February through May 2026 in review
It's been a while, hey? For a while, I just wasn't doing much other than playing FFXIV and watching youtube. I eked out a book here and there, and even fewer films. But in four months I suppose I got together a tolerable list.
Reading
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester, 1956
I only finished one book in February, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Bester is somehow best known for The Demolished Man, a quite good book that is nothing like as good as this book. Bester was a Jewish man who worked in television writing, who wrote a little SF on the side. Then he started writing it more and more, until he produced these two novels and a number of short stories.
Stars is basically retelling of Man in the Iron Mask, by Dumas. Here, Gully Foyle is dying, adrift on a ruined spaceship, and manages to get off the SOS signals when a ship flies by. It ignores him and leaves, at which point he swears revenge. The novel is then, basically, a kind of twisted bildungsroman where a man who barely thought about anything becomes clever, calculating, and intelligent just to have his revenge, helped by a love affair with a fellow inmate in prison (a lot happens in this book; Foyle goes to prison at one point).
The things apart from the kick-ass plot that make the book noteworthy are that it's considered a very early precursor of cyberpunk, the sentence level writing is fantastic, and there are a lot of fucked up SF things just wedged in because they're cool (positive). There's a guy who was exposed to so much radiation that he's fine but he's "hot," so he can't spend more than 10 minutes in any room, by law. People can learn to teleport, and the backstory of that includes a bunch of scientists locking their colleague in a tube they filled up, nearly killing him, just to duplicate his findings. There's a solar system civil war that looks very familiar if you've seen Gundam.
The main character rapes a woman at one point, it's worth mentioning that. He's also not a hero, so the book is very clear that it was a bad thing and it also fucks him over very specifically, later.
People from My Hometown, Hiromi Kawakami, 2016 (trans. 2020)
I've read Kawakami's Record of a Night Too Brief, and even taught it in the past, so I was really looking forward to this -- and I was right. It goes off the wall immediately, with the narrator telling us in a matter-of-fact way about how there's some kind of pixie sprite in her neighborhood that she met one day when she flipped over a tarp on the ground. It moved in with her, and never aged, even though she did, and it comes and goes, and doesn't understand why she's getting older.
It's sort of kind of Winesburg OH but "Magical Realism." I say that with love, it's probably what someone would say who didn't hate the term "magical realism" the way I do. People bet on how many flies are hovering over pigs; aliens invade; gods appear on the beach and bless people with minor luck; the school board makes the new school out of candy and chocolate and bread and then moves everyone back out when summer comes and it all melts. You never quite get used to exactly how mad the town is, in Kawakami's imagination, even as she sedately spends more time wondering at her childhood friend's change in personality instead of the way someone killed a man who was secretly the Lord of the Flies.
Scribbles, volume 3, Kaoru Mori, 2022 (trans. 2024)
This is the third and so far final volume of the sketchbook collections from the manga-ka who did Emma and The Bride's Story. Famous on Cohost for being "extremely straight, no seriously," Scribbles will go along and have sketches of rats and foxes and then 10 straight pages of women in their underwear, bunny costumes, tight pencil skirts, and nothing at all. At one point in this volume, Mori admitted that she'll get the urge to draw a man sometimes, but then end up being more interested in drawing his clothes than him -- so all her men look the same.
I enjoy the joke, and do genuinely wonder if we have a gay lady on our mind here, but of course A: it's not really our business I guess, and B: there do appear to be straight women who kind of make a career out of drawing very male-gaze-coded pinups, so who can say? The drawings are good, either way.
A Garden of Spheres volume 1, Linnea Sterte, 2025
PONTIFUS DON'T READ THIS ONE
Anyway. This comic reminds me of the sort of things I was reading in high school. No one in my hometown carried Heavy Metal, but they did carry this other magazine, the name of which I can't remember. It wasn't Realms of Fantasy, that was short stories. So yeah, I was reading this monthly anthology comic in the 90s with all kinds of stuff totally unlike the rest of the comics I was reading. I liked some of the pieces, and didn't like others, but even as a foolish teen I enjoyed getting to see stuff I didn't otherwise have access to.
GoS is like that for two reasons: one, it's very Not American Comics, and two, I appreciate and respect it but ended up not caring for it all that much. The art is fantastic; Sterte has said in interviews she's specifically interested in drawing nature because it's "messy," so her panels are full of amazing detail. The color sections are close to but not quite at pastel green as an overall hue, and the b&w pages feel like you'll never see everything in there. For me, it was the narrative that did me in. It's extremely difficult to follow, and that appears to be intentional. Sterte says in the back of the book this was a project to flesh out a setting that just keeps appearing in her head. Unfortunately for me personally, that means I can't focus. The POV character is often not in whole chapters, and when she is, her whole deal is she doesn't know anything about herself. So to be clear, this is a very genuine example of it being me, not the book. It's just a not a For Me kind of thing. But I'm glad I read it. And I want to read more by the artist. Just probably not more of this specific series.
The Lantern and Night Moths (Yilin Wang, translator, 2024).
