In which I wrap up October and November...
Yes, I know, we’re back to the two months at a time thing. What can I say, it was the Michaelmas term.
THINGS I HAVE READ
The City of Copper - S.A Chakraborty. No. 2 in the Daevabad trilogy, and it was so nice to find a fantasy sequel that lived up to its predecessor. I’m really enjoying how she’s complicating the world and its characters so that there are no easy heroes and villains.
Vengeance - V.E. Schwab. I really enjoyed her Shades of Magic series, but this was disappointing. It was fine, but I’m not chasing out to pick up the second in the series.
A Cook's Book - Nigel Slater. My favourite food and recipe writer. This is as nice to read as it is to dip in and out of to cook from, and my copy is now scattered with sticky notes to indicate the recipes I think might be feasible in a college kitchen…
Silverview - John Le Carré. The last Le Carré was a perfect chill, grey read for a chill grey autumn weekend. It’s not that it’s cold or utterly depressing, but there is a bleakness to its sense of the realities of the world that feels horribly true right now. It’s been a long time since I read A Perfect Spy (which I was far too young for when I did read it), but something in this reminded me of that.
It’s always Summer Somewhere - Felix White. One of the joys of the past 18 months for me has been getting into the Tailenders podcast, getting back into cricket — and discovering Felix White, because somehow the Maccabees passed me by in their heyday (I’m not even sure what I was too busy listening too at the time — Laura Marling and Noah and the Whale, I suspect). This is his memoir of music, cricket, and grief, and it’s a really rather lovely story about how life happens and how you deal with it, and how cricket gets into everything. And, as someone who got into cricket in the mid-90s, there’s a lot of shared painful cricket memories.
THINGS I HAVE WATCHED
I had a very cinema-focused October, and then returned to the ballet in November (with much much much joy)
No Time To Die - new Bond (obvs). I’m not a Bond obsessive, but I’ve generally (Question of Sport, excepted) enjoyed the Craig years. This isn’t up there with Casino Royale or Skyfall, and I’m not convinced by the love story, but I really enjoyed it anyway, especially Ana de Armas’ Cuba cameo, and (always) Q.
Venom 2: Let there be Carnage - the first Venom was quite fun, but this one really knocked it out of the park. It knew exactly what it wanted to be (a love story about a man and his alien symbiote), nicely mixed the story and the action without overblowing the action, packed everything under two hours — and somehow managed to pack in all the references from The Hunchback of Notre Dame to Natural Born Killers. We gave ourselves stitches laughing: A+ would recommend.
Dune - at the other end of the sci-fi / fantasy scale (in length, style and seriousness) this was breathtakingly beautiful and massively enjoyable. There’ve been some fascinating pieces on some of the complexities of the orientalism at play in Dune — both book and film (e.g. on the desert, on the music, on which questions matter and which don’t) — which don’t try and argue that you shouldn’t enjoy this film, but do help you think about it in interesting ways. I enjoyed almost everything about it, but most of all I enjoyed the fact that somehow in the middle of a story about space empire, geopolitics, messianism and colonialism, there is a fabulously kick-arse warrior called DUNCAN IDAHO — played by the perfectly cast Jason Momoa. Glorious.
The French Dispatch. A delightful soufflé courtesy of Wes Anderson and his troupe. Who else can get Ed Norton and Saoirse Ronan to be on screen for under 30 seconds? If you don’t like Anderson, you won’t like this. If you do like Anderson, you’ll find it charmant, with no one story outstaying its welcome.
Last Night in Soho. Well, I never ever ever want to hear the song Downtown again. I do not usually do horror or films in the vicinity but I went there for Edgar Wright and it was grand (but I was glad to have company on the way home). It was smart and inventive, had a great last role for Diana Ring, and I really appreciated that after Baby Driver, for which he got a lot of stick for his portrayal of women, Wright went out and worked with a female screenwriter and made a film led by two women. I’m not 100% sold on the wrapping up, but everything else was fab.
The Dante Project - I was supposed to see this, Wayne McGregor’s latest with the Royal Ballet, last May. I’d been umming and aahing about going back to the theatre, in the COVID stage the UK’s been in, but I also wanted to see this and Edward Watson’s last performance. McGregor doesn’t always work for me, but I found that this really did, perhaps because Watson’s last performance added emotional heft to both Purgatory and Paradise (Inferno is always the best, ok). This one, I think, will last.
Giselle - one of my very favourite classical ballets, and the chance to see Francesca Hayward dance Giselle. Alina Cojocaru is my Ur-Giselle, because she was my first, and she made me cry at the ballet for the first time in my life, but Hayward is beautifully expressive and charming, especially in Act One. One of the interesting things with Giselle, is how the male lead chooses to dance Albrecht (on the spectrum from casual playboy prince to genuine love), and I enjoyed Alexander Campbell’s take as a slightly arrogant flirt undone by the consequences.
A RECOMMENDATION OF SOME KIND
Two things. Firstly, get behind the People’s Vaccine campaign or a similar campaign for global vaccine equality. The better vaccinated we are globally, the better protected we are against new variants emerging (like, oh say, omicron…) — but governments including the UK and USA are failing to make it a priority. It’s (a) short-sided and (b) gross behaviour that assumes that certain other people and countries just aren’t as important. December is the month of Christmas: for me, taking that seriously means recognising that we in the UK won’t be able to work out how to live well with COVID if we don’t try and work it out for everyone.
Secondly: listen to some Stephen Sondheim. It will also be good for your humanity. For ages Sondheim had a rep for being intellectual and not emotional, but trust me, he packs an emotional punch, because he recognises how very complicated we are and isn’t scared of putting that on stage and in song. There’s a million and one places to start, but for me, it’s Merrily We Roll Along, which I saw in my early 30s, and which unpicked for me the journey from idealistic youth to a fearful, unhappy middle age. It’s shaped the way I think about my choices so much I might as well have ‘Don’t be Frank’ tattooed on me somewhere. It’s also Company, which was completely redefined for me by the re-casting of Bobby as Bobbie, in the form of Rosalie Craig, because it became both about me and not in certain ways. I love my coupled-up friends, but yes, I now spend time with them with a little theme tune of “Bobbie come over for dinner…” humming in my head — and let’s not talk about the emotional damage Being Alive does.
IN THE PILE FOR DECEMBER
I’m still working through Michaela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb, which I hope to finish in the holidays. I’ve also just started Abdulrazak Gurney’s Paradise — I’m ashamed to say I’d not heard of him till he won the Nobel, but he sounds very much my kind of jam so I picked this up. I’m also going to read City of Gold, and finish that trilogy, and then just see what I fancy. In non-book things, a trip to the Nutcracker is in my future, and also probably the new Spiderman.
A PHOTO FROM THE LAST MONTH
Cambridge does autumn really rather well.
Jesus Green