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A short review of every book I read in 2025

A Month in the Country, J. L. Carr A fun, quick read about trying to live a normal life again after the Great War. A young man gets a lucky job in rural England restoring a mural in a cathedral, and permits himself the cautious optimism to enjoy nice dinners and make friends and fall in love with women. In supremely British fashion, our narrator only tangentially even brings up that he was even in the war, emphasizing that he was a radio operator or something that kept him away from combat, and that his shell shock isn’t so bad. The appreciation of Anglican murals, a pretty lady who is married to a severe man in a giant and poorly kept house, and the social textures of the English village make for a nostalgic story about the idea of a more heartfelt, first “post-war order” for an author writing from the middle of the second one. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson Straight banger. An epistolary novel from the perspective of an old, dying man, a preacher in the rural Ameri...
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The DISS-possessed Is What I Would Call It If I Thought It Were Bad (But I Don't)

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      I’ve read a lot of thoughtful writing about Ursula K. Le Guin recently (like here ), so I figured it’s as good a time to jump into her work as any. I had read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (online here ), and picked up and enjoyed the first Earthsea book, so I went for this lovely 50th anniversary edition of The Dispossessed:       If you’re unfamiliar like I was, The Dispossessed concerns the scientist Shevek leaving his anarchist commune homeworld of Anarres to become a guest lecturer at a foreign university. The world of Anarres is typically completely cut off from foreign interaction, especially with the hyper-capitalist hellscape of A-Io that martyred Annares’s Marx-like philosophical progenitor named Odo, exiled its founders and first citizens, and hosts Shevek now. He has made a discovery about the simultaneous nature of time, on par with the theory of relativity, and he is determined to share it with other worlds. A...
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Metaphor: ReFantazio

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Full spoilers ahead        2010: The Social Network comes to theaters. Great movie, incisive, foreboding. Occasionally met with the criticism that Mark Zuckerberg can’t really be that bad, can he? This must be a hyper-dramatized version of the story for film that needs Zuck to bring about his own tragic downfall.       2013: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance releases, featuring a climactic sword fight with a roided-out American super senator. This is seen as over the top, camp, an observation of American politics from a famously idiosyncratic outsider auteur.       2013, later: The Purge releases. Reasonably successful, but surely way too heavy handed to take seriously. The Romney-like Young Republican bad guy puts on a mask and does snarling monologues about how much he loves killing poor people? Come on.       Here in 2025, these and more have gotten their due as ahead ...
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Final Fantasy 7: Retrospective

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      In the past five or so years, the band Paramore has made a huge comeback. They have a new sound and are bigger than ever, but when they go on tour people still want to hear the breakout mid-2000s hit that made them famous, “Misery Business.” “Misery Business,” a pop punk inversion of “Jolene,” is a gloating anthem about sticking it to The Other Woman after the singer character successfully waits her out and re-secures the affections of a man. The singer character also calls the other woman a “whore,” and Paramore endured a controversial uproar over the line where lead singer Hayley Williams eventually resolved to stop saying the word live.     A theme that defines Final Fantasy 7 Remake (FF7R), then, is the next evolution of this impulse. Not a version of “Misery Business” with one word excised, but a rewrite of the song where the singer character and Other Woman overcome their differences. I’m not the first to say this, but Final Fantasy VII (1997) i...
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Bo Burnham's Inside: Out Now

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                                            (Content warning: discussions of suicide, which is doubly true for Inside itself)      An interesting thing happened when Hannah Gadsby blew everyone away with Nanette , which is that I cried a lot. But in a wider context, a bunch of newly minted comedy scientists lurched out of their hovels with joke-ometers in hand to insist that Nanette was bad because it didn’t have enough jokes in it. I can already foresee the same obtuse criticism being levied against Bo Burnham’s new special, Inside , so I’m here telling you to please ignore those people until they dissolve back into slime. Inside was shot and edited by Burnham entirely within his house during the pandemic, so I promise that A) it is a piece of media about the pandemic that is actually good and B) most people (understandably) wouldn’t expect ...
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Why You Should Get HBOMax: Warrior

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       With two posts we’ve officially got a  series cookin’, baby. My last one hinted at this, but the next of HBOMax’s underappreciated all-stars is another Cinemax show, Warrior . Based on a treatment written by Bruce Lee before he died and even produced by his daughter Shannon, it tells the story of Chinese immigrant Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) coming to San Francisco during the Reconstruction and infiltrating the criminal underworld of Chinatown to find his estranged sister. He joins up with the heir apparent of a local gang, Jason Tobin as Young Jun, to investigate. Meanwhile, the crucible of turn-of-the-century America is heating up San Francisco as the rest of the cast try to take control of the city.      True to Bruce’s legacy, this struggle involves no shortage of beautifully constructed ass-beatings every single episode. Andrew Koji carries the lead role extremely well through the show’s intricate fight choreography. Warrior brings us everyt...
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Mortal Kombat: A Hot and Cold Disappointment

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  Finally, a video game movie that captures the feeling of handing the controller off to your older brother to beat the hard level. Mortal Kombat (2021) has a few genuinely interesting ideas and decent looking fights that it has no idea what to do with. It was all downhill from action legend Joe Taslim blood knifing Scorpion in the trailer. His involvement had my interest from the moment I heard about it and his resume is undeniably stacked, but unfortunately it fails to cohere into a sensible film.     The story follows MMA fighter and loving family man Cole Young (Lewis Tan). He’s an underdog and he cares about his daughter a lot but we spend very little time with this part of him before his his Mortal Kombat birthright, foreshadowed by a prologue sequence and the best action setpiece in the film between Sub Zero (Taslim) and Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, comes home to roost. He’s attacked by the very same Sub Zero and rescued by Jax (Mechad Brooks), who tells him w...
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