Books & movies, 2023
“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
– excerpt from Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
This novel gave me, as they say, all the feels 🥹
Parts of it really moved me, and the ending actually made me cry. (Yes, I am the kind of person who cries at books!)
Reading it, I really felt like I was growing up with the characters. The book is about the compulsion to create a world of your own in a deeply imperfect one, the tricky business of collaborating with best friends, the impossibility of controlling what the world thinks of you/your work, and about how to live and love with some measure of grace in the face of things we can’t change.
Definitely worth all the attention it’s been getting. More importantly, it reminds me to keep working on my ideas, and to be a nicer, less self-interested person while doing it!
My 2023 in books:
I finished off the year with a couple of titles on Israel and Palestine: Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I and Language of War, Language of Peace (highly recommend), and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
This year marked my completion of all (but one!) of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels with Sea of Tranquility-it’s surprising how she builds tension despite her books not being very plot-y!
I also finished Deborah Levy’s 'Living Autobiography' trilogy (Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living, Real Estate)—love the way she dissects life, builds meaning out of its fragments.
Memoirs: How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, a debut collection of essays by Malaysian writer Florentyna Leow (on coming to find, in solitude, her own way through a city haunted by the ghost of a suddenly lost friendship), What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo (I don’t think I would have picked this up on my own but it came highly recommended by three people I know, and it made me cry), Stay True by Hua Tsu (as good as everyone says it is, and I don’t think there are too many coming-of-age memoirs by “Asian” male writers?), and I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee (I couldn’t quite latch onto the voice, but found bits in it I related to).
Historical fiction: Lily by Rose Tremain, Matrix by Lauren Groff, and The Women of Troy by Pat Barker (the second in the Regeneration trilogy reimagining the Trojan War through the eyes of the women)—all of which were not as plot-driven as you’d expect, but still a pleasure to read.
Other novels: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (sharper on plot than subtext; turned page after page and read it in one sitting), Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (elegantly written with an interesting premise, but I had a little trouble feeling propelled through it).
Narrative journalism: Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah, which really ought to be recommended reading for everyone.
Literary review: Essayism by Brian Dillon and A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland.
Photobook with an accompanying essay on still life: Teju Cole’s gorgeously contemplative Golden Apple of the Sun.
My 2023 in TV & movies:
Settled back and binged a bit when I caught Covid over Christmas, and on the long-haul plane back to KL—really enjoyed Arcane (though I felt Powder’s turn could have taken a little more time?) and Past Lives (found it thought-provoking, but I couldn’t decide if the dialogue was sometimes stilted/contrived/too knowing, or if that’s just partly the protagonists’s character).
It was hard to watch Killers of the Flower Moon without thinking of how it so perfectly encapsulates the nonsensical injustice of this world; and though the movie’s long, it didn’t feel like it at all.
In the 'eat-the-rich' genre, I watched The White Lotus (kind of wickedly fun), The Menu (skewering, delights in shocking), Triangle of Sadness (bleak and punishing), Saltburn (even bleaker and more punishing).
Films set in a more closeted time with gothic undertones that I found quite compelling: The Wonder, Women Talking, Power of the Dog.
I watched Unorthodox (Deborah Feldman, the Berlin-based Jewish author of the memoir the mini-series is based on, has been outspoken against Israel’s bombing of Gaza, which is how I found out about her) and All The Light We Cannot See because I was interested in the books but hadn’t read them, and then came away feeling that I would probably have preferred reading them.
Tár, Don’t Worry Darling, and Babylon are a decent watch, mainly for the performances.
But I would recommend: The Banshees of Inisherin (the kind of black comedy I like, with still-endearing characters; from the director of In Bruges), Belfast (for a film that plays out amid the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland, it’s so life-affirming), Loving Vincent (a classmate suggested we do a co-presentation about it in my German language class, and it’s just gorgeously drawn), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel.
As for the dystopian: could not get enough of The Last of Us and Silo (based on a pageturner, Wool, by Hugh Howey I read years ago).
Fantasy: House of the Dragon (uhhh so wrong but so good) and the latest season of The Wheel of Time (the world-building elements don’t always feel persuasive visually, but the stakes feel higher this season and it got real dark with the appearance of the enslaved damane; also, Natasha O’Keefe, who plays the evil Lanfear, is chilling.)