it just felt like it needed either another edit or another thread to tie it all together

thank you for the recs, I'm definitely going to check them out!! I have a couple others that I've bought to read that I may get to first (found a copy of "Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility" for cheap, and also need to read this copy of "Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity" that I've had since 2022). TBRs, you know how it goes

I hope you enjoy if you read it!