Books:
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
This highly-lauded-by-non-Janices novel was, for this Janice, total book jail in that I felt trapped trapped TRAPPPPPPPPED by sheer unmitigated boredom yet forced myself to keep going to figure out why on Earth, to hardly mention how on Earth, anyone completed reading this #ratemypoo. Here’s the plot: someone (not named but wink wink we know it’s Shakespeare) marries a psychic who gets everything about the future right except the death of her own child. The end. This book is just awful on like 4000 different levels and the non-Janice accolades once again completely baffle I. The writing is atrocious - go read a page and then imagine suffering through hundreds more of that overblown prose. The characters are non-existent - they're barely ciphers because there's absolutely no story. NOTHING HAPPENS! Nothing! Shakespeare marries a psychic and goes on to write Hamlet - that's it! To the core of my being, I don't understand why anyone would want to write, let alone publish, a fictionalized version of a real person (assuming Shakespeare was a person rather than a collective just tossing that out there) because it’s just so dang lazy like that thing where advertisers put their junk product near a high-end piece of art in order to give it the sheen of classiness, e.g. the American Gothic couple holding Raspberry Yoplaits instead of pitchforks. That’s what this is and apparently it worked on non-Janices because somehow the magic sparkle of “Shakespeare” I guess eliminated for them the need for plot, character, or even anything resembling a “why” as in “why should I care why Shakespeare wrote Hamlet” or “if I’ve never read/seen Hamlet, what is this book about” or “if I have read/seen Hamlet, what is this book about”? I’ll ask it a third time: what is this book about? Remove the Shakespeare reference and what do you have? Less than the zero that’s already there now. It’s a positing of why some dude/dudette/themhom/collective wrote one of a bunch of plays. And… and what? Awful, excruciating, impossible not to DNF - I challenge you!
Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb Series #1) by Tamsyn Muir
This is one of the new crop of SF/Fantasy hybrids, i.e. very fantasy-like but there are spaceships to other worlds - Gene Wolfe is probably the most lauded (and somewhat unreadably confusing but still weirdly good) progenitor of this genre. I need to make a confession in the belief that it will feel much better once I get it off my chest: I was so wrong about this book! I ended up reading it twice. The first time, I DNF’ed at, oh, 15% maybe because, even though I could appreciate the writing, humor, and character-building, I found myself incredibly irritated by a plot contrivance of jamming two people together who would never willingly be together and I felt like I just didn’t want to invest in a story and relationship that was so shoddily constructed. Then, with the passage of time and no doubt several million competition reality shows to mellow that thought plus a fellow Janice mentioning in passing that zie liked it, I decided maybe I’d been, well, not wrong exactly because of course Janice is always right, but rather too quick in my rightness and I went back and re-read it and it was friggin’ awesome! Such a well done book both in and of itself and as the setup to a series (a trilogy I think). I’m writing off my prior DNF’ing as, I don’t know, being in a foul mood at the cancellation of Lovecraft Country, because the characters are strong and the contrivance that bothered me before wasn’t, it turned out, so contrived - I just hadn’t read far enough to understand everything that was going on. And btw I’m not entirely sure I understood everything that was going on even by the end because the world is complex but in a nutshell: there are 9 Houses (planets really) as part of an empire; two representatives of each, one versed in various types of magic and the other in swordplay, are called to a location to essentially solve an incredibly complicated puzzle, the winning team of which will become a kind of immortalish right hand of the Emperor. The world is pretty deep and there are mysteries within the mysteries and when the action takes off, it really flies but really what makes the whole thing work is the writing in the form of the entire story being told from the POV of the swordsperson - the eponymous Gideon - who absolutely does not want to be there and completely hates the House magician she’s forced to team up with (see, me, not so contrived after all but rather the entire character plot in a way). Her attitude and kind of half understanding/half total irritation with the world around her really makes the book work as a whole. She’s not a reluctant hero or an anti-hero but rather plays out like an angry younger sibling who’s dragged along on some stupid quest she has no interest in, and that pouty annoyed character telling what’s really a complicated and plot-driven story makes for a totally engaging read. I like to believe it was the initial DNF’ing that truly allowed me to appreciate this book in which case the way I approached reading it was pure genius - good one, me!
TV/Streaming:
Run the World (Season 1):
This series which, because it focuses on four female friends, is more or less begging - demanding, some would say - a comparison to Sex and the City, is actually just a meaningless, forgettable, atrociously plotted, and simplistically charactered (hmmm) effort to try to regenerate that show's success. The show lacks anything resembling logic and doesn't even bother to make an effort to have the characters make a lick of sense but rather jams them through plots that are, to make matters worse, incredibly dull to hardly mention appallingly misogynistic, which is in large part why I finished watching the show, i.e. to see if each episode could be at least as bad if not worse than the prior episode (spoiler alert: every episode won). This show was created by a woman with what looked like all or mostly female writers but somehow it didn’t make it much beyond the Anti-Suffragettes in terms of its gender politics. For example: we're supposed to believe that a highly ambitious, money-focused, successful, and wealthy woman was simply too oblivious/dumb/disinterested to notice the investment account she shared with her husband was being drained by him. Drained how you might ask in a moment of polite, feigned interest? Oh because he, too, an idiotic plot-slave whose sole purpose - other than looking super hot (the point of most of the men in the show at which they excelled btw and which accounts for the remaining reason I didn’t DNF) - is being a loafer who gave up his high-powered finance career in order to manage a band he saw on the subway platform (or something similar) and then to drain said account so wife could then have some emotional turmoil leading to divorcing him. Beyond its stupidity, it’s a fairly insulting ancient gender-roled notion that men handle money even when it's the women who are earning it, kinda like in the 1800s and prior when women lost all property and inheritance rights the second they married.
And, sure, the writers COULD have had it make character sense, even lame sense, by, say, setting up a character who's constantly in debt and pays no attention to her finances despite being the breadwinner etc. etc. but instead they just decided to degrade the character they'd already established who was honestly pretty degraded even without that (she’s the Samantha of the group and I’ll just leave it at that). It’s some classic old-school misogyny garbed in, in the showrunner’s mind I guess, sexual empowerment, but bottom line is for a show supposedly about the travails of four successful women, the A-plots are Bechdel fails across the board. These are the plotlines that carry us across the season: one’s getting married, one’s getting divorced, one’s reconnecting with her ex, and one’s moving in with her (super fucking hot) boyfriend. Other than an occasional C-plot, the entire show revolves around the women’s feelings for the men, what they want out of the men, what the men are up to, why the men did whatever they just did, how the men will respond to whatever the women are doing/thinking/feeling in response to what the men just did, etc. In fact, the only character we spend time with in her moments of non-man plot are in a career plot about how she, a writer with an unsuccessful book behind her, has sunk to a low of writing pfaff for an entertainment mag, i.e. more degradation in the service of well I don’t know. Again, there could have been an interesting character story about a principled woman who sells out and, even worse, fails then has to figure out who she is, but… no, though mercifully her man-plot guy is, per the bar set by this show, crazy, climate-change-inducing hot (it can’t be said often enough).
There's nothing in this series about career, reaching for dreams, ambition, self-fulfillment, no plots that involve anything other than gabbing about dudes and you know what? Sex and the City did that way better and at least has the excuse of being created in the '90s to justify its current cultural anachronisms. This show, by contrast, premiered in 2021 and as to my knowledge a misogynystic writing compulsion isn’t a side-effect of COVID, the creators really can’t blame their failure on that either.
Line of Duty (Seasons 1-6):
So I had a very unexpected - to moi - trajectory with this British cops-in-internal-affairs 6-ish episodes per season crime show. There was nothing about the first season or really even, say, half of the second, that would ever make me say that this is one of the twistiest, best-guest-acted, edge of your seat cliffhanger binge-y classy popcorn shows I've seen but there you have it. It is, and this most recent season was no exception. It's not that the first season or two are bad; it's that they're perfectly fine but absolutely nothing special and kind of by the numbers - here are some potentially corrupt cops; here's the investigative unit infiltrating them; here's the murder or whatever that the bad cops are trying to cover up etc. etc. I mean, sure, decent internal affairs cop show but whatever. Then in season 2 they cast an actress and wrote a part for her that really began to make the show compelling because it was very effective - and she was very good at - manipulating your expectations of what was really going on (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here if that sounds kind of vague). Each season of the show upped the bar from there by leaps and bounds and cast fantastic actors as each season’s different guest lead under investigation; plus there's an uber-story that starts in season 1 and continues all the way through which kind of crosses paths with the main plot of each individual season. Thus, even though the first season is just okay, if you're going to watch, I'd say you need to watch from the beginning and trust me, once the show finds its footing, it rips. I'm not saying it's the greatest show ever, but I am saying it's a completely fun and eminently binge-y piece of entertainment.
Movies:
The Incredible Hulk (Marvel Universe #2) - This is the second in my quest to watch all the Marvel movies and I'm not entirely clear how it relates to Iron Man but maybe I'll understand later? The plot, as far as gummy-brain could gather, is Ed Norton, a scientist of some kind or maybe a professor - whatever, he’s a genius - gets injected with something that does something plus the words “gamma rays” that makes him get big and hulky when his heart rate goes above 200 bpm which, nothing personal, seems somewhat unlikely given Ed’s noodly frame and making it difficult for your average Fitbit or Apple Watch wearer to believe he’s crossing 110 no matter how scared he is or how fast he’s running. The 200 bpm thing also precludes him from having sex or even getting aroused as apparently a 1/8th hardon is, for him, the cardio equivalent of a normal human doing, say, 40 decline box jump burpees followed by a 100 foot rope climb with an 80 lb. kettlebell strapped to their back then 5 minutes of sand wrestling with a live pig 4x through. This inability to even be marginally aroused makes him, in addition to big, green, emo-haired with a chunky, floppy bang and, when garbed, wearing a t-shirt torn in the jagged cut preferred by the likes of Fred Flintstone and Shia LaBoeuf, the world’s most muscly incel - and where’s that subreddit?
At any rate, at some point in this process he flees his military/academe/wherever-he-is to go into hiding in the only way left to someone in his position on the entire planet, i.e. working at a bottling factory in Brazil. Now the Gummy Squad cannot say with 100% certainty that the way the military tracked him down was by backtracing the supply chain because someone got sick after Ed Norton BLED INTO A FUCKING SODA BOTTLE, but the Squad felt this attack on our food supply was totally uncalled for especially as the Squad had just torn its way through a bag of BBQ Fritos, multiple Dove Bar Minis, and some random piece of cake of unclear provenance that was found sitting in the back of the freezer, and couldn’t help thinking any of them could’ve been bled on at at any time in their creation and thanks a lot for that, Bruce Banner!
The good news is that was all soon swept away when the military, Liv Tyler, bigger gamma-poisoned baddie Tim Roth, and I’m pretty sure William Hurt showed up to blow a bunch of things up, at which point gummy-brain no longer had the neuronal bandwidth to focus on food as it, instead, had to spend all its energy reminding itself that the insanely cartoony big shirtless green thing being hit on by Liv Tyler, stomping angrily yet somehow also with what can only be described as a bouncy jollity around the city it was busily destroying, and being punched nonstop by an enormous lizard-y Tim Roth wasn’t, in fact, Shrek.