You may know Wang from when she spread across social media when she discovered The British Museum was using her translations without credit. Cue the jokes about the British Museum's relationship to other people owning things here. I saw this news, and reacted as one does, when one doesn't live anywhere near London, and thought that sucked. Later, Wang's book of translations came across my timeline separately, and I put it on my wishlist. I finally got hold of it and it's quite good. I don't know much to say about the book itself, other than that it's good, and thoughtful, and the translations read excellently most of the time. The selections are also nice, from a spread of periods and types of poet in China you don't often see in English language editions like this.
Tao te Ching (Addiss & Lombardo, translators, 2007)
A nice hardcover edition of a book I've always meant to read. There are passages that, as you might expect, are spiritually and philosophically inspiring. Its also funny how, as the book goes on, it becomes more and more clear this is meant for rulers, not just... people. A lot of the things people draw from Daoism are originally meant, it turns out, to help rulers keep their peasants in line by pretending to be meek and polite.
This is one of those books it feels odd to review at all. You know if you want to read the Tao te Ching or not. The translation seems quite good.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Kawakami, 2014; translation 2024).
I rarely read the same person's books so close together, for fear of getting sick of them, but not here. This is a novel, not a collection of short stories, though Kawakami leans on her skill in the succinct fantastic short short to structure a lot of her chapters. Only as they build up do you get a sense of the whole.
I went in knowing literally nothing about the plot, and that may be the way to do it, but, let me return here.
The basic set up is that humankind declined in the past and scientists set up divided, separated communities, administered by watchers and mysterious "mothers," trying to assure humankind's survival. How and why are best left to reading the book itself. It's odd and fun, sad and tragic, and admittedly very straight. You'd think that's not important, and it's not, really, but it kept striking me as I read it. It's good despite that though! I promise!
Word by Word (Stamper, 2018)
Stamper is a lexicographer who works for Merriam-Webster. This book is part memoir, part "how the sausage is made" nonfiction, and part lecture series on introductory linguistics. It's easy to read, delightfully entertaining, and genuinely educational. I may have already known the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar and language studies, but it's an important distinction and I'm glad there's a book out there for general readers discussing it.
If you already have a background in English or linguistics, the first couple of chapters may be slightly irritating. Stamper tries so hard to appeal to general readers that, early on, they keep saying things about you, the reader that, as I tell my students, risk losing the actual reader if they're wrong. And in my case, they were. But I knew what I was in for, so I stuck it out and after that slightly rough start the book was a delight.
Ghost in the Shell (Masamune, 1991)
I finally read it, and accidentally the censored version, I found out. I'm still trying to decide if I want to drop $100 to get the box set of everything, which is apparently the only way to get the uncensored lesbian orgy scene. I mean, I've seen it, I have the internet, but my copy is sullied.
In looking for info on the later volumes, I saw some... less than positive reviews of the last stretch, Man-Machine Interface. They said things like it's a bit plodding and navel-gazy, and at one point "the author was kind of sniffing his own farts." And... this collection feels that way. I liked it, mind you, in some ways better than the film version, but Masamune does tend to lay it on thick. And then sometimes in the midst of the climactic philosophical conversation (yes), Kusanagi will use words and, in authorial margin asides, Masamune will admit the terms are nonsense and mean nothing. What are we doing here then?!
It's still good, it's just very certain of itself in a way that maybe I would have better enjoyed fifteen years ago? Or twenty? I dunno. As with the Tao te Ching, you know if you're interested in this already.
The Homeric Hymns (Sargent, 1973)
Sigh. It's fine. I wanted a verse translation, and somehow or other I became convinced this was a recent translation. It's not. There's nothing wrong or objectionable about it on its own, apart from a total dearth of notes. It's just that translations date very quickly. I once interviewed a poet who did translations, back in grad school (it was C. K. Williams). He said translations date in about a decade. That's not a hard and fast rule, but I've found I agree with him time and time again.
The biggest sin this edition commits, I suppose, is that it follows the Greek syllable structure. Just... don't do that. It makes the lines feel interminable.
The Silmarillion (Tolkien, 1977)
Yes, I only just recently finished rereading it. I started on September 22, 2025. The middle drags, ok? The cosmological stuff in the beginning is great. Everything from Beren forward is good too (though I have somehow read the tale of Turin so many times that I'm sort of sick of it). But the middle is sort of like Kings and Chronicles in the Bible -- there's a lot of setting up the scenery for later stories, and a bunch of battles. It's not bad, but it's clear in those sections that the book just wasn't done. Tolkien edited the hell out of his books. These would be much tighter if he'd really finished it off.
I've thankfully lost the common fan dislike of Christopher Tolkien, but I do think the Silmarillion, as published, is a bit stitched together, with Christopher's writing trying to seamlessly blend things together. And while I'm not saying I can point to passages and identify who wrote them, the book overall just doesn't quite read correctly. In the past decade or so I've been engaged in reading all the "History of Middle-Earth" books, where Christopher ties things together with editorial notes, explaining the manuscript history and missing pieces, instead of trying to seamlessly blend everything together. And as often as it can be frustrating to find a story I was enjoying just never got finished, like The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers, it's also true that many of the untouched versions of the stories that were clearly stitched together into The Silmarillion just read better.
