The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

This book is on the New York Times Notable Books for 2024 and Obama's recommended reading list, and so it is double recommended and with good reason. There is a mash-up of Gothic novel combined with cautionary tale here. The novel swings back and forth with two time periods when two children from the wealthy Van Laar family have disappeared, 14 years apart. When the novel opens in August 1975, an Emerson Camp counselor discovers that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar is missing from her bunk. Barbara was conceived after the disappearance of her brother in 1961. Peter “Bear” Van Laar, a boy as playful and adventurous as his nickname, was 8 when he vanished from the Van Laars’ summer house that adjoins the camp and never found. There are several layers to the caution part of the story. The first is that generationally rich people see themselves as different, that the rules do not apply to them, and that attitude serves their communities poorly, but it is not always the advantage they see it as. That is played out here, with intergenerational trauma on view. The second is that there is a very clear cause and effect between the two disappearances that could have been avoided should they been faced but they were not. Finally, this is a wonderful portrayal of the challenges of adolescence, and that money complicates that as well. All told, this is a rich novel with many sub-stories within the overarching one, and it is highly recommended.

Conclave (2024)

This film is nominated in a few categories, but I feel like the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts--the Critics Choice Awards agreed and awarded this Best Cast. The movie sets the stage right away. The Pope is dead. If there is ever an organisation that has embraced the pomp and circumstance, it is the Catholic Church, and this happens in death just as much or even more than life. Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who is Dean of the College of Cardinals, has to convene a conclave to pick the next Pope even though he protests that he is unworthy of the task. However, as cardinals fly in from across the globe, it is clear that there is tension regarding how the Church will move forward and also that everyone who is asked will serve, even those who protest they do not want the job. Will they go backwards and embrace tradition or will the vault forward and seek modernization? Or maybe somewhere in between. As the succeeding votes go forward, one secret after another is revealed, and popular candidates gradually lose momentum, until in the end, they make a choice. It is very well scripted and acted, and it is well worth watching.

What Does It Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella

I am not one to read a lot of Sophie Kinsella, seeing as her genre is one that I do not read extensively in, but this was on the 2024 NYT Notable Book list, and I do make my way through about half of those over the course of the ensuing year, and it was available on Libby just as I was loading up my Kindle for a long trip where I would take no physical books--well, knock me over with a feather, this not what I expected. The author herself was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, which is an aggressive and uniformly fatal brain tumor, and so does her main character. Also like the author, Eve is a successful author with a lovely husband and five children, and so the story is parallel to the one that Ms. Kinsella is herself living. On the plus side, she does address some of the things that one needs to grapple with in this situation, and she also avoids quite a lot about it at the same time. There is a fair amount of humor and good spirits--which I 100% agree is the only way to go, otherwise you already have one foot in the grave, but there was a lot missing, at least to my ear. I get it, this is a personal story and it is hard to face, even when you have an avatar in the form of a book character through which to filter your hopes and fears, but speaking as someone who received what is usually a uniformly fatal cancer diagnosis 9 years ago, there was a lot more to it than is here, and I would have liked it to go a bit deeper. But it didn't and despite that, it is worth a read

The Substance (2024)

This is an exaggerated yet very well done horror film. It is a genre that I know almost nothing about and have very little experience with, but given those caveats, this seemed adsurdly bloody as well. The bottom line in this movie is that if you are not seen you do not exist and to be seen and female, you have to be youthful. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), is the aging star who has had a career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor— abruptly ends when an executive (played with exaggerated offensiveness by Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, who is she? At least that is how it appears that she feels because when she is offered a Mephistophelian bargain--she takes a substance that will make her young--but only every other week--she jumps at the opportunity, and at first it goes very very well, but this being a horror movie, then it does not, and how very wrong it goes is for you to see. The remarkable thing is that Ms. Sparkle appears not to be missed at all, no one knocks on her door to check in on her, and she appears to have no friends. Her life really was on stage. The movie has beautiful cinematography and a unique voice--I hated the gore, but I did not hate the movie at all. It has several Oscar nominations, and while Best Movie seems a stretch to me, the other nominations seem at least defendable.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

This is a book with a unique premise. It is set in 1977 and Adina, a girl from another planet, is sent to Earth. She is four years old when her father pushes her out of their spaceship and she wakes up in a classroom designed by her predecessors where they communicate Adina’s mission – to determine whether Earth is a suitable replacement for their dying home world: Planet Cricket Rice (the closest approximation of its name using English). And how will she report back? By fax machine, of course. The story spins out from there, chronicling Adina’s childhood and teenage years in Pennsylvania, living with her mother, Terese, who barely makes ends meet, her friendship with Toni and Toni’s older brother Dominic, and her obsession with Carl Sagan and Philip Glass. All of it, including Adina’s move to New York, where a fame of sorts awaits her, is documented for her extraterrestrial family, sent via the whirr and screech of the fax machine, of course. It is the 70's, after all. It is all told from the stance of someone who is outside looking in, and while we all know that Earth also has some of the hallmarks of a dying planet and a population that is not treating it like a hair on fire emergency, all seen from the perspective of aliens who wish they could have a do-over. It is sad, and wise, and funny and altogether enjoyable.

