→ August 12, 2025
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The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

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→ July 1, 2025
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Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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→ June 9, 2025
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Masters of Renaissance.

Masters of Renaissance might be the game that finally kills Gizmos for me, as it scratches the same itch but is more balanced overall, without a dominant strategy (which is a common but not unanimous complaint about Gizmos) to cut the value of repeat plays. It’s the card-game version of a heavier worker placement game called Lorenzo il Magnifico, which was designed by three of the top Italian designers in the field who are responsible in part for games like Egizia and Tzolk’in, among others. Masters has an extremely satisfying resource management aspect along with simple victory conditions that capture some of the vibe of the original while putting it in a much more accessible package. (Right now it’s only available used in the U.S., such as here from Noble Knight, but it’s available new in Europe, with publisher Cranio selling it for €32.)

In Masters of Renaissance, players will gather four resources to buy development cards from the 3×4 card market. Each player has three columns for those cards, which come in levels 1, 2, and 3; you can only build a level 2 card on a level 1 card, and a level 3 on a level 2. Each development card has a color, a cost in resources, and an action that will be available for the rest of the game.

On your turn, you can choose to take resources from the resource market, which is also a 3×4 grid; to acquire a card; or to activate the visible cards in your play area. The market is one of the best parts of the game: it has 12 marbles sitting in a little plastic tray, with one marble always left out (so sad). To take resources, you pick a row or a column, take the resources matching those marbles’ colors, and then use the 13th marble to push the row/column so that one marble falls out, changing the market for the next player. There are marbles for the four resources, one red marble that lets you advance on the faith track, and white marbles that have no value (unless you get a card that says otherwise).

You only have six spots to store resources you take from the market, however, and if you end up with any resources you can’t store, every opponent moves up one spot on their faith tracks for every resource you have to discard. Your storage has three rows that can hold 1, 2, or 3 resources of one type, and you can’t store the same resource type in two rows. It’s a very tight constraint that I find makes decision-making easier because some moves are just so obviously bad that you can eliminate them from consideration. The storage limit doesn’t apply to resources you get from activating cards, though. Buying a card is just a matter of paying the appropriate resources and placing the card in one of your three columns; if you buy a level 2 or 3 card, it covers up the card below it except for its victory point value.

Activation is the most powerful action, and if you’re savvy about the cards you acquire, you can build a potent little engine even though you’ll never have more than three development cards active at any one time. Most cards let you convert one or more resources into other resources and/or faith points, and there are no cards that leave you worse off – at the very least you’ll swap one resource for another of a different type. Every player’s board has a default action of trading any two resources for one, useful if you can’t get the resource you really need for a future action.

Players also start the game with two Leader cards they may be able to play once they meet the cards’ conditions, which include having certain development cards in your play area, having at least X of a specific resource, or reaching a certain level on the faith track. These leaders are worth additional victory points and most of them give you a new power, like an additional conversion action, a discount on future card purchases, or the ability to take another specific resource when you take a white marble (a double-edged sword given the storage limits).

The game ends when a player builds their seventh development card or reaches the end of the faith track. You then tally up your points from all played development cards, even if covered; any points from leaders; and the highest point total you’ve passed on the faith track. There are also some small bonus tokens on the faith track that you can flip to their scoring side through the call to the Vatican, which isn’t that complicated but which I won’t explain here for the sake of brevity.

I can’t avoid comparing Masters of Renaissance to Gizmos because the cores of the games are just so similar: gather resources in four types, use them to buy cards, use the cards’ powers to convert and/or gain more resources, score the cards for points. Masters of Renaissance can allow a player to run away with things, but it’s a matter of choosing the right cards and getting lucky with what cards are available in the market when you have the resources to buy them. Creating synergies across your cards and leaders is the key to winning, but that’s true for all players, and I haven’t found specific cards that are overpowered, not even the leaders. It doesn’t have the cute marble dispenser that Gizmos has, and it could use better art that made the icons and point values easier to see at a glance. Otherwise it hits every high note, and plays like its own game rather than the poor cousin of another game, which is true of a lot of card- or dice-game adaptations of heavier titles.

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→ June 4, 2025
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Assumption.

