Set in a remote snowbound Polish village, this novel was a fitting read for the type of winter we’re having this year. The protagonist and narrator, Mrs. Duszejko, lives mostly in isolation. Most of the residents only spend their summers there, and she’s one of a handful of people who brave the cold over the winter.

The plot kicks off with her and her neighbour discovering the dead body of another neighbour, who had choked on a bone while eating. Soon, other villagers are found dead in increasingly bizarre circumstances. The book is sold as a crime/mystery novel, but it didn’t feel like that to me. Instead, the focus is on Mrs. Duszejko’s inner life.

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After being blown away by The First Omen, I just had to go back and check out the original film that launched the franchise. I guess it’s considered a horror classic, but I had never seen it before.

Surprisingly, the movie made me laugh a lot. I mean no disrespect; I would characterize it more as “laughing with” than “laughing at,” even though I’m sure the filmmakers didn’t intend to produce a comedy. I laughed because I was charmed… movies have evolved since the 70’s, and the rhythms and beats that were used to create suspense back then now seem over-the-top. Compared to horror movies today, everything—the acting, editing, sound—feels slower, but bigger, more theatrical. Especially notable was the score, which was not subtle at all, transitioning from idyllic melodies into Psycho-esque stings at the drop of a hat.

Again, that’s not to say that I didn’t like it. I enjoyed the ride. With older films, since they didn’t have the ability to cram special effects into every other scene, the handful of wow moments really stand out. I also got a kick out of learning the context of the references in The First Omen. I look forward to a future double feature, watching the two back-to-back.

letterboxd link

I started last year with an optimistic non-fiction read, and coincidentally, I recently finished another book with a similar tone, in Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World. It feels right to start the year in a hopeful mood, so maybe this will become a quasi-New Year’s Resolution for me going forward.

Ritchie’s book uses a data-driven approach to examine the threats of climate change. She’s the lead researcher for the website Our World in Data, and as summarized by one of the articles published there, the book asks us to hold three truths at the same time: “The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can do much better.” It’s easy to get gloomy and focus on the latter two parts of that statement, but this book tries to shine a light on the first, and I appreciated the boost of optimism that it gave me.

Part of Ritchie’s goal is to “sort” the issues by the impact that they have, in a quantitative way. Environmentally conscious people like myself tend to worry about many different things, and feel guilty about every action that may harm the planet. But if you look at the data, some things matter more than others.

For example, palm oil and plastic packaging get a bad rap, but their impact is small, and the alternatives may actually be more harmful. (Other oil crops require more land to grow; and not packaging food would lead to more waste.) Conversely, the most impactful actions include: reducing beef and dairy consumption, driving an electric car (or driving less altogether), and of course, transitioning off the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

Ritchie sums up her ideas in a couple of videos online. Definitely bookmark-worthy, and if I’m ever in a hopeless mood, she will serve as a reminder that there is positive change happening, and a path forward.

storygraph link

Another entry in the TIFF Secret Movie Club series, this film was an enjoyable rom-com about a gay Indian man who brings a boyfriend to meet his traditional parents for the first time. We hit most of the beats of the rom-com formula: the meet-cute, the big fight and temporary break-up, the grand gesture to get back together (although I felt that this scene was missing an actual apology and acknowledgement of wrongdoing), and of course, the happy ending.

Interestingly, there’s no coming out scene: the main character’s family knows that he’s gay from the get-go. But they’ve never seen him be with someone, and the difference between being accepting in theory, and being comfortable in practice, is one of the main themes of the movie.

I had a lot of laughs watching this and it was a good time. After the film, the lead actor and the director held a Q&A session over Zoom. It turns out that they’re a couple in real life, and they were able to express how personal the film was for them, which really enriched the experience for me.

letterboxd link

I recently caught up with the second season of Pachinko. The show follows the lives of a Korean family living in Japan, spanning from the 1930’s, when the main character, Sunja, was a young woman, all the way to the 1980’s, when she is a grandmother, and her grandson Solomon becomes the protagonist.

One of the main challenges that the entire family encounters is the discrimination that they face as a minority group, and it’s a fascinating to see how little this problem improves despite the decades of progress that has shaped the world around them. Somehow, they survive and thrive, but they end up going through life with a chip on their shoulder. Solomon, especially, uses his profession as a high-flying finance guy to make Succession-style deals and enact revenge against perceived cultural insults. It’s as if he’s getting back at all Japanese people for how they’ve treated his family through the years.

Kudos to the cast, who perform in both Japanese and Korean (and sometimes English). Not easy languages to learn, I’m sure. Speaking of the cast, though, one flaw that I see with the production of the show is that they don’t seem to age enough. The same actress plays Sunja from 1930-something, all the way to 1950, and she looks pretty much the same throughout. By the end of the season, one of her sons is a young man, and the two of them look like they’re the same age, which does make some dramatic scenes less convincing.

