no overarching, coherent theme for the reading and watching this month, but did come across some great stuff (and i’m almost done with a book that is practically certain to be a new favorite, but that’s technically june news, so wait and see!)
n.k. jemisin continues to be incredible and I Love Boosters rules. long live boots riley!
BOOKS
The Fifth Season (2015), N. K. Jemisin
It took me a bit to settle into this one, but by the end I was all-in. Lots of really fun, fascinating, cool stuff going on here narratively and thematically and with the world-building. Jemisin is an all-timer! not an immediate favorite of my heart the same way that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was, but still, well worth my time and i’ll eagerly read the rest of the trilogy.
Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of the Unknowing (2026), James K. A. Smith
an interesting book! in part because of the introspection that it prompted and the thinking about how i find the sort of unknowing that smith describes here (and then wondering if i ever have or if all the experiences that i may have previously classified that way are actually better understood as something else)
particularly of note here, i think, is the way that smith links mysticism and the avant-garde and sees them as serving the same purpose, experientially, for him. perhaps because the sort of meditative, solitude, mysticism that smith is drawing on is foreign to me and in many ways inaccessible given how i choose to structure my life, and perhaps because i don’t share smith’s affective response to avant-garde art, especially painting (which may be due to largely encountering these paintings as photo reproductions and not in their original, more obviously material form), the whole experiential underpinnings of smith’s argument just aren’t there for me. this mostly just made reading the book a fascinating sorta anthropological experience of trying to understand someone seemingly much like myself but also quite different (and in so doing perhaps understand myself better)
Funny Story (2024), Emily Henry
a pretty straight-up romance doing all the classic romance things and executed very well. funny! insightful! moving moments!
also just really artfully crafted in terms of set-up and all that to accomplish what it sets out to do. well done emily henry.
The Determined (2026), Rachel Rueckert
thrilled to finally sit down and read this! rachel’s great, i’ve loved anne bonny and mary read as long as i can remember, so very excited for it. and it’s good! rachel weaves together the story in a compelling way, using the structure and time to draw attention to different elements of the story and themes in ways that heighten the reading experience and help really dramatize some of what is at stake for these women and for us encountering their stories anew here
touches on lots of fascinating and complex and powerful ideas and ways of being a woman in the world. yo ho yo ho a pirate’s life for me!
The Obelisk Gate (2016), N. K. Jemisin
stronger than the first installment, i think. lots of really great, moving, jaw-dropping stuff here. builds on the fifth season in all the best ways a second installment should. loved it.
A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026), Michael Pollan
really interesting stuff here! love the way that pollan basically uses the book to mostly undo his sense of what consciousness is, even while digging deeper and deeper into it (and even if the conclusion still reaches somewhat for something to offer in terms of resolution). also just what a wild ride through the strangeness of the world and whatever consciousness may be! particularly loved the first chapter on sentience and what pollan does with plants (and, probably unsurprisingly, his work with feelings in the second chapter and the discussion of feeling vs thought, and all the humanistic elements in that discussion).
one of the things i have found very interesting in pollan’s more recent work (say the last 5-10 years?) is what i see as religious or spiritual impulses or implications around a lot of what he does, but his lack of interest (or willingness?) to really pursue those directions. just interesting to me (given my own abiding interest in religious/spiritual questions and frameworks for speaking to our current moment
The Navigating Fox (2023), Christopher Rowe
Fun! Lots of really cool worldbuilding and interesting ideas at play and sufficiently compelling action, but the ending is a bit underwhelming and the emotional/thematic mystery that becomes prioritized in the ending is not the strength of the novella.
But, if I were a kid and had read this, i’d absolutely be playing games inspired by the world and lore of this book! really incredible work sketching out the world and suggesting there’s more beyond what’s being described without ever feeling bogged down in it.
Yesteryear (2026), Caro Claire Burke
so much to say about this. definitely a page-turner, keeps you engaged and interested throughout, tackling some necessary and relevant themes and topics for our present moment. a little over half-way through i started to suspect i was going to be dissatisfied and frustrated with the conclusion and i was right! partially for structural reasons—i think the way the mystery and twist/reveal is handled requires the book to to break some of its own rules, denying its characters their own agency/perspectives AND i think it cheapens the whole conversation the book is tackling, raising way more questions than it even considers really addressing.
i think the narrator is so close to a really complex, fascinating, compelling insight into the influencer/tradwife/conservative-religious-woman world, but the choices for the conclusion of the book undermine so much of the potential that was present before, insisting on the least interesting, least generous reading of the character, and that bums me out!
the last third of the book also just has so much going on that i think should have been front-loaded, then tease out the rest of everything, and really delve into the complexities implied by the wildness of that back third. but alas.
