Hey! We did it! We survived 2025!

I hope everyone had nice and/or uneventful holidays. My Christmas was about as lovely as it has ever been, and then I lay down and took an accidental 2-hour nap.

I was overwhelmed last month by y’all taking advantage of the newsletter’s pay-what-you-want option. It makes a huge difference—thank you!

circling back: Wake Up Dead Man (2025). As promised, I saw this again in the cinema and then got my thoughts together. I had a complicated personal reaction to it, which I went into a bit here. Not my favourite of the Benoits, but still an enjoyable movie. I also cooked up a post about some of the film’s source material (aided by my friend Tarra), if you’re interested.

read: Common Goal by Rachel Reid (2020). I loved the Heated Rivalry book, but have only read some of the others in the series (because I don’t care about sports romance). However, being surrounded by people experiencing the Heated Rivalry show (due to the parts of the internet in which I reside) made me want to complete the set. This is about a player about to retire falling in love with a much younger man and was my favourite of the bunch, unsurprisingly as it involves art and being 40. Ebook, owned by roommate.

read: The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid (2025). This isn’t part of the Heated Rivalry series, but is also about hockey men. Riley and Adam’s teammates-with-benefits arrangement fell apart years ago due to Riley’s feeling and Adam’s denial. Now they’re older and retired, and Adam seeks out Riley in an attempt to reconnect. Their romance isn’t easy, but their eventual happiness feels very earned. I really enjoyed it. Library ebook.

read: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian (2024). I started and abandoned this last year, in part because Sebastian’s writing is sometimes not plotty enough for me, and in part due to the aforementioned disinterest in sports romances. But inspired by the hockey men, I gave it another shot. Set in the mid-20th century in New York, it follows a pro baseball player and a journalist, one required to be in the closet and the other determined never to go back there. I’m glad I came back to it, because I ended up really enjoying it. Library ebook.

film: Petite Maman (2021). This was Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire and somehow it took being the only one awake in my house on a quiet December night to watch it. It’s lovely. The film follows Nelly, a little girl whose grandmother has just died, as she and her parents clear out her mother, Marion’s, childhood home. Overwhelmed, Marion leaves, and then Nelly encounters a girl in the nearby forest with her mother’s name. Nelly and child Marion are played by twins, and every interaction between them is wonderful. The film is a dreamy fantasy, but the weird little girlness of it is relatable and real.

read: Brute by Kim Fielding (2012). And now for something completely different. Brute is about an extremely large, ugly man who loses his hand saving the life of a king and is offered a cushy position guarding a prisoner as a reward. The prisoner is blind and has screaming prophetic dreams, and the two broken men fall in love. I enjoy a story where a person to whom bad things happen experiences nice things, like friendship and warm food, so I liked this. Library ebook.

read: Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh (1971). Marsh is one of the golden age writers I pick up used paperbacks by when I see them, so I had this one waiting on my shelf for Christmas. What I did not realize when I bought it, or until a few chapters in, is that she wrote it (and set it) in 1971. It largely feels like a golden age house mystery, aside from the occasional appearance of a gold lamé jumpsuit. I had a fun time! I love when authors refer to characters kissing by saying they were “quiet for a moment.” Vintage paperback.

film: The Mastermind (2025). I watched this last night as the clocked ticked towards the new year, and it felt appropriate to me to spend my time with something deliberately slow and luxuriating in a specific past aesthetic as I moved into the future. The film follows an out of work architect who decides to rob a local museum. It plops you down into it after all the pieces are in place, which I love. Josh O’Connor is his charming and pathetic best, but is nearly outshined by the incredible cast of character actors with him. John Magaro! Gaby Hoffmann! Bill Camp! Incredible score also.

read: The Alignments by E.H. Lupton (2025). A novella entry in Lupton’s Wisconsin Gothic series, this sees Sam and Ulysses on their honeymoon in France. As an enjoyer of the novella as an art form, I was a little disappointed that this mostly felt like the first part of one of the longer works in the series, but I still enjoyed it. Highlights were a pair of elderly sculptors and Sam’s poncho. Ebook, purchased on Itch.

film: Tokyo Godfathers (2003). After watching Die Hard for the first time last Christmas, I decided that I’ll try to watch a new-to-me holiday classic every year. This year was Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece, Tokyo Godfathers. It follows three homeless folks who find a baby in the trash on Christmas Day. It’s funny and heartfelt and has a shockingly good depiction of a transwoman for 2003. A classic for a reason. I loved it.

watch: Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996). Did you know that Roku Live has a dedicated Murder, She Wrote channel that plays nothing but Murder, She Wrote, 24 hours a day? It does! In order? In AN order. A wonderful place to go if you want to see incredible film actors from the 1970s looking a little older and great actors from the 2000s as literal infants, all with hair that is so bad. Also, of course, Angela Lansbury. The queen.

dog:

cat: