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Week in review: Week to 3 January
Jan. 4th, 2026 08:14 amWe got to do several fun things with the out-of-town family members while they were back in town for the holidays, including Parkrun, a game night, and horse-and-buggy rides provided by a friend of one of my siblings. At the game night, we played Uno No Mercy, Dixit, Saboteur, and the imaginatively-titled That Sound Game, a variant on charades where non-verbal sound clues are allowed and hand gestures are forbidden. While the buggy was being set up, we were all encouraged to take a turn at hand-feeding treats to the horses; I haven't done that since I was a boy, and it turns out to be much more fun when you know you've got the technique down and have stopped worrying about losing a finger. I got a case of sunburn that I still haven't entirely recovered from, but it was worth it.
Books:
The first part of the week was devoted to finding books that would tick off multiple reading challenge prompts at once before the end-of-year deadline.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows was a great success: three challenge prompts in one blow ("Food and Drink", "Hopeful", and "Alliteration") -- and, more importantly, I enjoyed it a lot and never felt uncertain about whether I wanted to continue reading. (I feel like I've been writing or contemplating the sentence 'This book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun' a slightly worrying amount this year, but anyway this book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun.)
I didn't get on so well with Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree, although I enjoyed it well enough to get through it. Something about it didn't quite click, and I think part of the trouble was a mismatch of expectations. When that first occurred to me, I thought it was because it's a subgenre I don't read so often, but when I got to the epilogue I decided that it was (also) that it's a prequel to a book I haven't read. I'd assumed that being chronologically first would mean I didn't need to know anything going in, but research suggests that the characters whose arcs I was having the most trouble getting a bead on are the ones who also appear in the original novel, and who therefore the author had grounds to assume the reader would already know where they were going to end up. (It may also have suffered by comparison to The Guernsey Literary; they're both books about the transformative power of reading but their approaches and styles differ significantly, and I know which one I prefer.)
In the end, I completed nearly all of my 2025 reading challenges -- I was only one prompt short on one challenge, and halfway through the book that would have filled that prompt, but I decided I'd be happier if I finished the book at its own pace than if I tried to cram 350 pages in one evening for the sake of an arbitrary goal. The reading goals that mattered were "Read books" and "Have fewer unread books at the end of the year", both of which I passed with flying colours.
For 2026, I've cut back a bit, and am only doing two main reading challenges: a monthly themed challenge and a new iteration of the book chain.
The first reading prompt for the book chain is "a book you're excited to read", which is a bit of a stumper: if I had a book handy that I was excited to read, I'd have read it already. Worst case, the book chain's not getting started until Platform Decay comes out in May. Anyway, I decided to start laying groundwork by clearing out some books I'm definitely not excited to read: I officially DNFed some of the books I'd paused on StoryGraph, and returned three unread library books that I'd got out as potential candidates for the old year's last few reading challenge prompts.
The first prompt of the monthly themed challenge is also proving unhelpful; I've placed holds on a few possibilities at the library, but none have come in yet.
In the mean time, I've finally got around to starting Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a story about a country where free speech is being restricted one letter at a time (first they ban the use of all words containing the letter Z, and so on). The story is told in letters and documents, so the restrictions are reflected in the storytelling itself.
The timed readalong of The Dark Is Rising is technically still going on, but I couldn't restrain myself and finished reading already. It's still a very good novel, and the BBC radio adaptation a few years ago did not do it justice. I'm undecided about whether I'll go on and re-read the rest of the series; there is more good writing to come, but the direction the series ended up taking never sat right with me.
Movies:
I watched Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson's new murder mystery, with friends, and we had fun discussing our theories as we went along. We've all seen enough other locked room mysteries that we each immediately suspected the key points of who did the deed and how, but it was still interesting to follow the uncovering of the details and the revelations about who else was involved and why. And, like Knives Out before it, the story isn't just about solving the murder; the protagonist, and at least some of the supporting characters, have their own personal journeys to go on, and in the end a kind heart is just as important as a clever brain. (That was something I felt was missing in Glass Onion, and I was glad to see it back.)
TV:
I've made it to the end of Bille August's TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. It eventually becomes apparent that this version of the story is mainly interested in Edmond and Mercedes. The scenes where one is pining for the other are among the few scenes that actually work, and the scene in the park where they're standing within arm's reach, looking each other in the eyes, and still yearning for each other over a seemingly unbridgeable emotional chasm, is probably the best scene in the whole thing -- and shows that the writer does in fact know what subtext is and has a grasp of the concept of conveying information without having a character baldly state it, which I had been beginning to seriously doubt. I mentioned that there was a moment in the first episode that moved me to audibly-expressed derision; this scene includes the moment paying off that bit of set-up, in an action whose import is clear to both characters and the audience without a word spoken, and I have to admit that the pay-off is actually pretty good. The set-up remains solid gold bullshit, and typical of the writer's tendency throughout to have characters do what's convenient to him without regard for whether it makes any sense for someone of that time and social status. There are in fact, I grudgingly admit, several nice moments in the last few episodes which deliver interesting payoffs to set-ups that I disapprove of (the scene where the portrait of Mercedes sits in the background of every shot while Albert and his father have a conversation that conspicuously avoids mentioning her is another one). The construction of the revenge plot continues to be slapdash right up to the end, and a lot of scenes that ought to be dramatic fail to be because there's been no build-up to them or because the air was let out early.
