Category: Film Page 1 of 101

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

As if Anna Karenina were not enough, I also set myself the task of reading this Dickens behemoth. Aha, said I, but I will do it via audiobook! Somehow that time-saving device does not work for me and even though I started early in the year I had only made it through half the book by October when I gave up on audio and gobbled up the rest via print. (I do HIGHLY recommend the Richard Armitage audio; I’m just not an audiobook person.) This one my mom and I started when I was a teenager and we both got bored and stopped. I’m so glad to return to it years later – there are still sloggy parts, but it all ties up so beautifully and heartbreakingly and heartwarmingly that I’m kicking myself for not reading it earlier.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I feel like this was the year of me finally getting to a lot of books I’d put off because I didn’t feel like I’d like them, and being TOTALLY WRONG. I inhaled this book (which isn’t short!) in a week over spring break and instantly placed it among my all-time favorites. It’s evocative and sprawling and mythopeoic. I loved it so much I’m considering doing it in class some year instead of Brothers Karamazov (and I LOVE Brothers Karamazov).

Another book I read almost at the same time and felt paired really well was Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Like parts of East of Eden, it’s set in California (and environs) in the early settler period, about a young woman from the East who marries a mining engineer – a surprise to many because she is cultured and artistic and he is taciturn and very rough around the edges. It’s a hard, beautiful, and poetic book.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I’ve always felt this book was probably not for me. Adultery and all that, plus I already knew the ending! Then I watched the 2012 Joe Wright film and LOVED it. Then I had babies and reading a 900 page Russian novel felt pretty daunting. But 2023 was the year, I planned it as soon as summer started, and wow, was this a showstopper. It’s sprawling and intimate and complicated and beautiful. It has me ready to read War and Peace next summer, is that overly ambitious?

Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity by Joshua Gibbs

I’m going to use this space to mention several similar books, but I honestly think I got the most out of this one. Gibbs argues that we should avoid what he calls “mediocre” (things that are ephemeral by nature and not intended to last) and focus instead on “common” (ordinary goods) and “uncommon” (great/holy things). The main point is about taste – that taste matters, and a steady diet of the mediocre will prevent us from developing good taste, and that this affects our soul (not in terms of salvation but in terms of living the good life). I find his argument compelling but also challenging and controversial at times, which I love in a book like this.

In similar books, I read The Wisdom Pyramid by Brett McCracken as our assigned teacher development book for school, and I spent the whole thing going “yes, I agree, but Gibbs is better”. McCracken’s point is similar, that to seek wisdom, we need to plan our “diet” carefully to prioritize things that give wisdom – scripture, church community, nature, great books, beauty all above social media/internet. Like, he’s right, but it’s pretty surface-level and not really the good struggle like I had with Gibbs’ book.

Other things I read and recommend in the broad education/cultural criticism/philosophy category: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World by David Epstein (I’ve never felt better about being a generalist), Reading for the Love of God by Jessica Hooten Wilson (really good and deep exploration of reading as a spiritual practice, and how to use spiritual disciplines to read better), Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman and Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey (honestly, a tragedy I hadn’t read these before), and both Consider This and Know and Tell by Karen Glass (an argument for Charlotte Mason being in the Classical tradition, and a nitty-gritty book on narration which I’m using every day in class).

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918 by G.J. Meyer

This was the recommendation from my history teacher friend when I asked him what I should read over the summer. He knows I’m pretty into World War I, and this is one of the few books he says deals with the WHOLE war. It was great – covered the lead-up, the battles, the aftermath, as well as the historical backgrounds of various groups that informs the conflict.

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

For some reason I had Joyce Carol Oates in a category with prolific “literary” but shallow bestsellers, and I think I was wrong. This was recommended to me in the 12 in 12 Months challenge and I was like, really? But then I looked it up and was like, oh, a gothic novel set in 1910s Princeton? Okay, we’ll give it a try. It is a RIDE, let me tell you. Woodrow Wilson and Upton Sinclair are major characters, there are demons and vampires, and a whole sojourn into a hellish dimension. And all of this in dispassionate prose meant to be by a young historian telling the real story behind an outbreak of hysteria in Princeton. Somehow this “historical” approach makes what happens even more horrifying.

I realized about the time I read The Accursed that I really do need some more modern fiction, especially speculative fiction, mixed in with classics, so I picked up a few more to finish off the year. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty was actually another 12 in 12 pick, and I basically couldn’t stop reading it once I started (except the three days of agony when I left it at church). Premise is cloning is common, and the six-person crew of a spaceship trying to safely find a new planet for their generation ship all wake up in new cloned bodies and find their previous clones had been murdered…but by whom? This is exactly the kind of hook I can’t resist, and it plays out very satisfyingly. I chose The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern on my own due to enjoying her The Night Circus and being in love with stories about libraries and stories. I do think this one went off the rails a bit at the end (she’s more modern than traditional in her treatment of story and I don’t love that), but overall, I was captivated. Finally, I grabbed a classic I’ve been meaning to read for a while: The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. It was pretty fantastic, though I did find the ending a bit tropey. Throughout there was so much to love, and I’m told I really need to read on in the series, so hopefully that will be a 2024 thing.

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

I always try to get in a few Wodehouse novels every year, and this was the only one that made it in this year, but it was a doozy of a good one! The hilarity kicks off when Bertie has to be the unfortunate go-between in the acquisition of a coveted cow creamer desired by two relatives, both of whom Bertie greatly wants to stay on the good side of. This leads to elaborate schemes which only the genius of Jeeves can untangle.