I'm glad I reread it. I hadn't read it front to back since I was 17 (so... a loooooong time ago, cough). But I think it'll likely be a long time before I read it from front to back again again.
The English Assassin (Moorcock, 1972)
I've also been slowly rereading Moorcock's Cornelius Quartet, a collection I read in undergrad of the four Cornelius novels he wrote, apart from all the short stories he and other authors wrote about the character. Jerry Cornelius is Moorcock's sexy 70s British spy character, ignoring explosions, having sex with any and all men and women he comes into contact with, all while dealing with entropy and the end of the world.
He may also be the puerile fantasies of the actual Jerry Cornelius, a feckless youth who lives in poverty with his mother.
He also also appears to be a version of the Eternal Champion, though as often as not it's his sister, Catherine, and their sometimes lover, Una Persson, who get more things done, in other stories.
This is the last piece in the book section so I might as well wax poetic, or something anyway. I wanted to read Moorcock, specifically his Elric stories, since I was in middle school. They were frequently mentioned in Inquest, a magazine on CCGs and RPGs I read obsessively in middle and high school. Moorcock, Lovecraft, Zelazny, and Donaldson were all authors I wanted to read desperately long before I actually got to, all through references in Inquest.
Well, in late middle school I found one collection of Elric stories. Only one was written by Moorcock, but I was 13, I didn't really care. Mostly the stories were great. Apart from Moorcock's, I remember one where Elric meets Jimi Hendrix; another where Elric has sex with a fantasy elf-like woman who is specifically described as having long and flexible fingers with which she does things to the champion's penis; and the Neil Gaiman story (I know) that ends up being about sexual assault in school that the narrator, who is strongly hinted to be a thinly-fictionalized Gaiman, just shrugs off (hahaaaaa I know I know). At any rate, the collection set the hook, but I couldn't find anything else until I was in college. I'd walk to the bookstore and pick up one of the handful of thin single-novel printings they had in stock.
At some point a few years later I got a huge box of Moorcock books off ebay -- I still haven't read every single book that came in that box.
So. Anyway. Cornelius is a really interesting thing within the Eternal Champion stories, because on his own he's a fun super-spy take on dystopia and politics and sex, but also he's a tongue-in-cheek parody of the Eternal Champion concept itself.
The English Assassin is "the weird one," in that sequence. The first two Cornelius books are fairly straightforward adventures. The first, The Final Programme, cribs Elric's origin story for the first third of Jerry's, in fact. Assassin barely features Cornelius. He's dead, floating around in the ocean in a weird box, or buried somewhere, or defleshed and in a crate tied down in a giant luxurious "flying boat." Moorcock began to use more and more techniques he was picking up from postmodern authors in mimetic fiction, so bulletins, a cavalcade of newspaper clippings of tragic deaths and injuries and callous attacks butt up against the carefree warmongering of the cast of characters, cast and recast again into strange new roles as the universe appears to keep changing.
CW: there's rape and much violence here. Be ye warned.
movies
There aren't nearly as many of course.
The Princess Bride (1987)
I rewatched it. It's good.
The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (1962)
Very good. The last black and white Zatoichi. It's a direct sequel, in that many characters reappear when Ichi visits the town from the first film, one year later, and new entanglements complicate the old ones. His brother -- played by the guy from Lone Wolf and Cub, appears as well. This movie kicks ass. The final seconds of film had me hooting and hollering, kicking my feet like a kid as I clamped my hands onto my head to keep it from exploding. Watch this movie. After the first one, at any rate.
King Kong (1933)
I'd never seen this before, although of course I've wanted to ever since I learned about it through cultural osmosis as a kid. The pacing is wild. The first like half an hour is just getting to the island. Only the last 20 minutes are back in New York, with Kong rampaging through the city. The rest of the movie, about 40 minutes probably, is on the island, letting rip a take on The Lost World but also with natives to be racist at, you know.
I was flabbergasted to find the hook for the movie is lifted entirely from Lovecraft. The movie producer learned, from a Norwegian sailor, that there was a mysterious island with a strange, ancient building; the sailor produced a document detailing its location. That's absolutely just the base of the third part of The Call of Cthulhu. I checked, too; the story was published several years before the movie. It seems likely, in a way I absolutely cannot prove, that a scriptwriter somewhere read it. This isn't important; it doesn't change the film or how I take it. It's just interesting to me.
I also finally know why Kong looks so weird. I've always thought he looks odd, when I've seen clips or still images. It's because he's just a Black man. There are multiple repeated shots of Kong's face, from below, as he leers down at Fay Wray, off screen, and it's straight up blackface. Kong is constructed to just look like minstrel show images of Black men, or more accurately I suppose, images of Black men preying on white women that would have been widespread at the time. The movie came out in 1933, I'm not saying anything revolutionary here. It just caught me off guard a bit.
Movie's good. Pacing's wild. I had to take two or three sessions to tackle it all, but I'm glad I did. There's more monster-wrasslin' than I was expecting. Kong just keeps fighting fuckers in that jungle. Good times.