Percival Everett’s Assumption is a triptych of a novel, three neo-noir detective stories featuring the same character, Ogden Walker, a deputy in a small town in New Mexico who’s confronted with three murders in fairly short succession, each of which seems to revolve around at least one person who isn’t who they claim to be. The first two proceed almost traditionally, although Everett is still playing around within the confines of the genre; the third, however, slides into a hallucinatory haze where Walker’s reality is suddenly open to question.

Walker is a Black man in a town that’s largely not Black, with its share of white racists, but also plenty of Latino and indigenous residents, and as you might expect in a small-town mystery or detective story, he kind of knows everyone and has his usual haunts where everyone knows him. He’s got good enough relationships with his boss and his co-workers, even though it becomes clear that Walker is a reluctant cop, and is close to his mother, who lives in the same town and whose house he visits several times in each story.

The first case starts when the possibly-racist Mrs. Bickers turns up dead just a few minutes after Walker visits her to take away her gun, turning into a larger mystery when her estranged daughter shows up unannounced. The second involves a couple of sex workers who end up dead in not-so-rapid succession, again tapping into a bigger story as Walker investigates it. The third starts out innocuously enough, as Walker stumbles on a field & game warden catching a poacher, with Walker taking the poacher’s nephew – maybe – to try to find the kid’s home while the warden takes in the poacher. The warden turns up dead and the kid disappears, making Walker a suspect and causing him to question everything around him.

Everett can’t help but allude to some of the masters of the form, with a line about “the postman ringing only once,” paying homage to the greats even as he upends and inverts the very genre he’s mimicking. The first two stories read like great works from Cain, Chandler, and Thompson, with the same stoic tone and grim imagery, right down to the matter-of-fact descriptions of corpses and gunfights. The third is where Everett gets imaginative, as the story quickly turns into a fever dream of sorts, with Walker trying to solve the crime to keep himself out of jail, while a second strand follows the cops investigating him, and the two stories seem to diverge in impossible ways.

Walker is a typical Everett protagonist – a stolid Black man experiencing some existential doubts, in a job he doesn’t love, either a bachelor (as Walker is) or someone who has distant relationships with women. He’s an outsider in this town in multiple ways, even though he has cordial relationships with most of the locals; he doesn’t have close friends, and he is keenly aware of his status as one of the few Black people there. The pointlessness of the killings he sees wears on him, as he questions the utility of his job and the meaning of any of what’s happening in front of him, including the scourge of meth and the cycles of poverty and violence. What begins as a traditional detective novel – even the triptych format has a history in the genre, as Rex Stout authored several Nero Wolfe books that comprised three semi-related cases – ends up flipped on its head as a story of deep existential despair.

The contemporary review in the New York Times compared Assumption to the Inspector Maigret detective novels by the French writer Georges Simenon, which also have an existentialist bent, a clear line of descent from Sartre and Camus in style and substance. Maigret has more panache than Walker, though; he’s a gentleman detective in many ways, a French Roderick Alleyn, while Simenon’s stories end with far less bloodshed. The similarity is philosophical, rather than stylistic, although I appreciated the reference to another of my favorites.

Next up: I’m about three-quarters done with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms.

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→ June 2, 2025
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Sinners.

Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return from a few years in Chicago working for Al Capone to their hometown in rural Mississippi, where they plan to open a juke joint for their fellow Black Mississippians, with booze, gambling, and good old-fashioned Delta blues. It’s all good, profitable fun, at least until the white vampires show up, and the whole show turns into a battle royale.

Sinners, the latest film from director and writer Ryan Coogler, is that story – but a whole lot more, with layers upon layers of meaning below the surface of a film that starts out as a celebration and ends up a horror film, although it plays with the tropes of all of its genres. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but with some strong performances and incredible music, it’s an unusually good time at the theater among the sequels and the IP- and merchandise-driven pablum.

Michael B. Jordan stars as Smoke and Stack, oozing charm and panache, although the two characters are largely indistinguishable beyond their attire. They come home and buy a decrepit mill from the obviously racist (Boss) Hogwood, planning to turn it into their new juke joint. They ask their young cousin Sammy, also known as Preacher Boy (perhaps a nod to Samuel Sharpe?), to come play his guitar at opening night, only to discover that he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist with a deep, powerful voice – so powerful, in fact, that it calls out to the devil himself in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant and vampire who has already infected a married couple who are Klan members and who are more than happy to join him in an attempt to invade the joint and turn everyone inside.

