May 11
Just a few movies:
And several books:
- Affluenza
- Quentins
- Meridian
- The Beet Queen
- Unburnable
- The Radiance of the King
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
- Fledgling
- Kindred
The month got off to a bad start, reading wise. The premise (increasing affluence doesn't make for happier society; in fact growing consumerism and emphasis on acquisition may make people less happy) of Affluenza is one I am interested in and sympathetic to, but this Affluenza (there's another, better book with the same title) was so terrible that as I read it, I kept wanting to poke its author in the eye. In the acknowledgements, the author himself gave me the exact words to describe why I hated his book, describing an early manuscript as "incoherent, sometimes sexist, often ethnocentric and frequently self-obsessed". The final version of the book is not, as far as I can tell, a substantial improvement.
There were two highlights of my April reading, two books that made me, after I finished them, want to lend them to other people so they could have the pleasure of reading them too*. These were Marie-Elena John's Unburnable, which I wrote about before, and plan to write about again, and Octavia Butler's Fledgling, which made me sad that there will be no more new novels by Ms. Butler.
As for my movie viewing, I've been waiting for months to see The Last King of Scotland (I missed it during its fleeting stay in the local cineplex), and it did not disappoint. The Bone Collector was as cheesy the second time around as it was when I first watched it, and I Think I Love My Wife was just... I don't know, it just didn't work.
* If you're in Barbados and you want a borrow, drop me a line (titilayoATgallimaufryDOTws), and we can try to work something out. ↵