I have survived the summer travels! Still in recovery mode, but I shall persevere.
Summer movies:
Thor: Love and Thunder was mostly amusing, occasionally annoying, and chock-full of eye candy of all kinds. Pretty men and women! Interesting non-people visuals! It also doubled down on the distinct version of Thor that Taika Waititi wrote for
Thor: Ragnarok, which should give most people a big hint if this movie is for them. As for me: well, mostly? Waititi’s style doesn’t always mesh well with my own tastes, so there were definitely some things I would have skipped. But still fun overall.
Top Gun: Maverick was also entertaining, in a well-executed, over-the-top way. I went into it having already read
this review, which goes with the theory that
( spoilers )
No TV to report. I canceled my Netflix membership without even starting season four of
Stranger Things, even though I think I’d probably like it. Just not enough time this summer.
Summer books:
Jodi Taylor’s
Just One Damned Thing After Another lives up to its title. The subtitle might be “The amazing debut adventures of the BEST time traveler-historian to ever exist!” Or something of the sort. I will say that the narrative does NOT lack forward momentum. What it does lack: nuance and a richness of language.
Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta wrote
The View Was Exhausting. It’s a romance novel featuring a leading actress of color and her wealthy and famous sometimes fake boyfriend. It delves into some of the pitfalls of big money and of celebrity while being a person of color. Absorbing and gratifying, but not soothing.
Elizabeth Lim’s
Spin the Dawn feels very linked to fairytale origins. Young girl dresses as a boy to save her family, but instead of going to literal battle, she enters a contest to become the royal tailor. Compelling but a bit too easy to forget. To be fair, I read it early in the summer.
I read book 7 of Melissa McShane’s
The Extraordinaries series,
Soaring Flight. McShane is fast becoming a “just buy it” author for me, at least for this series. Just FYI,
( brief spoilery content notice )The big summer read was Larry McMurtry’s anti-western classic,
Lonesome Dove. I write
anti-western, but McMurty himself thinks he felt short of the mark. The novel was published in 1985; in a 2000 edition, McMurtry wrote:
It's hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man's Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time.
For myself, I think he hit the mark... mostly. But the characters, in all their deeply tragic flaws, were still human, and some even “larger than life” heroic. Maybe someday we’ll un-learn our romanticization of America’s western history; until then, McMurtry’s novel is going to be misread by many.
One thing to note: a stylistic evolution in the last few years made the novel a bit of a hard read for me. We don’t often see multiple jumps in point of view within a small section nowadays, at least not with some kind of marker to hint that the point of view has changed. McMurtry slides from one character’s POV to another without anything to note the switch.
Anyway. While the book has a slow start, it’s a haunting and worthwhile read. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. I may track down the 1989 miniseries. Or not; I rather like the characters as I see them in my mind.
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