Books:
Witchmark (Kingston Cycle Book 1) by C.L. Polk
Despite thinking I wouldn’t be interested in this fantasy novel due to not really liking the setting - a not-England after not-WWI - I ended up absolutely loving it. I thought the writing was great; it’s breezy with a focus on character and a plot that really built up steam as it went. I’m not going into plot details because they’re spoilerable but I’ll just say there was family drama, politics, some romance, a clear sense of the world, and an ending that both wrapped up this first book while setting up the sequel. I’ve read enough genre books at this point to say it takes some genuine skill to write more than just a page-turning plot (though I’ll take that with mediocre writing - I’m looking at you, Andy Weir! - over plotless “voice” novels any day thanks); it doesn’t matter that the genre of this particular book is fantasy as an author still has to make the reader understand the character motivations and entanglements enough such that you’re invested in the story, and by that metric I think this author is very skillful. I pretty much inhaled the whole thing, didn't see a few of the plot twists coming, and will definitely be reading the sequels.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
I’ma tell you up front: I’m conflicted about this one. This book is a piece of contemporary fiction that tracks four friends and their trials and tribulations (many many many of those) as they and their relationships with each other change. The source of the conflict is that the stuff the author does to her characters in graphic extensive (the book is long) detail is painful to the point that this Janice began resenting it, not for the imagery really but because when you read pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of something - and not the first something btw - truly horrific happening to a character plus all the aftermath of that something to hardly mention the setup and then even more somethings, well you kind of start asking why the author is doing this. To prove she can? I mean, yeah, she can absolutely write. But incident after incident after incident in which she crushes the life and dreams of her characters, it all begins to feel kind of self-indulgent. Or - and this is why I’m conflicted - is it not self-indulgence but rather a compulsion on the part of author, i.e. she couldn’t stop herself, like she needed to do this to her characters, to write out all the stuff that happened, to play out every psychological consequence because, I don’t know, that’s who she is as an artist? And that’s where I get stuck with whether or not this is a good book. My reading of it was a cycle of (a) never wanting to pick it up then (b) picking it up anyway and being completely engrossed before putting it down then (c) repeat. If you told me the author wrote this book because she had all these thoughts inside her and needed to purge them, I’d believe you. I’d equally believe you if you told me she did it because she was in a writing class and discovered this was the kind of writing her teacher thought was deep and encouraged her to explore which she did, not because she cared about what she writing one way or the other, but because she wanted an A. Either one seems valid. I don’t know how I feel about this book because I can’t tell whether I was emotionally manipulated by a calculated author with a facility for writing torture porn or whether I read a genuinely sad novel, but the fact that I can’t tell is what also makes it impossible for me to dis it. Even though every time I picked it up, I was sure I’d be bored, I never was - the pages really flew by - and authorial calculation or genuine writing, either way this book sticks in my mind. So… do with that what you will!
TV/Streaming:
Save Me (Season 1):
This is a British investigative-y drama about a guy with a teenage daughter he's never met and what happens when she gets kidnapped and he reconnects with her mother while they try to find her. The strength of this show and the thing that makes it a big step up from others of its ilk is the unpleasant self-absorbed relentlessness of the lead character; he’s someone who is unreliable in many ways and has left a big mess in his wake (and continues to leave more messes throughout the season) and seems either oblivious or uncaring as to how his behavior affects those around him - all of which was interesting to watch, especially given the stakes. Despite being unappealing, I found myself wanting him to succeed because the character was written and acted in such a way that I understood the humanity, guilt, and desire to save his daughter beneath all the selfish surface behavior. It takes a bit for the plot to rev up, and I wouldn’t say its main point is to be a thriller or anything (though there’s plenty of that element - an investigation, run-ins with the police, etc.); rather I’d say it’s a drama, a kind of character study, about someone trying to do this one thing right but incapable of doing so without being himself for good or ill. Saying that, the plot does play out in some surprising ways, but the real story is about a person whose messy past is becoming his messy present. I ended up liking it significantly more than I thought I would based on the first episode and will definitely be watching season 2.
