zoetrope

More screen time. I watched all of these on Netflix.

Hostage: The British Prime Minister's husband is kidnapped in French Guiana while working with Doctors Without Borders. I watched two episodes across several days, mostly for Julie Delpy as the President of France, but I just didn't care about these people's problems. And then Julie Delpy did a public end-run around the prime minister to get French troops stationed on English soil to stop migrants from entering France from the channel and my entire being just shriveled up and died with how much I didn't like that.

Minx: The evolution of an erotic feminist magazine in the early 1970s. A fun and raunchy show that wants people to succeed and be kind to each other—mostly. The main character, Joyce, is kind of a pill, but part of the fun is watching her become more flexible as she's exposed to new perspectives. The first season is about building a team and putting a magazine together, but the characters lose their way in the second season as they give in to fame and power (or are alienated by it) and the show similarly becomes muddled; appropriate, maybe, but it also felt very unfocused and even cruel at times, quite a departure from the first season. Contains: drug use, nudity, and lots of dicks.

The Staircase (2022): The thing about The Staircase (2004) is that it will make you detest Michael Peterson. Did he kill his wife? Well, an owl certainly didn't do it. Guilty or not, the man is an odious narcissist, and Colin Firth nails him right down to his way of speaking. So I hated him immediately of course. But not in a fun way. The series also stars Toni Collette! And wastes her! Outside of a death scene so raw I wanted to look away, she mainly spends her time drinking and being quietly sad, except for a scene with a leaf blower and two more death scenes that are similarly awful, but similar enough to the first that it kind of dulls the effect over time. The whole thing is pretty tedious, which might be excused in a documentary, but not in a drama. If you've seen one The Staircase, you don't need to see the other, and really, you probably don't need to watch either. It was really great to see Juliette Binoche again, though. Contains: a lot of blood; violence.

I read 47 books last year with MY NEW GLASSES. Still really proud of myself for finally getting that done. Last year at this time I was running out of arm to get the book far enough away to read. Weirdly, after several years of that, I'm still holding books way out in the middle distance even though I no longer have to. It's like they're too close now, like, get out of my face, bro.

Did my reading have a theme? Fiction, mostly. I've been avoiding the news for my whole body health, like, get that reality out of my face, bro. I can barely handle the pressures of day to day living, bro. Please understand I'm doing the best I can, bro.

Here are the best things I read in 2025. Links go to my reviews here on Dreamwidth.

Fiction:

The Hunter, by Tana French: Sequel to French's The Searcher. I enjoyed them both, their interesting characters and a small town setting that's claustrophobic and idyllic in turns, but this one has three narrators rather than one and it creates a beautifully balanced story.

Fly Trap, by Frances Hardinge: Another sequel that I liked even more than the first book. It, too, is filled with interesting characters and a setting so real you feel like you're there, but in a kind of ye olde fantasy England.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty: Pirates! Sea monsters! A middle-aged Muslim woman with a bad knee!

The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin: This is science fiction and fantasy and filled with textured worldbuilding, incredible characters, and high stakes relationships.

Honorable mentions:

• Gravity is the Thing, by Jaclyn Moriarty
• The Rivals, by Jane Pek (yet another sequel I liked better than the first book!)
• The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Graphic Novels:

• Skim, words by Mariko Tamaki and art by Jillian Tamaki
• The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag

Poetry:

• They Never Asked: Senryū Poetry from the WWII Portland Assembly Center, edited and translated by Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa

Non-Fiction:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander: If you're only going to read one non-fiction book a year, make this one. It constituted 90% of the reality I engaged with last year, and I won't lie, it's a rough read, but Alexander makes it super accessible.

Cookbooks:

The Elements of Baking, by Katarina Cermelj: A beautiful cookbook and an excellent reference for free-from baking, with a framework for how to adapt recipes to be gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, vegan, or a combination of these things.

You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible, by Margaret Eby: A cookbook, yes, but really more of a gentle hug.

For everything I read in 2025, there's my Goodreads Year in Books, though you have to be logged on in order to see it, or you can check out my book report tag here on Dreamwidth.

I picked this up knowing nothing about it except that it was science fiction, and I spent the entire book trying to figure out where it was going, but in a good way. It starts out with a raid, so I was thinking military SF, but then it quickly transitions into a mystery, and from there we go through some spy shit, a bit of romance, a Mission Impossible-style heist, a miner's strike, and, finally, cyberpunk. It's quite a ride. It's got unremarkable queerness (people are queer! it goes unremarked upon!), the protagonist is a woman of color of........complicated origins, and there's a fascinating relationship between her and an AI. Cohen, as he calls himself, is hundreds of years old, controls dozens of networks, and has expensive tastes.

In part, this book is about memory, what your memories make you, and who you are without them, and at times I felt like it was messing with my memory because it seemed to be skipping over important things in the investigation and in the spy shit. Like how did Li get her Beretta back? They took her knife, but left her with that gun and the ammo for it? No. It's also the kind of science fiction that comes with a ten page bibliography at the end in case you want to read up on quantum entanglement, but just tosses you into the world, dumps a bunch of new terminology on you, and lets you figure things out on your own. Which I mostly did, but it's a bit of an uphill trudge at the beginning.

This is the first in a trilogy, a fact I discovered when I was 82% through this one, and happily my library had the other two ebooks, as well, so I checked out the second book as soon as I was done with this one.

Contains: sexual assault, attempted rape—brief and not lingered upon; (sexual?) slavery—underpins a side relationship in the book.