The Wild Robot (2024)

Happy Valentine's Day! In a world full of turmoil, this is a quiet place to spend the holiday. This is not my favorite amongst the nominate Animated Feature films for this year's Academy Awards, but it is my second favorite. The two share lush animation that outshines the story line (my favorite is Flow and the story is one that the reader imposes on it since there is no dialogue at all) and I would highly recommend watching it when you need an injection of calm into your week. These days, that feeling is hard to come by, of course, so perhaps watch it more than once. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. Roz is greeted with understandable suspicion by the furry inhabitants of the island. Roz neither looks nor thinks like a living thing. Her logic is pure binary – execute task, then return to manufacturer. Devoid of a clear purpose and thwarted in her return by the natural world’s chaos, she stumbles into the possession and care of something she does not understand: a lone goose egg, the rest of the family crushed beneath her. Raising the gosling up becomes her raison d'être and the audience comes along for that ride. Sweet and lovely, even with the sub-text that robots could take over most tasks currently accomplished by man.

All Fours by Miranda July

This is a mid-life crisis book, female style. A modestly well known artist is grappling with all sorts of things: he child nearly being still born, and her own struggles, which leads her to set off on a great adventure of a road trip from LA to New York. But it all goes off the rails right from the get go. Just outside of Los Angeles, not a day into the journey, she locks eyes across her windscreen with Davey, a devilishly handsome attendant who knows his sexual attraction at a smalltown garage. She squanders thousands of dollars commissioning Davey’s wife Claire to exquisitely redesign the room she takes in an ugly hotel, and there she remains for three weeks, joined every afternoon by Davey himself, with whom she discovers an astonishing mutual but unconsummated passion. He turns out to be foremost an incandescent, preternaturally airborne dancer, and through dancing they find forms of intimacy that finally make life seem real. Returning home she must somehow make sense of the rest of her life. She’s aware that her agonizing descent from ecstasy to misery coincides with symptoms of the menopause; a foisting of reality whose deathly overtones have had literal consequences in her family – her grandmother and aunt both killed themselves in their 50s when "the change" is upon them. Two things very clearly scare her. The first is the acceptance of mortality. Then there is sexuality. There is some very unique grappling with both of these in a way that is both gendered and ungendered and wholly fresh and different, which turn this explicitly into a novel about the menopause like none you have read before.

A Different Man (2024)

This is a classic Beauty and the Beast situation, where a severely disfigured man with neurofibromatosis, Edward, undergoes an experimental medical procedure to transform himself from his beastly appearance into a handsome beauty, only to discover that changing how he looks on the outside doesn’t necessarily change how he feels on the inside. Any psychotherapist worth their salt could have told him that, but Edward discovers it for himself and he is very disappointed about it. He was a B-grade actor at best, and when he transforms his visage, his acting skills do not miraculously improve because despite his newfound attractiveness, his insecurity continues to plague him. He still carries himself with the same hunched demeanor and halting speech as before. Then when a beguiling stranger, Oswald, shows up with the same disfigured face. Oswald is confident and charming despite his appearance, and the rest of the movie is Edward struggling with that reality. This is nominated for an Academy award in the area of Make-Up and it is an achievement in that realm.

Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

This is a quiet, lovely story that is beautifully told. The year is 1972. Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. In Ashiya, Tomoko encounters family she has never met and it is through her eyes that we learn the family dynamics. First is her impossibly handsome, half-German, Mercedes-driving uncle who has is fables to make people happy. Then there is her aunt as well as her uncle’s mother, Grandmother Rosa. Grandmother Rosa is a perfectly poised and coiffed 83-year-old German immigrant. The titular Mina, Tomoko’s cousin, is just a year younger. She is a frail elementary school student who will become Tomoko’s best friend for the year she spends in Ashiya. There are others but none so surprising as Pochiko, the family pet pygmy hippopotamus. It is through Mina that Tomoko grows up--Mina is obsessed with books but she is too frail to get them herself, so she sends Tomoko. There is symbolism in the novel and it is reflective of the books that Mina is reading. There is a fairy tale quality to it all that seems on the verge of collapse throughout, a kind of house of cards. I read a review that made the case that while this is on the surface a coming of age story about Tonoko, that it is also reflective of Japan on the cusp of change as well. The oil embargo of 1973 brought about real changes in the promise of prosperity that characterized Japan after the Americans withdrew in 1952. In any case, this is a well told story, written in 2006 but recently translated and published in English.

Soundtrack To A Coup D'Etat (2024)

This is a wonderfully innovative documentary that is set on the eve of independence from France for the Congo. There is worry about communism, because the Cold War is still going hot and heavy, but there is also the question of natural resources and who will control them. The later question is an ongoing one, which gives this more relevance than it might otherwise have. The rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba is the backbone of this film. On October 28, 1960, for instance, Louis Armstrong jubilantly arrived in the Congolese capital to perform as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Africa. Four months earlier, the Republic of the Congo’s bid for independence had become a living reality. Three months after Armstrong’s performance, with the murder of Lumumba, the dream had already died. It happened that fast. The film uses jazz as the soundtrack for this troubling story, and it is quite effective--Jazz legends: Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Armstrong--are featured, and improvisational jazz proves to be a perfect foil for the story that unfolds. The take home message, told with 20:20 hindsight, is true independence for former territories turned countries was always going to be a fraught proposition in the face of colonial powers afraid to part from the unchecked wealth they gained through ultra-violent oppression.