ZeroZeroZero:
This is a limited/mini series about a side of the drug trade you don't normally see - literally how it's wholesaled and transported. The story tracks three intersecting plotlines: a Mexican cartel (with some typical Mexican cartel problems) purchasing a huge pile of drugs, the Italian mafia (with some typical Italian mafia problems) selling the drugs, and the Americans who are middlemanning the sale. I’m sure the Americans had some typical American middleman problems too, but I had a hard time focusing on anything in those sections other than Andrea Riseborough's hair choice which was the highlight of the series for me in every punny and actual sense. The show itself is a perfectly fine drug thriller over its 8 or so episodes… no actually I’m not done talking about Andrea Riseborough’s hair. I was riveted by it in every scene she was in and never tired of studying it from all angles and actually found myself looking forward to her entrances, head tilts, the lighting and how it played out on her hair, and her occasional running or fast walks so I could dig deeper into what was going on with it as it moved. Basically this is a decent enough mafia/cartel show elevated to greatness by hair.
Movies:
God's Own Country - This is a kinda arty (read: slow) movie about a closeted gay sheep herder way the fuck up there in Scotland and an affair he has with a migrant worker. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but - arty part here - the film was more about mood and silence and the unspoken, and the component that made the film engaging was the will-he-or-won’t-he interior tension of the lead character’s struggle with his sexuality. Despite its pace, I liked this movie; the performances were good and the scenery was cool to look at, and I liked the way the film placed sexuality firmly in the context of self-acceptance rather than cultural/local/familial acceptance (I mean there was that too but it wasn’t thematically central (at least not for the Scottish guy)) because it made the film seem less about sexuality and more something universal about facing anything within oneself that one dislikes and trying to shift one’s life as a result. You'd have to be in the mood for something slow and sheepy as well as be someone who doesn’t think too much about the last time characters bathed before having sex but if you’re all those things, you’ll probably like this.
Yes! 000! That HAIR! I too was so hypnotized that I often lost the plot thread because I was so deep into an existential contemplation of that ‘do. What was it attempting to SAY about the character? Clearly a choice, so a viewer must dig deep to find its meaning. Was it a cry for (lesbian) help? A response to her marginalization within the family business due to her being the sole female but yet the most ballsy in the outfit? In the course of the time span of the story, as drugs were being moved across continents, would the hair grow, become unruly, reflect the increasing chaos the character was dealing with, or would it stay unflappable (even in Mogadishu!) bulletproof, speedboat-wind proof, after-sex-bedhead-proof— a few episodes in, I became so deeply entranced and protective of the hair that I found myself rooting for the character; if she was killed or harmed by any of the baddies, we would lose that hair, and the thought of that ‘do being defeated by something as mundane as international drugs transshipment created a level of dramatic tension so extreme that the entire series seemed lifted on the strands of that head-helmet. A special award should be created for Dramatic Achievement by a Head of Hair just to acknowledge this cinematic/narrative feat!
But Jan, I think you’re not giving the rest of the series enough credit. Yes, the hair’s the thing (to quote the Bard) but I was equally riveted by the moral questions the no -hair aspects of the show posed, namely, if you don’t “technically” know you are specifically shipping drugs, and your business agreement is to simply get something moved from Point A to Point B and you have contracted to do exactly that, then isn’t the most important thing to be reliable, and isn’t the “don’t ask/don’t tell” something of a moral shield? I like the complexity of the arrangement, that a nominally legit shipping company that moves a wide variety of goods around the world, is squeezed between two criminal enterprises, and though they certainly have a damn good guess of their part in a criminal enterprise, being simply the clueless-by-choice middleman let’s them pretend they’re not part of the global drugs problem. The series for me was a slow-burn unmasking of corporate greed and deniability; that if you don’t know for a 100% certainty what you’re moving (even tho you do) are you committing wrong? Where does legal wrong stop and moral wrong begin? And to successfully parse and navigate this moral-criminal minefield, is helmet hair the ultimate decider?