There’s so much story here that that alone would make it one of the most interesting American films of the last five years; so many movies work with less plot and equivalent run times, yet Sinners seems to abound with story and subplot, to the point that crucial characters, including Stack’s white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, in her first significant film role since 2018) and Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), get a fraction of the back story they deserve. There are multiple movies’ worth of material and strong characters here, and Coogler knows it, playing with genre and tropes, starting the film out as a glorious celebration of Black culture and music, then turning very hard into a neo-horror film with revenge-fantasy elements that pits its white vampires against the Black heroes, literally surrounding them and threatening to burn the place down.

You can watch Sinners as is, without even considering the subtext beyond the obvious racial stuff – one of the film’s few moments of outright humor is when the vampires start talking about their belief in racial equity, and act offended that they’re not invited into the club because they’re white – but there appear to be layers upon layers of meaning below the surface. My first thought as the film ended was that the entire story might be a metaphor for the Tulsa Race Massacre, a real-life atrocity where Black residents of Tulsa built businesses that were profitable and part of the community, and white supremacists burned it all down and murdered dozens of Black Tulsans. But it could apply to all of Black history in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, right up to our modern moment of a white minority seizing power to reverse decades of gains in civil rights. The blood-suckers aren’t just coming for the Black lives in that juke joint, but to feed off of the culture inside it, to profit from Black music and dance and traditions and leave the Black progenitors poor, wounded, or dead.

Jordan is going to earn much of the praise for his twin performances here, and he’s very good, but the two characters aren’t distinguished by much beyond their clothes; there are some references early in the film that imply that one of them is the more responsible of the two, the better business mind. The story just doesn’t do much with this, and the main distinction between them becomes their women, not anything innate to their characters. Steinfeld and Mosaku are tremendous in their supporting roles, as is Delroy Lindo as the drunk harmonica player who just wants to be paid in beer but ends up a voice of wisdom when calamity strikes. Sammy is played by a newcomer, Miles Caton, who boasts an outstanding, deep singing voice and apparently learned to play a mean blues guitar in just two months, and who delivers in what turns out to be the movie’s most pivotal role.

Sinners is overly ambitious in the end; as much action as there is, by the time it hit the two-hour mark I was ready for the conclusion – which it sort of telegraphed in the opening scene, a gimmick many filmmakers use that I really don’t care for at all. Let the ending surprise me, or at least let me come to it on my own terms. The largest action scene is very hard to follow between all of the very fake blood spurting everywhere (vampires, you know) and the dim lighting; I missed the fate of one of the characters entirely in the melee because I just couldn’t see. There’s also a mid-credits scene that I would say only sort of works – it’s sentimental where the rest of the film is anything but, yet it’s also true to some of the broader themes of the story.

This one is going to show up in all of the awards talk later this year, as it was a resounding commercial success, hits on a lot of themes that the voters seem to love, and was made by an acclaimed director who only has two tangential Oscar nominations to date – one for producing Judas & the Black Messiah, the other for the original song from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I would be very surprised if we get to January and it’s not nominated for Best Picture, with a smattering of other nods, definitely for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, maybe for Coogler’s directing or Jordan for playing two parts. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that I love to see succeeding, because there’s at least some small chance that future projects like this, untethered to any IP or previous films, have a little more chance to secure funding. I liked Sinners a lot, but I doubt it’ll be my favorite movie of the year; that said, if it wins all the things, I won’t be upset in the least.

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→ May 26, 2025
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I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is the seventh of Percival Everett’s books that I’ve read, but the first for which I did some homework, watching four of Poitier’s movies to which I knew Everett alludes in the novel. This was hardly difficult, as only one of the movies (Lilies of the Field, for which Poitier won his sole non-honorary Academy Award) failed to hold up. I’m glad I went through the exercise, however, as it made reading Everett’s novel even more enjoyable. It’s a riot, and another incredible feat of imagination, and while it has its serious moments, it is Everett at his least serious among the books I’ve read.

