Well hello

So, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Life has interfered. Also, I’ve been lazy.

But, I have been reading and watching, just not reviewing. But here we are, the first day of the new year¹ so new start.

Or at the very least a new intention to have a new start. I make no actual promises, just like the more commonly accepted new year and my traditions then, I do not do resolutions, vague and hand-wavy has always been the way to go if you ask me.

Last month I read three books² Wild Life by Molly Gloss, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Broken Places and Outer Spaces by Nnedi Okorafor. All were really interesting reads and completely and utterly different from each other. I’d recommend them all. Broken Places is a short autobiography covering a specific time in Okorafor’s life, after she underwent surgery and her whole life changed.

The Overstory is a long, long book all about trees. But not really, its all about life, and people and how lives intertwine, and how we are destroying the environment, but it’ll be okay even if humanity and life as we know it won’t… I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this, and the final third is good, but it doesn’t quite tie together and I think it was meant to be slightly more uplifting but I was just depressed by it and the fact that all that destruction is really and truly happening.

Wild Life was a great read, although I think the framing at the start could have been left out, and I’m not a hundred per cent sold on the ending, but still I’d highly recommend it, even if I’m not exactly sure how to summarise it. It is partly an historical fiction book about a woman searching in the forests for a lost child. Partly a fantasy fiction about sasquatch-like creatures that live in the forests. But just like The Overstory much of what it deals with is how people are determined to destroy nature, or as much of it as they can.

Filmwise October has not been a standout month. I’m not sure, but I think the only film I saw in the cinema was Joker and I was not impressed. In fact I was so so bored by it. Phoenix gave a great performance, but the film itself… ah, just watch Grouch and you’ll have seen more than enough. As someone wittered it is “gritty fluff” full of its own pompous importance yet saying absolutely nothing.

TV has been better in October, as I’ve been enjoying the new season of The good place, and rewatching the last season of BoJack Horseman.

I also caught a 2009 version of Wuthering Heights, mainly because it had Tom Hardy as Heathcliff and now I want to reread the book. I don’t think I’ve read it since studying it as school…

So that’s been my October, what have you been up to?

1. according to the ancient Celts  ↩

2. I think ↩