Junk Journal Week 19

I would like to have finished more books this past week, but I am in the middle of one long ebook (The Frozen Heart by Almudena Grandes is more than 700 pages) and an audiobook (a biography of Babe Ruth that is almost as long).

For the past year and a half I have tried to consistently read short story collections. In the past few months I have consistently read one, possibly two, short stories per day. Any more than that is too much. Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s collection Likes. I thought the two best stories in the collection did a very good job showing how a tween or teenage girl thinks; that is not an easy thing to do, at least in my opinion.

The Righteous Gemstones finished its fourth and final season on Max recently. The Gemstones are leaders of a prosperous South Carolina megachurch. The children of the patriarch, Eli, are incredibly self-centered people who lead opulent lifestyles paid for with church funding. The ideas of ethics, virtue, theology, or spirituality are pretty much non-existent; and, yet, I found the show to be entertaining and funny.

I finally saw Rashomon. As Philip Kaufman said in the Adventures in Moviegoing interview series available on the Criterion Channel, most pictures tell one story in linear order, in Rashomon, the director, Akira Kurosawa, tells the same story five times in a row, each time in a different manner. A true watershed in filmmaking, and the picture is also quite entertaining.

I watched Rogue One to try and clear up the confusion I had while watching the current season of Andor. I suppose I better understand the story now, but, while I was enamored with Star Wars when I was ten and saw it for the first time on the big screen, I am older and not nearly as engaged with the story and the characters at the age of 58.

What about you? What have you been reading and watching? Let me know in the comments.

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