I’ll shout out one sequence in particular, where one of the characters lives through the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki. The blast itself is depicted only as a bright light, but the scenes covering the days before the explosion build tension in a cool way, by showing the date in big lettering on the screen. To emphasize the point, there are also conspicuously visible calendars on the wall in the background. It was a very effective way of building suspense.

Like many Apple TV+ shows, it seems like they have spared no expense in recreating the look of multiple historical eras, and I hope that their coffers don’t run out before they can complete the story in subsequent seasons.

I spent a lot of time in museums when I visited London in the fall of last year. The British Museum is a gigantic repository of artifacts, which seems to cover all of human history from all over the world. It was truly overwhelming and awe-inspiring, and I came away feeling ignorant. Our world has so many stories to tell and even if I really tried, I could only hope to learn a small fraction of them.¹

During the same trip, I stumbled across a copy of Andrew Marr’s A History of the World in a used bookstore. Since I was feeling the urge to improve my historical education, I picked it up and started reading as soon as I came home.

It’s quite an ambitious work, to attempt to summarize world history in one book. It’s impossible, of course, but what is here is successful, I think. It reads like a series of articles, around the length that can be tackled in one sitting, each focussing on a specific event. Every once in a while, there’ll be a few pages where Marr attempts to synthesize and draw comparisons between the stories, for example, how both the Vikings and the Mongols shaped Europe via conquest. It’s all pretty readable, but since it has to cover so much ground, it does inevitably have to refer to some names that the reader is assumed to already know. A lot of times, I didn’t get the references, so had to keep Wikipedia handy.

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I read the trilogy of books¹ around the time that this show premiered, in 2019. I think I had always been curious about the series, and figured that I would read it before jumping into the show. I ended up being disappointed at how the story progressed, so I didn’t feel the need to follow the show as it aired.

On my recent trip to London, I saw an exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum with some costumes and props from the show, which reignited my interest. Even if I wasn’t fully satisfied by the books, I still enjoyed a lot of it.

The TV adaptation is so faithful that my reaction to the show pretty much mirrors how I felt about the books. The first season is the best, with a great sense of adventure and world-building, but it becomes overly convoluted by the third, final season. However, even as I lost track of the plot and character motivations, the visual depictions of fantastical beings like angels and witches and armoured bears were still pretty cool. And I like the cast, especially Dafne Keen as Lyra and Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter.

All in all, I would still recommend the show if you want to see some cool magical concepts and special effects, as long as you’re prepared to be confused and frustrated by the end.

Footnotes

1. I got my hands on a copy of an omnibus version, which has the entire trilogy in one volume. I’ve always had a thing for this idea, of having multiple books in one. Don’t ask me why… ↩

What I did for my movie-watching history in the previous post, I’ve done for my book reviews in this one. This habit started on Goodreads, but I grew dissatisfied with the UI/UX design on that site, and so moved over to The Storygraph.

With this, I think I can say that everything that I’ve ever written on the Internet (apart from social media, which, who cares?) now lives on this website, which I have full control over.

One thing I would like to explore in the future is going in the other direction. I.e. when I write something and post it on this website, I should also share it on Letterboxd or Storygraph, or whatever platforms spring up in the future. There’s a name for this approach: POSSE, which stands for “Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.” It could be as simple as copy and pasting, but as a software developer, I can’t help but try to find a way to automate it.

Let’s see if I get around to it…

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I guess it’s becoming a bit of a New Year’s mini-resolution for me to liberate myself from tech platforms (see Quoteshelf). Not that I have anything against the platforms in question, but it’s always been important to me to avoid getting locked into someone else’s website.

Since 2009, the first time I attended TIFF, I’ve been tracking every movie I watch. I think I used to do it on the venerable IMDB, but once Letterboxd came along, I migrated over and never looked back.

A social site like Letterboxd encourages a certain style of writing: pithy and snarky, i.e. like a tweet. I’ve written my fair share of those, with longer reviews residing on my blog. Having my content in two different places just sticks in my craw, so I’ve finally done the somewhat tedious work to export my posts, and have collected them all here in this post.

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In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading a lot. I also like to record my experiences, for example, by tracking the books I read on The Storygraph, and tracking the movies I watch on Letterboxd.

There’s an app called Readwise which is great for readers like myself. In the app, you can point your phone’s camera at the text on a page, and it will use OCR to save it as a quote. The app also allows you to review the quotes that you’ve saved in the past. It’s fun to revisit the favourite bits from books that I’ve read. The Readwise app implemented well, and I found it useful enough to pay for a subscription.

Having said that, I’m a firm believer in owning one’s data, so I decided to try to create my own solution. Introducing… “Quoteshelf”! This new section of the website contains all of the quotes that I’ve exported from Readwise. On the main page, I can swipe through a random selection of quotes, and I can browse the author index to find specific books.

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