december 2024
we’ve done it! we’ve reached the final month of 2024. merry happy etc to us all. i’m coming to you live from the pacific coast, where it stopped raining long enough to grace us with a stunner of a rainbow. take whatever omen you’d like from this into the new year.
read: Blood Sweat Glitter by Iona Datt Sharma (2024). this is 35k words, so just a little bon mot of a novella, but i loved it. it follows Eleanor, a nurse whose only real hobby is roller derby. when Robin joins her team, Eleanor is immediately bothered by her—she’s girly and doesn’t take anything seriously. she wears high heeled skates. but there’s more to Robin than meets the eye, and their shared journey of finding each other is delightful. i also really appreciated the way this book dealt with the mental toll that COVID took—and is taking.
read: Travels Through the French Riviera by Virginia Johnson (2018). i am not one for travel guides usually, but i saw this recommended when i was doing some research for a forthcoming trip and i’m very glad i checked it out. it combines personal recommendations and appreciation for history in a way that is EXACTLY what i want to know before i travel. johnson is an artist, and in addition to illustrating the book, she also mentions her favourite art shops in the region, and provides recommendations for what supplies to bring while you travel, which was fun.
game: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024). yes, again. i am a replayer of games, but i probably wouldn’t have replayed this one as immediately if there wasn’t such a sense of 2 storylines existing in the game. i created as different a character as i could manage, romanced someone else entirely (Emmrich this time), and attempted to choose to reverse of every choice i made the first time around. it was fun! that said, i stand by my earlier review.
read: A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (2024). i’ve been prioritizing reading some of the many (many) books i bought this year, and i started with this one. gill-peterson is an academic, and the introduction this this book is so dense that i nearly stopped reading. i am very glad that i persevered however, because the rest of it is extremely accessible, and REALLY good. while it is a history of trans misogyny, in writing it gill-peterson has laid out a really good history of transness on the whole, specifically the history of transness as a personal choice. highly recommend this.
read: Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March (2022). i think i picked this up at the same time as a short history. really solid bookstore trek courtesy of Politics and Prose. this is set in 1890s India and digs into the setting from a perspective that was entirely new to me, which i really enjoyed. protagonist jim agnihotri is a biracial army vet and his clients are Parsee, which March (a Parsee herself) used to dig into the gray areas of social class in british colonial India. the mystery is enjoyable and there’s a compelling romance tossed in for good measure. really enjoyed this! longer review here.
film: Queer (2024). sometimes a movie is not for me, and that’s okay! that was definitely the case with this one, but i still enjoyed the experience. it’s visually so lush and lived-in, which were also the things i loved most about Call Me By Your Name, the only other Luca Guadagnino film i’ve seen. since Sayombhu Mukdeeprom was the cinematographer on both of them, that is probably no accident. there’s a delightful artificiality to the sets that made me feel like—oh, this is a Picture. obsessed with the hotel room set in particular. i didn’t realize until i was sitting in the cinema that this is an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs book, and i should have known immediately that i’d likely bounce off of it. that said, i really appreciated my friend’s program notes for the film for providing a lot of context that i was lacking by not caring about the beats. good for daniel craig for grabbing his post-bond career with both hands, for jason schwartzman for absolutely everything he is doing in this movie, and drew starkey for being, to quote an acquaintance, “an ice-cold marlene deitrich succubus.”
film: The Bishop’s Wife (1947). i’ve been aware of this as a Christmas classic for years, but didn’t realize the titular bishop was played by David Niven. Having fallen in love with his performance in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, i had to watch. loved it. great cast, wonderful performances. i understand now the folks who watch this yearly.
film: Die Hard (1988). i had somehow never seen this! i’m not interested in weighing in on whether it’s a christmas movie, but boy howdy is this ever an AMERICAN movie. possibly the most american movie ever made. really good stuff. SO stylish. movies used to be movies, y’know? this is one of them.
film: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024). this was an airplane watch, and viewing this with noise cancelling headphones on made me SO appreciative of the sound design. ritchie films are always stylish and fun, and this was no exception. very enjoyable cast. “good”? eh. but sometimes it is enough to see handsome faces small and on the seatback in front of you.
read: Down Among the Dead Men by Patricia Moyes (1961). i nabbed this from a little free library near my brother’s house on the first day of my visit and toted it with me on the rest of our journey. moyes was new to me, but I greatly enjoyed this story about a detective who goes on a sailing vacation and finds himself unraveling a recent suspicious death and tiptoeing through the feelings of all involved. despite being written and set in the early 60s, it feels very golden age.
read: The Socialite’s Guide to Murder by S.K. Golden (2023). this was a quick read but full of fun and character. it follows an agoraphobic heiress in 1958 who rarely leaves her father’s manhattan hotel. after a man is murdered within it (and she discovers the body) she is determined to solve the mystery so her home will feel safe again. i could see Evelyn’s narration getting on some readers’ nerves, but i loved her, her tiny mutt Presley, and Mac, the bellboy who loves them both.
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