may

A long month of cycling, movies, and a burst of reading at the end of the month.

Books

Sea of Tranquility

Fantastic! Shades of David Mitchell, but more contained and rather relaxing.

The Body Keeps the Score

I’ll definitely return to this again in the future. This book captures the cutting-edge and seemingly silly ways modern trauma is treated effectively. Many stories and ideas here have fueled therapy sessions for the two or three months I’ve read it.

Ninth House

Magic at a University more mundane than the Magicians, but every bit as seedy. I hope there are more of these.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise

A very strange collections from an interesting lady. I’ve got a few other of Tiptree’s books and I’m curious if they’re all so horny.

Movies

Limitless

For sure I’ve seen this before but this movie feels like what every guy from Stanford and young founder dude thinks he sounds like.

Jackass 4.5

Poor Darkshark. More of the delights and bruises from the gang.

Desperate Hour

Don’t go into the woods/filming during covid. I dig Naomi Watts but this was… a little too solo.

Chip’N’Dale

This found the right side of the nostalgia line to be charming and funny.

Everything Everywhere All at Once pop

This hit a lot of family buttons and was also super fun.

Dual

I don’t quite understand Stearns’ style, but the concept was fun. With so many Finnish actors it was odd to have Gillian try an American accent.

Blood Quantum

A pretty cool take on the zombie story. Parts of this were definitely lower-budget but they did a lot with it.

Deep Water

Incredible divorce energy. Waiting for my retired friends to buy a weird mansion with a pool and start murdering their partner’s lovers. The snails were the stars. I hate that he keeps calling his gravel bike a mountain bike and that whoever did continuity let drops turn into flat bars.

The Innocents

TW they murder a fucking cat in this film which pretty much ruined it for me. The theme of “how do children learn morality” was ok, but wow this was a brutal film.

Operation Mincemeat

An interesting war spy thriller with a lot of nods towards the ways it influenced various spy novelists.

The Northman

From husband and wife to son and mother—I wondered what kind of chemistry Skarsgard and Kidman would have in a Viking epic, and the vibe is weird. The VVitch remains my favorite Eggers film, but this clicked with me much more than the Lighthouse. “Their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.”

The Lost City

A goofy blast.

Mirai

Super cute but also definitely “please have children” propaganda.

A Futile and Stupid Gesture

Oh that’s the story of how National Lampoon happened. Kinda fun.