Books:
Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Series #1) by Steven Erickson
So I need to start off by saying that this first doorstopper fantasy book in a doorstopper fantasy decapod is both completely genius and completely infuriating. In fact there's many a Janice out there to whom I've rec'ed this book who gave up out of sheer frustrated boredom and I honestly can't say I blame those Janices. This book is extremely difficult to get into and remains at least moderately difficult through its entirety. I actually ended up reading it twice and really it wasn’t all that much easier the second go round. Okay so now you know that. Also know this: it's brilliant. The very thing that makes it so difficult is what makes it so good in a way. The author throws you into a world and explains absolutely nothing and just assumes that over time you'll figure it out. You're all trees, no forest, though you do get occasional glimpses of the forest which always, for me at least, elicited a satisfied aha. The writing isn’t confusing to be confusing or confusing because the author’s confused; it’s confusing because the world is so rich and clear and detailed to the author that, rather than offering exposition, he tells you the story from inside of it. The story of this book, which tracks multiple characters in multiple different places, is essentially this: an empire-building nation is trying to conquer one of the major cities on a particular continent and the invasion story is told from the POV of a new officer, the grunts in his squad, and some people in the city being invaded. There are also a bunch of other POVs AND an extraordinarily detailed magic system AND complicated politics AND oh did I mention different races and beings all with their own cultures and rules AND another oh-did-I-mention also a third uber-plot that you get hints of and which clearly is going to slowly (I mean there are 10 books in the series after all) wind up impacting everything? The writing is great with vivid characters, humor and a scope that feels real. I unconditionally recommend this book; I equally understand why you'd DNF or throw it against the wall in boredom or frustration. All I can say is I forced myself to push past all that because I could see, if I could just get through the frustrating part, I’d be immersed in a fully-realized world with all the action, plot, crosses, double-crosses, reveals, and surprises one could hope for in the genre which, for me, was worth the effort.
Lady Chevy by John Woods
I’m torn on this one because this book – an ambitious high schooler in a small fracking town gets inadvertently involved in a crime and its cover-up – really feels like a first novel, though like a decent first novel. The writing was pretty strong and the author managed to capture the characters and place, but the crime plot – which didn’t even start for 25% of the book – spiraled out of control into the completely ridiculous. It’s as if the author really wanted to write a book about Appalachian Ohio but felt he needed to make it genre in order for it to sell and then just jammed a crime story in there. Also the meat of the book is told from the POV of the lead, but each chapter ends with a POV from a town cop, and really I couldn’t figure out what all of it was supposed to add up to as in why the book had been structured that way or what meaningful link, if any, I was meant to draw between these two perspectives. Again, this is not a bad book and I’d be curious to read his next novel and if you like the crime genre in general and read a lot of it then I’d say this author should be somewhere on your radar because this one’s decently written enough to be worth keeping an eye out for his future work.
TV/Streaming:
Design Star Next Gen:
This is the reboot of HGTV Design Star which for some completely unthinkable reason was cancelled years ago. I don't actually watch anything on HGTV - oh, fine, I went through a House Hunters International phase a while back (assuming watching for over a decade counts as a “phase”) - because I find the hosts, all of them, to have the same robotic faux-friendly irritating fakeness that feels as if, before being allowed to even glance at a camera, they were placed into some kind of industrial lathe which removed the entirety of the person’s prior personality, any emotion other than delirious joy, and all vocabulary not related to design, and, once said person had been milled down to a pure state comprised of nothing more than a toothy grin, a glue gun, and some repurposed upholstery fabric, said person was then rebuilt back up into the network’s image of the viewer’s ideal buddy who just happens to know a shit-ton about decorating and wants to talk to you about it all the time because they’re your FRIEND whom you totes want to hang out with 24/7 and buddy friend friend friend who maybe in the midst of so much laughter-filled friend-fun casually drops a tip about an inexpensive way to re-tile your kitchen backsplash to color-coordinate with your spatulas.
