In which I wrap up September…
Things I have read
This was the last month of the vacation and I went to Cornwall and had a proper holiday and did not touch the Frantz Fanon I had packed ‘in case’. Instead I read:
The Three-Body Problem - Ciuxin Liu. I like a bit of sci-if from time to time, and this seemed really fascinating in the bookshop. And I did enjoy it, but more because the ideas were interesting than because it worked as a story. I’m now trying to decide whether to read the other two books in the series, or just read the breakdown on wikipedia.
City of Brass - S.A Chakraborty. I then moved into some fantasy, because this was on offer on kindle, and I’d been eyeing it up for a while, and it was a lot of fun (to the extent I promptly bought the next two in its Daevabad trilogy). It’s set in Central Asia and within its mythology of djinn, and its such a fun mix of religion, politics, and a li’l bit of romance, with a great female central character. I’m hoping it holds up across the series (because I’m not sure the Ember series did)
Nairobi Heat - Mukoma wa Ngugi. I picked this up after reading a review of his newest book, which sounded like my kind of jam, but I didn’t really want to get the hardback. So I went back to his first, which is a crime story, set between the Mid-West and Nairobi, with a plot that takes in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the guilt complex that exists in the west in reaction to it, and which is, frankly, horribly plausible. I’m not often a crime genre person, but this was snappy and fun, and with a nice dose of geopolitical mess for me.
Things I Don't Want to Know - Deborah Levy. A friend of mine recommended this a while ago, and when I finally sat down to it, I read it in a day. It’s a lovely little reflection on identity and belonging, and how writing is a part of her working this out. I trotted straight out to the bookshop when I got back to Cambridge and bought the second volume
Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead. This one I did get in hardback and it was just a joy. It must be weird publishing a novel after The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys with some kinds of expectation that you’re going to write the next great state of the nation novel and win a third Pulitzer on the trot, and this is so delightfully not that and I love this choice for him. It’s no less good for it and it still has things to say about the world, particularly class and also real estate in Manhattan, but reading it is more like listening to Duke Ellington play some really fun jazz, as you follow Ray Carney
Things I have watched
My return to the cinema for Wong Kar-Wai reissues continued with As Tears Go By (one of his earliest films) and 2046 (one of his latest). The former I’d never seen before, the latter I saw on its original release, possibly before I saw In the Mood for Love (to which it is a loose sequel) and was really quite baffled by it. In seeing them close together it was really nice to see how some of Kar-Wai’s cinematic tendencies have held and evolved over the years - the colour palettes, the wooziness, the brokenness of his characters and their relationships. As Tears Go By is a really good place to start with Kar-Wai, I think, as it’s a fairly simple tale of a low-level triad gangster trying to keep his ‘little brother’ out of trouble while also falling in love with his cousin and thinking about getting out. 2046 is not the best place to start, but watching it on the heels of watching and rewatching both Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love in their very loose trilogy opened that film up beautifully (though I suspect that 15 years of life also helped…) - making so much more sense of both the ‘present’ of the story and the story-within-the-story of journeying to the year 2046 and how the film is thinking about how people hold their secrets and their dreams. Watching it again felt a bit like the end of a journey.
I also went to see the reissue of The Maltese Falcon, which is an old fave but one I’d not watched for years. I’d remembered how good everyone in it was (Bogart! Sidney Greeenstreet! Peter Lorre!) but not actually how sharp its humour is, along with being a nice study in obsession and greed. It slightly unnerves me that ‘classic’ films now includes things that were released in the 1980s: this is a classic.
Finally, I went to see the latest Marvel (of course I did), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I enjoyed it more than I’ve enjoyed a Marvel film since Thor: Ragnarok - even though it did, in the end, succumb to ‘Big Beast Fight That is a Bit Dull’ (and at least the beast was a proper dragon). Big thumbs up for Simu Liu and Awkwafina and Shang and Katy, who were delightful as characters that did some proper growing, and for some good shades of grey in the villainy - and frankly, for giving the world Tony Leung in a major blockbuster. I’m pretty much assuming that the next phase of the Marvel-verse is going to end up a hot mess of multiverse goo, but I’m glad that this didn’t get dragged too far into that.
in the pile for October
I’m excited about the list of things coming out at the cinema this month: Bond, Dune, Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, and the ridiculous madness that will be Venom 2.
In books, I’m in the middle of The City of Copper (the Daevabad sequel), which is my fun, and Michaela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb, about Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, which is extremely good but also hard work in the way that it’s just disillusioning, even if you sort-of-knew some of it before. I’ve also got Felix White’s memoir It’s Always Sunny Somewhere to read, which I'm very much looking forward to.
a photo from the last month
Cornwall in September can be really nice, you know.