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children by E. Nesbit

I don’t love children’s versions of novels, but I make exceptions for legends and stories like this – most of these stories existed in some form before Shakespeare and it’s actually really helpful to be familiar with the story before reading the full play version. I read this to my 10yo and we LOVED it. For me, it really made clear how so many Shakespeare storeis are structured like fairy tales and need to be understood as such – a harder thing to realize when reading the plays because so much focus goes on the language (not incorrectly!).

Other great read-alouds (most of which I had read before): King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green, Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Good Master by Kate Seredy, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald and d’Aulaire’s Norse Myths.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

I just finished this one yesterday, and I admit I don’t yet feel ready to say a lot about it (though I do have a lot of unorganized notes about it!). In a way, I read David Copperfield because of this book; a friend recommended it for the 12 in 12 challenge, and I had been intrigued by it already, but I didn’t want to read it without having read David Copperfield. Due to how long it took me to finish Copperfield, I ended up reading this IMMEDIATELY after it, and I’m not sure if that was a great idea or a terrible one. It was a great one in the sense that I could see very clearly all the references and allusions Kingsolver is making to it, many of which I might have missed had I not read the Dickens so very recently. On the other hand, with how much I loved Copperfield, Copperhead had a lot to live up to, and it’s probably not fair to put it in such close proximity with what is only its inspiration, to be fair. Kingsolver is not trying to write the same story, and she does not. She makes changes that are very fitting for her modern Appalachian setting, and a lot of it works very well. I slammed through this very long book, too, easily reading 60-70 pages at a time, fully engrossed. That said, Kingsolver seems to understand Dickens’ story as his “experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society” (a quote from the flyleaf which is born out in her treatment of Demon and the story in general) which is extremely reductive of Dickens’ story, which is about so much more than that. Many of the characters are interesting in their own right, but are mere shadows of Dickens’ creations. The sense of place is MUCH stronger here, which I think is a strength in some ways, but also ties her story down to social criticism in a way that Dickens is not, despite her reductive understanding of him – Dickens is interested in transcendent truth.

Okay, I guess I did have a lot to say about it. LOL. I appreciated reading it. There’s a lot here. I just also found it frustrating.

Criterion viewing

I wrote about a few of these early in the year, so I won’t belabor them. From the Joan Bennet series in January, the most memorable two were Me and My Gal and Man Hunt, with an honorable mention for the craziness of Wild Girl. From the Pre-Code Paramount series in February, Merrily We Go to Hell is the clear standout. I also watched almost the entirety of the Michelle Yeoh series in March, but I didn’t end up getting a post up about it. The Heroic Trio series was ridiculous but super fun, and Police Story 3 was a major standout. A few other Criterion notables were Robert Siodmak’s stylish The Phantom Lady (maybe my fave new-to-me film all year), The River of No Return (Monroe + Mitchum, how had I not seen this?), Jacques Tourneur’s Experiment Perilous, and Backfire from the recent Christmas Noir series.

Les Vampires (1916)

My one attempt early in the year to revive my old chrono project; and this is pretty great. A great example of silent storytelling, consistently mysterious and engaging (though some episodes are more so than others), and so clearly influential on later films. Does crime cinema start here?

RRR (2022)

This movie is off the chain in all the best ways possible. I love Indian cinema in general and haven’t watched enough of it lately. This was a great one to get back into it. Not AS MUCH music as it could have had, honestly, but it makes up for that in some of the most insane fight/action scenes I have ever seen in any movie.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

The one and only time I made it to the theatre this whole year – and get this, it was my first time in the theatre since December 2019. A far cry from the old days, where I saw at least a movie a week in theaters no matter what! Ah, well. If I missed it more I would make more of an effort, so I guess I’m okay. Anyway. This was great, like the first one, and I will see the third in theatres as well.

Alfred Hitchcock on Criterion

After several months of NO movies except the occasional famiyly rewatch, I used Christmas break to get back into Criterion festivals a bit. I watched a couple from the Christmas noir series (see above) but mostly focused on the Hitchcock for the Holidays series, because it included several of his early British films that I have missed. (I’ve seen every post-1934 Hitchcock feature except The Paradine Case.) I crossed off Downhill, The Lodger, Murder!, and The Skin Game. The first was pretty routine, but the others are quite good, with Murder! the clear standout – mystery, courtroom drama, and backstage story all rolled into one!

The Kid Who Would Be King (2019)

I had intended to watch this when it came out due to Joe Cornish and King Arthur, but missed it then. Came up as a possibility for a friends’ movie night pre-New Year’s Eve, and we jumped at the opportunity, especially since 10yo and I have spent so much time on King Arthur this year. It was a lot of fun! It brought elements of the legends in quite nicely and had a good Attack the Block-ish vibe. A bit earnest at times, but I find that pretty easily forgivable.

Family Watches

It may not have been a plentiful year for new-to-me watches, but it was a pretty fantastic year for family watches. The kids are finally getting old enough to enjoy a lot more in the way of movies, classics and otherwise. Among others, this year we watched the Back to the Future trilogy, Karate Kid and Karate Kid II, Superman, Superman II, and Superman Returns, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (a new Thanksgiving break tradition!), Galaxy Quest, Porco Rosso, The Mask of Zorro, National Velvet, Arsenic and Old Lace, Charade, It’s a Wonderful Life, Camelot, and to cap things off, a late night viewing of Jurassic Park as we let 10yo stay up late for New Year’s Eve.