So what actually makes this particular competition kind of interesting (vaguely) is that part of it, in addition to the normal part where the designers are given rooms to make over, is the designers being forced to do social media snippets on which they’re also judged - Instagram Stories and whatnot - so we get to watch the sausage being made of transforming someone from a regular, plain-old, overly perky and annoying camera-hog-of-a-human-being into an utterly unbearable HGTV host. At first you can see the panic in the contestants’ eyes as they begin to forget they’re actual people with actual relationships instead of nonstop narrators of their thought process on flooring, and then slowly, soothingly, they let all that go and cover up any lingering sense that they’ve lost something vital in their transformation from human to brand - a brand hopefully with a product that will one day wind up on the shelves at Home Depot - with a soothing veneer of telling themselves they’re okay with it, said veneer composed of common household items that everyone can afford like beeswax, shoe polish, and self-nullification. Regardless, as always with a competition reality show, whatever one may think of the judges or contestants (in this case, not much) you still get to see a creative process and the final product and compare one to the other and that’s always satisfying to me even if the production is screamy and overproduced the way this one is.
Halt and Catch Fire (Seasons 1-4):
Did you not watch this series because you heard it was about computers and thought ugh boring? Because if so, you have made a huge mistake! This is a thoroughly entertaining character drama about people trying to go up against the system to build something new and what happens as they and everything around them changes. Each season is great and builds on what came before while still being different from what came before. The characters and the way relationships play out feels naturalistic rather than contrived and, really, the computer thing is, hmm, what's the drama equivalent of a MacGuffin? An... O'Guffin? A Guffinsdottir? In any event, it’s the road on which the story unfolds and not the vehicle itself, meaning you don’t have to be interested in computers to love this show. I'm not going to go into plot details since, while this show absolutely has a driving plot season to season, it's really a relationship drama - think Boardwalk Empire only set in the present day and with PCs instead of guns. Nope, that one doesn’t work at all. Hmm, okay let's try this one: it's Mare of Easttown only with no cop/investigative stuff but all the big slow-burn family drama. No, that one's not so great either! I refuse to blame myself for my inability to find a suitable show reference but rather the entire American TV/Streaming megalopoly which doesn’t air character-driven dramas (other than PBS imports like Last Tango in Halifax) without there being some kind of crime element or set in a law office or hospital to draw an audience which is perhaps why this show had no audience which is a shame because, if you like drama, it's really that good.
Movies:
Beau Travail - This is a French movie in every derogatory cliche sense of the phrase which managed to make me feel both mind-blowingly bored and totally judged by the film for feeling mind-blowingly bored. The basic plot is ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn plus some vaguely homoerotic French foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti for reasons that are made apparent only in the brief moments of wakefulness. In those moments, when I emerged from contemplating what I'd ever done to me to deserve myself forcing myself to sit through this, there were many images of soldiers dragging things through sand, soldiers completing an obstacle course, soldiers crawling one by one under netting, the first soldier by scampering on all fours, the second with hips on ground and pulling forward, the third with forearms, the fourth on his stomach and then the same thing with another part of the course - soldiers hopping individually across a stream, soldiers climbing up a wall, and I wonder if my socks will dry in time (oops sorry zoned out there for a second just thinking about the film) - then another then another and ANOTHER, soldiers swimming, Djibouti ladies at some outdoor restaurant bobbing their heads and slowly shimmying their shoulders left <beat> then right <beat> then left <beat> then right <beat>, a soldier ironing, and life itself being drained away drop by drop into a black hole of arty French malaise. If you’re in a space in your life where you need minutes to feel like hours or just want to relive the experience of being 5 and stuck in the back of the car for seeming weeks as you’re taken to a mall then forced to sit in the adult clothing section waiting for another eternity while your parent tries on multiple outfits despite the fact that you’re making your feelings about this situation very clear by screaming nonstop about HOW BORED YOU ARE followed by being dragged to a doctor’s appointment which takes FOR-EV-ER and then to make matters worse the only lollipops they have left are lime which you hate and you make that very loudly clear to everyone as well until you’re dragged out and taken home and told no you can’t watch TV until you’ve practiced piano and you don’t WANNA but you do it anyway and when you’ve finished you’re told you should go outside and play instead and, because clarity is so very very important to you, you make it more clear than ever that THIS IS COMPLETELY UNFAIR and you repeat that several times louder and louder just to make extra sure you’re not misunderstood at which point you’re told to go to your room and sit there for another sulky eon waiting to be called down for dinner, then this will really hit the spot.