When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

This book had a lot of critical acclaim, including being on the Booker International book shortlist and amongst the New York Times best books of 2021, but it is an oddity, somewhere between a journal review article and a musing on the the state of the universe. I think the title refers to the uncertainty that Einstein brought to the table in the early 20th century and then Heisenberg cemented with the uncertainty principle, which Einstein at first refused to believe was possibly correct and then came to at least agree he couldn't find evidence that it wasn't correct. Why? Well, while god may not play dice with the world, as Albert Einstein famously declared, the author might retort: perhaps not – but the devil does. In fact, Einstein himself had a lifelong niggle of doubt about mathematics, the discipline that we suppose keeps the Lord away from the gaming tables. How is it, he wondered, that an intellectual tool invented by humans can comprehend, account for and even manipulate so much of objective reality? That the physical world should be amenable to something we made up seemed to him suspect. THe book fairly clearly and very patiently takes the reader through the amazing physical science of the last 100 plus years, and then leaves us to contemplate where in fact that leaves us. It is an unsettling and yet enjoyable read.

House of Gucci (2021)

OMG, so many unlikable people. Then again, this is Ridley Scott, not a man to shy away from unpleasant people and it is a docudrama, so one needs to adhere, more or less, to what is known about the events of the day. The end result is a sweeping yet wildly imbalanced rendering of the celebrated Gucci fashion empire’s scandalous history, full of backstabbing, betrayal, greed, and even murder. While the movie is not the sum of its parts, there is a lot to celebrate here. The story itself is a spicy enough foundation that comes with sufficient amounts of flamboyance, one that sees Lady Gaga's charactger convert herself into an ambitiously avaricious character who consumes all those around her and spits them out. It also features an unrecognizable Jared Leto dialing yet another transformative role up to eleven, and contains plenty of solid performances portraying the troubled business that stems from what has become a troubled family. The Italian accents are insufferable (we were accidentally watching the dubbed Italian voice track and it was definitely an improvement) but all else is mostly well played acting of unlikable people.

Leave The World Behind by Rumaan Alam

This is a kinder gentler disaster story than The Road, but while less bleak and creepy, the story is no less sobering. Amanda and Clay take their two teenage children away to a remote Long Island holiday house where they are able to play at ownership of a house that they cannot afford in real life. It is the allure that Airbnb allows us all to play at for a weekend or so at a time. They are comfortable, in love, delighted by their children and enjoying themselves until one night, when there’s a knock on the door. A black couple – GH (George) Washington and his wife, Ruth, ask to come in. They are the owners of the house, even though Amanda thinks to herself that it didn’t seem “like the sort of house where black people lived”. There are strong echoes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as the reader is asked to join Amanda and Clay in ascertaining how threatening this couple are. So while we contemplate what the end-of-the-world event has just occurred, we are also grappling with their, and also our, preconceived ideas about race, class, and how to form alliances.

The Worst Person In The World (2021)

I have to say that I am not 100% sure that I even vaguely get this movie, which I would characterize as a messy but likely more accurate than most depiction of a coming of age movie. The thing that I think is both of key importance, and also the thing that I get the least is that it is about millenials. They were born into a world that doesn't demand much of them early on, but somehow that lack of pressure feels like part of the problem. In days gone by, one had to get the job, the spouse, the kids, and get on with it. Young people now are caught in this strange purgatory between child and adult. Enter Julie, a fickle Norwegian who has never stayed committed to one thing in her entire life. A teenaged overachiever, she dabbled in medicine before she discovered that she was more interested in matters of the soul than the body. So, she cuts and dyes her hair, dumps her med school lover and pivots to psychology pursuits before burning that all down too, shifting once again—this time to photography. But unsurprisingly, photography manages to bore Julie as well, and soon enough she’s off to the next new thing, next new hairstyle, next new guy iand never quite settling in to who and what she wants to be. Two events, back to back, rock her world enough that she is jolted into moving forward. It is a puzzling and yet enjoyable movie with a couple of Oscar nominations to its credit.