Having got that out of the way, I rewarded myself by watching the first episode of the new season of The Traitors, a series reliably made by people who know how to tell a story about intrigue and betrayal properly.
Books:
The first part of the week was devoted to finding books that would tick off multiple reading challenge prompts at once before the end-of-year deadline.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows was a great success: three challenge prompts in one blow ("Food and Drink", "Hopeful", and "Alliteration") -- and, more importantly, I enjoyed it a lot and never felt uncertain about whether I wanted to continue reading. (I feel like I've been writing or contemplating the sentence 'This book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun' a slightly worrying amount this year, but anyway this book was a pleasant reminder that reading can actually be fun.)
I didn't get on so well with Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree, although I enjoyed it well enough to get through it. Something about it didn't quite click, and I think part of the trouble was a mismatch of expectations. When that first occurred to me, I thought it was because it's a subgenre I don't read so often, but when I got to the epilogue I decided that it was (also) that it's a prequel to a book I haven't read. I'd assumed that being chronologically first would mean I didn't need to know anything going in, but research suggests that the characters whose arcs I was having the most trouble getting a bead on are the ones who also appear in the original novel, and who therefore the author had grounds to assume the reader would already know where they were going to end up. (It may also have suffered by comparison to The Guernsey Literary; they're both books about the transformative power of reading but their approaches and styles differ significantly, and I know which one I prefer.)
In the end, I completed nearly all of my 2025 reading challenges -- I was only one prompt short on one challenge, and halfway through the book that would have filled that prompt, but I decided I'd be happier if I finished the book at its own pace than if I tried to cram 350 pages in one evening for the sake of an arbitrary goal. The reading goals that mattered were "Read books" and "Have fewer unread books at the end of the year", both of which I passed with flying colours.
For 2026, I've cut back a bit, and am only doing two main reading challenges: a monthly themed challenge and a new iteration of the book chain.
The first reading prompt for the book chain is "a book you're excited to read", which is a bit of a stumper: if I had a book handy that I was excited to read, I'd have read it already. Worst case, the book chain's not getting started until Platform Decay comes out in May. Anyway, I decided to start laying groundwork by clearing out some books I'm definitely not excited to read: I officially DNFed some of the books I'd paused on StoryGraph, and returned three unread library books that I'd got out as potential candidates for the old year's last few reading challenge prompts.
The first prompt of the monthly themed challenge is also proving unhelpful; I've placed holds on a few possibilities at the library, but none have come in yet.
In the mean time, I've finally got around to starting Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a story about a country where free speech is being restricted one letter at a time (first they ban the use of all words containing the letter Z, and so on). The story is told in letters and documents, so the restrictions are reflected in the storytelling itself.
The timed readalong of The Dark Is Rising is technically still going on, but I couldn't restrain myself and finished reading already. It's still a very good novel, and the BBC radio adaptation a few years ago did not do it justice. I'm undecided about whether I'll go on and re-read the rest of the series; there is more good writing to come, but the direction the series ended up taking never sat right with me.
Movies:
I watched Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson's new murder mystery, with friends, and we had fun discussing our theories as we went along. We've all seen enough other locked room mysteries that we each immediately suspected the key points of who did the deed and how, but it was still interesting to follow the uncovering of the details and the revelations about who else was involved and why. And, like Knives Out before it, the story isn't just about solving the murder; the protagonist, and at least some of the supporting characters, have their own personal journeys to go on, and in the end a kind heart is just as important as a clever brain. (That was something I felt was missing in Glass Onion, and I was glad to see it back.)
TV:
I've made it to the end of Bille August's TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. It eventually becomes apparent that this version of the story is mainly interested in Edmond and Mercedes. The scenes where one is pining for the other are among the few scenes that actually work, and the scene in the park where they're standing within arm's reach, looking each other in the eyes, and still yearning for each other over a seemingly unbridgeable emotional chasm, is probably the best scene in the whole thing -- and shows that the writer does in fact know what subtext is and has a grasp of the concept of conveying information without having a character baldly state it, which I had been beginning to seriously doubt. I mentioned that there was a moment in the first episode that moved me to audibly-expressed derision; this scene includes the moment paying off that bit of set-up, in an action whose import is clear to both characters and the audience without a word spoken, and I have to admit that the pay-off is actually pretty good. The set-up remains solid gold bullshit, and typical of the writer's tendency throughout to have characters do what's convenient to him without regard for whether it makes any sense for someone of that time and social status. There are in fact, I grudgingly admit, several nice moments in the last few episodes which deliver interesting payoffs to set-ups that I disapprove of (the scene where the portrait of Mercedes sits in the background of every shot while Albert and his father have a conversation that conspicuously avoids mentioning her is another one). The construction of the revenge plot continues to be slapdash right up to the end, and a lot of scenes that ought to be dramatic fail to be because there's been no build-up to them or because the air was let out early.
Having got that out of the way, I rewarded myself by watching the first episode of the new season of The Traitors, a series reliably made by people who know how to tell a story about intrigue and betrayal properly.