FILMS AND TELEVISION
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
love the gentleness of this as it grapples with big feelings and the way the strange magical elements are just woven throughout and not explained (either explained away or given like a world-building lore background—they just are!)
movie night with the fam
Lion (2016)
dev is so good, even in this full-length feature film advertisement for google earth
(i like it! it’s moving and good and interesting and sia’s end-credits song is catchy as hell)
Sound of Metal (2019)
finally convinced cec to watch this with me and it holds up. riz ahmed is incredible. just a fantastic performer that deserves way more credit and attention. love him here.
and this whole film is just beautifully crafted and artfully, intentionally put together to really help you experience and be with ruben in the midst of this event that he experiences as a chaotic disruption to his life. also love how everyone we meet feels like a real, fleshed out person, even if we only get little glimpses of them.
still just an incredible movie. so so so good
and that final sequence? chef’s kiss
Ratatouille (2007)
gotta know which ideas came first for this—a rat that loves to cook? a bastard child of a chef who is actually terrible at cooking? the french rat culture of eating garbage but playing jazz? a rat that turns a human into a puppet by pulling their hair?
a great time
movie night with the fam
Ramy Youssef: In Love (2026)
ramy’s so good. also loved the fun, film stock stylistic flourishes/imperfections here
Serpico (1973)
gotta love a man with a code tortured by his adherence to it given the corrupt world he finds himself in
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
the scene where moses and ramses talk right before the destroying angel goes around is sooo devastating
ramses saying to moses “but then again, you were always there to get me out of [trouble] again” with the hint of a smile?
ramses’ son being afraid of the dark and standing with the torch so only the mouth of the crocodile in the mural behind him is visible?
the light showing more and more of the mural until the final shot after ramses’ declaration of there being a great cry in all of egypt showing everything cementing the parallel and foreshadowing the death that is coming?!?
incredible economic thematically unified storytelling
the way you can see the warmth and love between them almost come back to the surface with this whole possibility of a different resolution to the story and then we watch ramses harden and turn away from that possibility but for tragically believable and almost commendable reasons (mixed with pride/evil/etc) is just some of the best the movie has to offer
this movie’s so good
Troy (2004)
this is, uh, not good
certainly suffers by comparison to my recent re-read of SONG OF ACHILLES and also re-watching THE PRINCE OF EGYPT in the midst of working our way through its 3-hr runtime.
watched the director’s cut, which is maybe worse than the theatrical? i don’t know--hard to remember it exactly from that newborn late night/early morning haze when i watched it the first time. they take out josh groban’s end-credits song! a tragedy for the 2004-ness of it all
brad pitt manages to make achilles EASILY the least interesting person in the story, which is truly a feat
and then the screenwriters and director and most of the actors all conspire together to really render this as boring and unemotional as possible
with the exception of eric bana, who is doing pretty good work here
Finding Nemo (2003)
lots of delightful world building/random story touches—hippie turtles, sharks in recovery, fish that know about dentistry, etc
movie night with the fam
Chef (2014)
jon favreau wish fulfillment that is also incredibly 2014
I Love Boosters (2026)
HELL YEAH
this is the janky, bonkers, vibrant, stuffed-to-the-gills, radical kind of movie that i want from boots riley.
the music throughout is on point. the movie is in many ways aggressively obvious with its themes and takeaways, but does so with such style and aplomb and heart that it works (clearer articulation of marxist riffing on hegel than i’ve heard in any of the critical theory classes i took in grad school). AND importantly, the movie has so much else going on that is not explained and that sits alongside the other stuff that you can’t simply reduce it to that radical political message
the practical effects and miniatures here are delightful, just a riot—the whole third act is amazing. just went for it in similar fashion to sorry to bother you and i am here for it!
performances are great—love lakeith in his supporting role, keke palmer is so good, eiza gonzalez is great, and everybody is really just a delight to watch and be around
could be a fun, disorienting double-feature with the devil wears prada or a rich pairing with the underseen blindspotting, which also is about oakland and gentrification with music and musicality being central to what the film does, but is otherwise quite different
White Collar, Season 4 (2012-13)
after a long hiatus we finally returned to watching White Collar and it’s still great. i think this is probably the weakest season so far—the overall arc of the season is just not as engaging as previous and doesn’t fully engage the strength of the show—peter and neil’s relationship. but still fun heist-y/con shenanigans
Robin Hood (1973)
still perfect. love it and love that the kids love it
movie night with the fam
Totoro is a near constant fixture in my home