it's that time of year! reading roundup, film feelings, operatunities, cultural conclusions, judgy judgements, the usual unsubstantiated personal opinion!
books first. this year i did pretty well on reading more (43 in total), but quality was few and far between. there has to be a better way to decide when to give up on reading something that doesn't catch my attention or interest. only hindsight is useful.. which is useless.
8 memoirish - i can't seem to stop seeing this genre as easy reading, with mixed results. half of them were pretty damn good, particularly Notes on a Foreign Country (Suzy Hansen), When in French (Lauren Collins) and in my prize for most unexpectedly nuanced, Jill Soloway's She Wants It. The Lonely City (Olivia Laing) was a very interesting beast, musings on psychology, lived experience intercut with art history and biography.
15 non-fiction focused on special areas of interest. most alarming - Why We Sleep. largest and most edifying yet depressing, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. most inspiring - The Evolution of Beauty and The Wonder of Birds. in another life i might become an ornithologist. i fulfilled my goal from a year ago of starting to learn and understand chinese history. i particularly liked Mary Gaitskill's collected review/criticism (Somebody with a Little Hammer), i'll read anything that she writes.
12 traditional fiction - my harshest judgement is reserved for this category, where i increasingly can't stand navel-gazing contemporary literature about the minutiae of the titular life (The Idiot, Elif Batuman [who wrote a fascinating longform article on the japanese rent-a-relative industry]), this whole genre of autofiction. i write my own in my journal every night and it's more entertaining! nor do I enjoy historical fiction (Pachinko, Min Jin Lee) anymore, sorry not sorry, everyone raved about that one. everything is always telegraphed in advance, character stereotypes abound, i find myself skim-reading just to confirm my plot predictions. this is not to say that a traditional love story (Normal People, Sally Rooney) or myth transposition (Everything Under, Daisy Johnson) can't be written well in new lyrical ways, but sometimes it's more fun to blow shit up and blur the boundaries between waking and sleeping as in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Otessa Moshfegh), which was particularly disorienting to read in bed while falling asleep. i was disappointed by Philip Pullman's plotless canoe adventure La Belle Sauvage and also, typically for the booker prize, the first graphic novel included on the shortlist (Sabrina, Nick Drnaso), where just because something is a commentary on its time and media (social and populist) doesn't mean it's interesting or make up for the fact that the characters are barely distinguishable and everything looks like it happens inside a cardboard box. "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all" - clearly i don't hew to this view, on the mostly anonymous internet, but i don't like to only write positive things because that just contributes to publication bias. scientific method and all that.
conclusions: i'll take provocative writing with brilliant turns of phrase for now, thanks. i'm looking forward to the next books by Otessa Moshfegh, Nell Zink, when oh when is Alison Bechdel going to release hers?
films:
my worst movie experience of the year - i love a good documentary and also i love public libraries. Ex Libris: the New York Public Library went for over 3 hours (we walked out at the 2:45 mark) and lacked any sort of narrative structure or aesthetic interest, with way too many administrative meetings and american self-congratulations. i liked where they showed the automated processing of returned items, and that was about it.
i saw a lot of blockbusters this year and they were pretty much mostly forgettable. Isle of Dogs was good, i do like wes anderson. rewatching the royal tenenbaums though - it was not as good as i recalled from 14 or so years ago.
Phantom Thread was pretty great, all interiors and crunching and eating and jockeying.
hands down the best film i saw was also the most recent, The Favourite. it was in the smallest theatre in the most multiplexy of black concrete-walled lightning bolt-carpeted cinemas, and it was great. i haven't seen something where what felt like a small like-minded community of audience members laughed so much at genuinely wicked/funny/black dramedy without ruining it. throw in deadpan barbed verbal jousting, excellent shooting outfits, hefty emotional undercurrents and associated nuanced acting, unpinnable/flexible sexualities, baroque organ/harpsichord soundtrack, i haven't even gotten to the strong female characters yet. absurdist period drama, i'm here for it.
(shoutout to the moment in its sibling film The Lobster and the pony with the beautiful hair. i'm still laughing about it.)
i watched the most TV this year that i have ever, i think. Westworld was cerebrally entertaining, at least it kept us discussing and conjecturing and wending a way through all the plot convolutions. Killing Eve and Maniac are probably my picks of the year. i also watched a lot of Parts Unknown and other food-related tv, RIP anthony bourdain and jonathan gold, sigh.
the classics:
why is lucia di lammermoor, a tragic opera, in mostly major keys? is this a bel canto thing? i tried to expand my horizons and felt like laughing the entire time. Jessica Pratt was great, though, a rare treat in sydney. i would love to see this opera with a black comedy production.
ho ho ho this year i went to glyndebourne, on a trouser role pilgrimage (frankly, i wouldn't do it for anything less). it is definitely the fanciest pants thing i have ever done, trying to not stand out too much among the black tie garden picnic crowd who thought that a bling mcmansion fluoro set for Der Rosenkavalier was just not traditional enough. i think i finally understand what it means to see operas when you already know and love them, to hope they will surpass your experiences and expectations. who will be the next mezzo Giulio Cesare after Sarah Connolly hangs up her golden chestplate? that opera is just hit after hit after hit. to see Kate Lindsey in her first outing as Octavian in those sublime stretched Strauss moments was very special, i hope she has several more to come.
a final highlight, also in london, was seeing John Eliot Gardiner with the english baroque soloists and monteverdi choir do several Bach cantatas, ewig in dulci jubilo indeed.
till next year! let us put our phones down and appreciate everything else.
