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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Previously…

I was a big fan of Lost while it was airing. I know it had its naysayers, because I used to passionately defend the show against them. With the benefit of hindsight, I can definitely see how the plot became a mess; it’s clear that the writers didn’t have it all fully planned out, and had to sacrifice many loose threads in order to bring the story to a conclusion. But I felt at the time, and still maintain, that the ending was emotionally satisfying on a character level, even if some/many of the mysteries went unexplained.

The same could be said of Servant, which also offers plenty of supernatural twists, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Instead of a whole island, with dozens of characters, Servant takes place almost entirely in one house, with a primary cast of four.)

I said in my previous comments that in the end, I only cared about the main emotional resolution, and the show delivered. (I was also right that it waited until the second-to-last episode to deliver it.) When Dorothy, the mother, finally realizes the truth that she’s been suppressing for the entirety of the show so far, it’s appropriately heart-wrenching, but also feels like a relief. It’s the only way they can move forward from the tragedy.

Nell Tiger Free as Leanne remains the MVP for me, even though I didn’t love the turn that her character takes in season 4, becoming a full-on evil wacko killer. She was much more interesting when her nature was ambiguous, even to herself. But the disquieted, damaged innocence that she carried in earlier seasons does return in the finale, which makes her fate bittersweet.

I’ll also shout out the rest of the main cast (Toby Kebbell, Lauren Ambrose, Rupert Grint). The show works mainly on the strength of their performances. They make the more ridiculous supernatural plot elements much more believable.

A fun page-turner about a woman who visits “The Centre,” a place where people can go to learn new languages. Amazingly, you can go from complete ignorance to full fluency in only 10 days. All it takes is to cut yourself off from the outside world, sit in a cubicle with headphones on, and listen to a recording of someone speaking in your target language all day. There’s a dark mystery surrounding how the process actually works, and the novel gets a lot of mileage from doling out little pieces of the puzzle over time.

The protagonist is a Pakistani immigrant to England, and at one point, she visits her family back home; also, she befriends the manager of the Centre, and together, they go to India, where the founders of the Centre reside. These travels allow the novel to touch on the immigrant experience, as well as the fraught history of India and Pakistan, and how those two nations relate to each other.

Unfortunately, these digressions, while interesting, felt a bit disconnected to me. I enjoyed the book mainly because I wanted to find out what the twist was, and the relationships between the characters, and the accompanying cultural and society commentary, seemed engineered to allow the plot to reveal itself, and therefore not entirely believable.

storygraph link

I’m not sure how you would categorize this novel, but maybe it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it a rom-com. The main character, Greta, works as a transcriptionist for a therapist, listening to recordings of the sessions and typing them up. (Sounds like a great job to me.) But what gives the story a surreal edge is that she lives in such a small town that she’s constantly encountering the people whose voices she’s been listening to. Imagine that whenever you meet someone in a social situation, you already know their deepest and most secret thoughts, even though you’re a stranger to them.

The title refers to Greta’s nickname for one of the patients, a young Swiss woman, who shares with the therapist (and therefore, Greta) a traumatic story of physical assault. Predictably, Greta ends up meeting Big Swiss, at the dog park, and the two of them strike up a friendship which becomes a fling. Because Greta knows about Big Swiss’s past, the relationship dynamic is messed up from the start. It feels both funny and icky at the same time, similar to how Tom Hanks is both charming and sleazy in You’ve Got Mail.

Greta herself also survived trauma in her past, and one of the novel’s strengths is the conflict between the two women’s worldviews regarding their history. Greta has the tendency to fall back on her past as an excuse for her misdeeds, while Big Swiss believes in moving on by repressing her experience. The novel isn’t saying that there’s a right or wrong way to deal with trauma, only that people must try their best to figure out how to survive and flourish after. You’re left hoping that Greta and Big Swiss come away from their relationship having learned the lessons that they needed from each other.

storygraph link

Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.

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