Movie #17 of 2015:
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
[review originally posted 5/25/15]
This is such a good movie on every level, from character to worldbuilding to plot to sheer pulse-pounding spectacle. I still have the film score roaring through my head, and I might need to go back and see it again in 3D. This is easily my top film of this year that didn’t star Mila Kunis as a space princess.
★★★★★
Movie #13 of 2015:
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
This is such a good movie on every level, from character to worldbuilding to plot to sheer pulse-pounding spectacle. I still have the film score roaring through my head, and I might need to go back and see it again in 3D. This is easily my top film of this year that didn’t star Mila Kunis as a space princess.
★★★★★
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Book #54 of 2015:
Every Day by David Levithan (Every Day #1)
I really liked this story of an agender teenager who wakes up each morning in a different person’s body. I did think there were some ethical issues behind the premise that didn’t get explored (although there were a lot that did), and the author could have done more research about the various sorts of lives he’s describing*. Still, this was a tremendous love story with a great effort to include diverse life experiences of gender, sexuality, race, class, mental health, and more. Recommended, for sure!
*To expand on that a bit more: the protagonist spends one day in the body of a trans man but keeps referring to him as ‘biologically female’ which is not how I’ve ever heard any trans person describe themselves (and the narrator can access the body’s memories so it’s not like this is just an ignorant character). I’m cis, but it rang a bit false to me.
★★★★★
TV #22 of 2015:
Arrow, season 3
Although this season of Arrow does some much-needed rehabilitation of Thea and Laurel and gives us the joyous piece of human sunshine Ray Palmer for a hot second before he jumps ship to the new Arrowverse spinoff, overall it’s a bit of a letdown of illogical storytelling and under-established motivations. The first year of this show did so much great character work, and the plot beats in its sophomore outing were utterly fantastic, so it’s really disappointing to see the writers drop the ball on those fronts here. No spoilers, but the finale also completely fails to set up what’s happening next in either of the program’s timelines, which seems like an odd choice for a shared-universe flagship series. I’m still watching, but this doesn’t feel like the Arrow I first fell in love with.
★★★☆☆
Book #52 of 2015:
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
I wasn’t sold at first, but I ended up really liking this story about two mythical beings in nineteenth-century New York. It definitely got better as it went along – the beginning is brimming with characters that don’t have a clear relation to the protagonists’ journeys, but they do eventually intersect with the main narrative. It’s just a little frustrating before that happens, especially because the book is so male-heavy and the story keeps cutting away from the interesting female protagonist to focus on secondary male figures.
But as I said, it improves a lot over the course of the novel, and I loved how debut author Helene Wecker modernized and intertwined these figures from traditional folklore. If she ever writes a sequel, I would happily return for it.
★★★★☆
Book #45 of 2015:
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
This sci-fi novella is unfortunately the most disappointing thing I’ve ever read from Brandon Sanderson. (I guess something had to be…) It has some neat ideas, but for the most part they’re woefully unexplored, and the resolution just doesn’t hit the logical or emotional beats that it’s aiming for. I liked the main character’s insistence that his AI friends were just as real as the living humans plugged into the computer system, but this was a pretty mediocre story in general and far far below the author’s usual quality of output.
Oh well! I don’t think I’m reading anything else by him until the next Mistborn book comes out, so that should be enough time to get the taste of this one out of my brain.
★★☆☆☆
Book #42 of 2015:
The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #4)
I’ve yet to be really blown away by this series, and it’s getting harder to ignore their awful gender politics. Count Olaf’s (nonbinary?) lackey who looks like neither a man nor a woman is regularly treated as a grotesque punchline, and Olaf’s disguise as a female receptionist in this volume marks a new low. It is probably possible to have a male villain pretend to be a woman without being misogynistic or transphobic but that absolutely does not happen here.
I’m not willing to give up on these books quite yet, but I need some time to block out the gross parts of this one before reading any further.
★★☆☆☆
Book #41 of 2015:
Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson by Randall Sullivan
I don’t know how I feel about this one. I did learn a lot, and Michael Jackson had a very interesting life, but this narrative is a really disjointed telling of it. It keeps hopping around in time all over the singer’s life and the years since his death in 2009 (although not too far forward since it was only written in 2011) with no clear motivation, which makes it all a tad hard to follow. The book also just sort of ends — I guess because the author had covered all the most recent stuff at the time of writing, but there isn’t really a conclusion or an overall point or anything. So although it’s an interesting subject, I’d recommend reading up on it from a different source.
[I also wonder whether this biography offers the fairest treatment of the sexual assault allegations against Jackson. It offers plenty of details, but the author definitely comes down on the side of MJ’s innocence, which seems unearned and far from a neutral choice on the matter.]
★★☆☆☆
Book #35 of 2015:
Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld
I really love this novel, which is the first thing I’ve ever read from author Scott Westerfeld. It utilizes a cool narrative structure with two parallel stories told in alternating chapters, each of which has a pretty awesome female protagonist. One is a first-time Young Adult novelist, just out of high school and nervous about editing her manuscript and establishing a new life for herself in NYC; the other is the heroine in her finished novel, a teen girl who escapes a terrorist attack by temporarily willing herself into the afterlife.
The novelist character is a demisexual woman of color with a lesbian love interest, and over the course of her edits and her blossoming romance she struggles with issues of cultural appropriation and impostor syndrome and what constitutes someone’s real name. The book-within-a-book has some really neat developments that clearly reflect the stuff the writer character is going through, and the subtle differences between those finished chapters and the drafts we see in the others are quietly illuminating as well. I would have liked either story just fine on its own, but in linking them together this way, Westerfeld has crafted something really special.
★★★★★
Book #31 of 2015:
The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in an Age of Terror by Dina Temple-Raston
This was a fascinating piece of local and national history that I’d had no idea about before stumbling across this book in the library. Basically, the Lackawanna Six were a small group of Yemeni-Americans who traveled to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001. Following the events of September 11th, they were arrested on suspicion of being a sleeper cell waiting to carry out some other act of domestic terrorism. This book is a really interesting overview of the events leading up to their eventual trial and conviction, and author Dina Temple-Raston does a good job of representing the men’s side of the story without it ever feeling like she’s making excuses for them or trying to justify their actions.
(The book also functions as something of an oral history of the Lackawanna and South Buffalo area, where I’ve been living for the past three years. The local events described in the book all happened within a few miles of my house, and there will be many familiar streets and landmarks that can be spotted by any reader who’s spent time in the area. It was neat – if a little surreal – to learn about these events, which must surely be well-known to all of my neighbors who were here back then. How odd to discover that I’ve been living here this whole time without any idea of it.)
★★★☆☆
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