In Every Mirror She's Black by Lola Akinmade Akerstrom

This is a fairly intense book about three Black women in search of a better life end up in Sweden. Linking all three is a wealthy, enigmatic, and damaged man, Jonny. Kemi Adeyemi, 34, a Nigerian American successful professional, is headhunted by Jonny’s Stockholm PR firm. Muna Saheed, a 20-year-old janitor at Jonny’s firm, fled from Somalia two years earlier, leaving behind her family and the man she was in love with. And lastly there is Brittany, a black American flight attendant that falls hard for her and woos her to be his wife. So all three of them are exposed to racial prejudice and profiling, but they are all three immigrants to Sweden, none of them adjusting and not one of them accepted. The other thing that they share is that they are objectified sexually and not a one of them escapes. They are various levels of undone by the cascading experiences that they face. It is a many layered and rich portrayal of making it when you have black skin in a predominantly white country.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

This author is a wonder. First of all, she has produced two amazing yet very different novels in two years. Next, both of them feature her in some way within them. Best of all, this is set within real time in Minnesota, so it has both the pandemic and George Floyd. Finally, we should strive to suport independent bookstores, because they are labors of love for those who work in them and at them. This is a ghost story set within a greater story. The narrator, Tookie, is a convicted body snatcher with a hard-won appreciation for the words used to build stories. She opens the novel by announcing, “While in prison, I received a dictionary.” She immediately looked up the word “sentence” because, she notes, “I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife.” This very subtle but real reminder that brown and black people do not get a fair shake from the law. Tookie gets a break, after reading every book in the prison library, an is released from prison decades earlier than she’d feared. Because she’d spent so long dreaming of a wider selection than the prison’s limited book collection, she decides to look for a job in a bookstore. Only one employer responds to her résumé: “a modest little place” that specializes in Native American literature and is owned by a novelist named Louise. We see the world through Tookie's eyes and in the very end, there is an extensive reading list for the rest of us to work on, courtesy of Tookie.

In The Same Breath (2021)

The filmmaker, Nanfu Wang, is also the narrator of this film, which has been shortlisted for the Oscars for Best Documentary. This is her second appearance on this list, with her last documentary, One Child, making a similar appearance. This fim explores =f how political narratives and public health collided in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in both China and in the United States, and and that these are still happening in both countries in different ways. The film opens with the denial of the seriousness of the novel virus in China, even arresting those who raised the alarm early on, then with incredible access within China, she shows security footage of the sick and ailing coming in to a private clinic near the wet market where it is beleived that it all started going back as fat as November, 2019, and then how the whole thing played out in Wuhan. The contrast between a totalitarian dictatorship versus a democracy doesn't leave one feeling that either served its people well, and marveling at the filmaker's access to material from China in order to tell that half of the story is even handed. Her juxtaposition of censorship afflicting Chinese citizens from speaking out—from telling the truth to the rest of the world—against the ways freedom of speech in America slowed the proper response to the virus, is just as balanced.

The Other Black Girl by Zakyia Dalila Harris

This has both the expected and the unexpected wrapped into it. In the beginning Nella is the sole black woman at her prestigious publishing house. She is unsurprisingly not just on the diversity committee, but also the shaker and mover on that committee, the acknowledged expert based almost solely on her race. When Hazel McCall, another Black girl, shows up to work at the publisher, the drama is set into motion. Nella is thrilled and eager for the friendship and comradery, however it soon becomes clear that Hazel is not focused on new friendships. Instead, she strives for dominance in the workplace and seems to be edging Nella out and alienating her from her boss and her colleagues, and what plays out is somewhere between fantasy and thriller. The story starts out as a simple, charming story about a young Black woman working at a prestigious publishing house and turns into something altogether different and unexpected.

Procession (2021)

This is an incredibly powerful documentary around the subject of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Even if you feel like you know what there is to know about that, the window into the long term effects on the children who were abused is very compellingly demonstrated in a way that we can all identify with and understand, and all the more damning of the church for covering it up and allowing it to continue. The filmmaker decided to make this film after witnessing a televised 2018 press conference in which three middle-aged Kansas City-area survivors of sexual abuse by priests stated their intention to name 230 priests in the area who had participated in an organized child sex trafficking ring operating within the Catholic Church, which had a long record (not just in Kansas City) of enabling, ignoring, or barely disciplining abusers on their payroll. He contacted the men's lawyer, Rebecca Randles, and hooked them up with Monica Phinne, a "drama therapist" who teaches trauma survivors how to use theater to transform feelings of victimization into empowerment. The movie is a record of the process each went through to confront their traumas, and film re-enactments of them.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

Oh dear, this was massively underwhelming, a meandering and unfiltered look at several inter-related characters who seem to have little to offer, either to each other or to the reader. Maybe I just didn't get it. If this is the new 'un-novel', then I am going to take a pass on reading them. I have loved this author's work in the past, so this is particularly disappointing. Also not unique, in that I have read several books in the past year that have the potential to be self-referential, but in a way that, for me, detracts from the novel. I found this not just neutral, but actually annoying. I couldn't decide whether to power through it or put it aside and come back later, and the advice I got from those who I knew who had read it before me was that letting it simmer wouldn't improve it for me.