Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
3/2022 – ⭐️⭐️
A somewhat amusing murder mystery and courtroom drama; basically Law & Order: TOS starring Samuel Cogley. Unfortunately, the poor treatment of the two primary female characters (one an overly stereotypical shallow, bitter wife; the other bitter at past events who fares badly) marred my enjoyment.
2/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A recommendation from my 10-year-old niece (V.E. Schwab is her favorite author), this was a fun fantasy adventure through multiple magical Londons. Neat worldbuilding and magic rules and styles; perhaps a bit more violent than I would have expected from a pre-teen’s recommendation (apparently Schwab also writes YA books, which is how my niece came across her, but this is one of her adult novels), but her parents also read and enjoyed it, she’s none the worse for reading it, and I’ve certainly read far worse.
1/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Near-future technothriller in Stephenson’s trademark “neat stuff infodump” style. Weird to read something so new that it references both Covid and the Jan. 6th insurrection.
Jungle Cruise: ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Exactly what it purported to be: A Disney action/adventure with The Rock and Emily Blunt having fun playing in the Disney sandbox and making bad jokes. Perfect lightweight and low-stress entertainment for a lazy Sunday afternoon.
A reading challenge I just might try to do this year: Your TBR Reduction Book Challenge:
January – New Beginnings
1 – I give you permission to read the most recent book you got on top of your TBR. For many this is one we only get to read eventually but for now I want you to pick up the newest book in Mount TBR and read it. Can you remember the last time you did that?
Stretch Goal – Read the oldest book in Mount TBR it has waited long enough
We watched two films today. If we can keep up this momentum, we’ll watch 730 over the next year!
To be clear, we are not going to keep up this momentum.
‘No Time to Die’: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2: Definitely one of the top two Daniel Craig Bond films (along with Skyfall), and a good end for his arc. His hasn’t been my favorite tenure (on the whole, too many of his entries went too far into the “gritty and realistic” approach), so it was nice for the final one to be one of the more enjoyable entries. I particularly appreciated the coherent and well-lit action scenes, all too often a rarity these days (particularly noticeable just after watching The Matrix: Resurrections, which had confusing and underlit action scenes that were often difficult to follow).
‘The Matrix Resurrections’ ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2: I’m going to have to do some thinking and reading on this one, and possibly re-watch it at some point. I very much enjoyed the first half, with all the de-/re-construction of the original trilogy. The action in the latter half could probably have been cut down a good chunk, it rather dragged on, and I’ll admit to being confused about just what was going on and why (Neo and Trinity are…super-batteries? But only when connected in parallel? Something?). But my first impression is that while it doesn’t reach the heights of the first, there was more about it that I liked than that didn’t work for me.
My resolutions for this year:
(That’s my Mac mini’s primary 4K monitor and secondary display, the secondhand MacBook Pro I got from Prairie last year, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh.)
Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 54. Here’s a quick (?) overview…
Just as with last year, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Gee, I wonder why that was the case?
Non-fiction: Just one, and it was still right in line with my usual reading: Lester del Rey’s The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture. While del Rey absolutely has his biases and blind spots, especially when reading his history with the perspective of almost another fifty years of development in both SF and society in general, he’s still a good resource for looking back at these formative years. And for me at least, this retrospective was far more readable than Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, which I tried to read early in the year, but simply couldn’t get through.
Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Three this year, the best of which (seriously) was Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I, the first book of the Bridgerton series. While romance isn’t my usual thing, and I see no great need to continue on with the series, I had enjoyed watching the Netflix show with my wife when it was released, and this was a perfectly acceptable and amusing bit of fluff.
Quality genre fiction: Once again, good goals fell to the reality of living in pandemicland, and I didn’t add quite as many “quality” books to my list as I thought I might.
As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden: cryptids, speculative evolution, parallel worlds, spacefaring trilobites, and dry British humor.
I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 44% of the way through. Of those I read this year, I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite between The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both of which are by Ursula K. Le Guin, and both of which were excellent.
Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.
Finally, some stats on my year’s reading, according to Goodreads: