Consumption Diary: August 2024

MUSIC

BOOKS

I re-read Living in the Maniototo a few more times (and dipped back into Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy and Parade) in August as I prepared my talk for the symposium on Reading Janet Frame (for) Today on the 30th. It was a great event!

I also read:

The Material World by Ed Conway (non-fiction, audiobook, 2023, UK) - this really did make me look at the (material) world differently. I highly recommend it.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (non-fiction, audiobook, 2024, US) - this was basically a recapitulation of Haidt's previous work on anti-fragility, repackaged as an anti-phone treatise. He admits as much toward the end of the book.

Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova (novel, audiobook, 2022, Canada) - okay.

Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (novel, audiobook, 2024, Colombia, translated) - I can see why GGM wasn't keen on this being published, but also why his literary executors thought better of his wishes and pubbed it anyway.

James by Percival Everett (novel, audiobook, 2024, US) - I retelling of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective. In the spirit of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Everett employs alternative history (Jim and the other slaves are highly educated and eloquent, but speak in their dumbed-down patois to white people for a range of reasons) in such a way that you realise the "history" was also partly fiction. Unfortunately, the book is limited by the picaresque nature of the original narrative so that, like any remake, it never quite becomes its own thing, and like any road-trip (or river-trip) novel, it never quite feels complete, but merely finished.

Chosen by Geoff Cochrane (poetry, physical book, 2020, NZ) - this came out as I was preparing to move islands and I didn't get around to reading it before Geoff died, or his posthumous best of came out. Now that I've read this last collection, it's time to delve into the best of (I suspect it will suffer the same problem that Owen Marshall's 2x best of story collections have, in that the quirky, interstitial pieces might not carry the individual heft to make it into a best of, but leaving them all out means the sum of the parts is less than the whole impression of breadth and deliberate unevenness -- or maybe willingness to subvert reader expectations is a kinder way to put it -- in any one collection)… We shall see!!!

Fire and Blood by George R.R. Martin (fiction, audiobook, 2018, US) - I quite liked Season 2 of House of the Dragon, but became increasingly intrigued by what book readers were saying about how much action was left to come in the show's final two seasons, so I became a book reader myself and... this was not my cup of tea. I read the first two novels in A Song of Fire and Ice and quite liked them, but feel no compunction to read the rest. But Fire and Blood is not a novel, but a collection of fictional histories Martin knocked out for certain anthologies. The sections that inform House of the Dragon are the most engaging, but they are still pretty tedious. I guess I'm no Westeros completist.

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen (novel, audiobook, 2004, US) - Several times I felt like I'd read this book before, but I can't find any hard evidence. This speaks badly for Hiaasen and/or me. 

FILM & TV

The Olympics (how good were they?)

Colin from Accounts - Season 2

Taskmaster NZ Season 5

Anyone But You

The Sixth Sense

Masterminds

Hate to Love: Nickelback

Remembering Gene Wilder

The Last of the Mohicans

How to Rob a Bank

Untold: The Murder of Air McNair