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Week 14

Book: A Venetian Affair by Andrea di Robilant. A packet of old love letters is the entry point to a fascinating history of 18th century Venice, full of scheming politicians and courtesans, grand palaces, masked balls and intrigue. A true story. Recommended for readers who like Venice, history, and tales of forbidden love.

Movie: Toni Erdmann. A careerist’s overscheduled life is shaken up by the arrival of her father, who likes putting on false teeth and playing practical jokes. Maren Ade’s low-key comedy topped the Sight & Sound critics’ poll last year. It’s less funny-ha ha than oddly touching, especially when it evokes the loneliness of our supposedly connected world. Recommended for viewers who live in fear that their parents will embarrass them in front of their colleagues. Like, everyone.

Week 15

Book: The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill. It’s the 1970s, New York City is bankrupt and reeking of uncollected garbage. Beautiful but decrepit old buildings are being torn down to make way for boring new buildings. An antiques dealer enlists his preteen son to “salvage” gargoyles, tiles and other ornaments from building facades—salvage as in steal. A love story about architecture, written in compelling prose that ends abruptly. Or maybe I wanted to find out how the narrator spent his 20s and 30s before appearing as his older self. Recommended for readers who love architecture, New York, and young protagonists in non-YA novels.

Movie: The Ticket. Dan Stevens (Legion) plays a blind man who suddenly, inexplicably recovers his sight and turns into a jerk. Recommended for viewers who just want to see Dan Stevens. Eh, just watch Legion again.

Week 16

Book: Submission by Michel Houellebecq.

TV: Decline and Fall (miniseries). A nimble three-part adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel about a mousy young man (Jack Whitehall) who gets kicked out of university through no fault of his own, and ends up teaching in a remote school crawling with eccentrics, grotesques, and criminals. I read the novel in college and recall it being more manic. Recommended if you love early Evelyn Waugh, school stories, 1930s fashions or British accents.

Week 17

Book: Jeeves in the Offing by P.G. Wodehouse. I always keep some P.G. Wodehouse books (He wrote about a hundred) in reserve to ward off glumness. I really needed this after the Houellebecq. As always, Bertie gets in trouble with girls and aunts, and Jeeves bails him out. Yeah, all Wodehouses have the same plots, that’s one reason they’re so comforting. The other is that they’re brilliant. Recommended for P.G. Wodehouse devotees and people who’ve seen the Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry series from the 90s.

Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2.

Week 18

Book: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. In January I started doing these weekly report cards to prevent a recurrence of last year’s slacking off (I got very little reading done). One of the books I put off reading was Fates and Furies, and I’m glad it turned up during my housecleaning because it’s wonderful. It’s the story of a marriage from two perspectives. Usually I blank out when reading about marriage, but Groff’s novel is so sharp it wounds. The husband, Lancelot, is exiled to boarding school by his rich mother. He goes from depressed teen to popular guy, falls in love with Mathilde, becomes a failed actor and then a successful playwright. The wife, Mathilde, is exiled to her cold, cruel uncle’s house, and does what she must in order to survive. She falls in love with Lancelot and supports him in the lean years. They think they know everything about each other; they don’t know each other at all. Recommended for readers who like relationships dissected and filleted.

Movie: The Zookeeper’s Wife. We are familiar with the imagery of Holocaust movies: families herded into freight trains, sunken-eyed prisoners in concentration camps, Nazis beating defenseless Jews. In The Zookeeper’s Wife, directed by Niki Caro from Antonia Workman’s screenplay based on Diane Ackerman’s book, produced by and starring Jessica Chastain, we see the horror from a feminine perspective. Women are murdered, children are raped, animals are massacred. In the most painful scene, little children sweetly raise their arms so they can be lifted into the trains and oblivion.

In the early scenes the Warsaw Zoo is a paradise ruled by Antonina Zabinski (Chastain), angelic mother and midwife to the animals; when it snows, the zoo becomes a fairyland. Later, falling snow turns out to be the ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto. In our minds we see the gas chambers.

The Zabinskis turned their empty zoo into a safehouse for Warsaw’s Jews—by the end of World War II they had saved hundreds. The film portrays the couple’s different approaches to resistance. Jan (the Dutch actor Johan Heldenbergh) opts for direct confrontation: sneaking people into his truck right in front of the Nazis, and taking up arms (Michael McElhatton a.k.a. Roose Bolton is his loyal aide). It’s the macho way. Antonina takes a more feminine, subtle approach: looking after the refugees, keeping the household together, using her charms upon the Nazi zoologist creepily played by Daniel Bruhl. She does not affect a heroic posture. There is no great rush of victory or fist-pumping triumph. Faced with all-encompassing evil, the hardest thing is to be a decent person. The Zookeeper’s Wife reminds us that taking up arms is not the only form of courage, and that heroism requires no melodrama, just people saying, “No, this is not right.” Recommended for people who like historical movies, movies by women, and movies about doing the right thing.

Week 19

Book: Speedboat by Renata Adler. Still reading it.

Movie: Gifted. An amiable movie about an ordinary guy (Chris Evans) who is raising his genius niece (McKenna Grace). Then his mother (Lindsay Duncan), who had shown no interest in her grandchild for seven years, finds out that the kid is a math prodigy and sues for custody. She wants to put the kid to work solving the Navier-Stokes equations, which the kid’s mother had been working on at the time of her suicide. Uncle repairs boats and drinks on Fridays, Grandmother is rich and a mathematician herself. (Uncle used to be an assistant professor of Philosophy but decided freelance boat repair is more conducive to a “normal” life.) Uncle wants the kid to be normal (Do Grade 1 math and don’t let on that you know all the answers), Grandmother wants her to be amazing. So go with Granny already, being normal is overrated. The only thing Uncle has going for him (Admittedly it’s a lot) is that he is Chris Evans. Recommended for people who want to see Chris Evans stretch.