The main character in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which, as you may imagine, presents him with all manner of difficulties, including bullying in school. He is, however, quite rich, as his mother invested very early in shares of Ted Turner’s media company, making her one of its largest shareholders and, at her death, putting Not Sidney in Ted’s care, in a way. Turner himself becomes an amusing if caricatured side character, prone to rambling non sequiturs, but he makes for an entertaining conversationalist as Not Sidney tries to make his way through the world.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier proceeds into a sort of modern picaresque, as each chapter is a new adventure modeled after one or two of Poitier’s movies. Early in the book, for example, Not Sidney sets off for California in his car, choosing to avoid the interstates, and finds himself in a hick county in Georgia where he is arrested for the crime of being Black. He’s soon chained to a racist convict, and an accident gives them an opportunity to escape, which, if you haven’t seen it, is the plot of The Defiant Ones, which starred Poitier and Tony Curtis. Everett’s trick here is adhering very closely to the plots of several of these movies, often to the point of repeating key quotes (“They call me Not Sidney” might be the best), but then turning something inside out at the resolution.

Not Sidney drifts back and forth from his home on Ted Turner’s estates, including interactions with Jane Fonda, to these vignettes from films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (but with a family of light-skinned Blacks prejudiced against darker-skinned people), In the Heat of the Night, and No Way Out, the last of which appears in a dream sequence.

Everett’s gift for comedy shows itself more in wordplay and in the humor he mines from absurd situations, rather than some of the more situational and highbrow humor in books like Dr. No. The protagonist’s name is obviously a source of repeated gags at his expense, and Everett creates all kinds of improbable interactions that allow him to poke fun at something, whether it’s the movies he’s referencing or Black literature or really anything that crosses his mind. Everett has referred to himself as “pathologically ironic,” and I have never felt that more in his writing than in his novel, even though I think it’s the least serious or thematic of any of the seven I’ve read.

I will say I think I enjoyed this novel the most of the seven, but that doesn’t make it the “best” or my favorite. It’s the funniest, it was probably the fastest to read, and it’s endlessly rewarding if you’ve seen any of the movies involved. I did notice that it was lighter in tone and subject, which isn’t a criticism, but it’s a change of pace from James or So Much Blue or Telephone. The guy still hasn’t missed for me, though, and there are very, very few authors about whom I could say that through even four books.

Next up: Another of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones.

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→ May 13, 2025
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TEN.

Somehow I never reviewed TEN, a great small-box card game from the Flatout Games group (Point Salad/City, Verdant), even though I first played it at least two years ago. We broke it out again on Monday and played a quick two-player game, refreshing my memory enough for a writeup. It’s fun, and so easy to teach and play.

TEN comes with a deck of cards numbered 1 through 9 in each of four colors and currency cards of value 1 through 5, with various wild cards I’ll describe in a moment, and black and white tokens used as currency in the game. The goal is to create sequential runs of cards in each of the four colors. You’ll score one point per card in your longest run for each color, and if you complete a run of cards 1 through 9, you get an extra point as a bonus.

On your turn, you flip cards from the top of the deck until you choose to stop, or until you bust by exceeding ten in total value on the numbered cards or on the currency cards (but not combined). If you chose to stop, you can take all of the numbered cards into your hand and all opponents get the tokens shown on the currency cards, or you can take the number of black tokens shown on the currency cards and your opponents get nothing. In the latter case, you move the numbered cards into the ‘market.’ If you take the numbered cards, you then get to buy one card from the market by paying tokens equal to its face value.

If you bust, then the numbered cards go to the market and you get a white token, which is equal to three black tokens. You can use black and white tokens to buy cards or in the auctions of wild cards (put a pin in that), and you can also discard any cards from your hand for a value of one in any purchase action.

The wild cards come in three flavors. One is just a straight wild card, which can be any color and any number of your choice; you don’t have to decide any of this until the end of the game. Then there are wild cards of a fixed number where the color is wild, and ones where the color is fixed and the number is wild. When the active player flips one over from the deck, they pause their turn and a one-round auction begins; the active player will always get the last bid. Then they resume their turn.

Play continues until the deck is exhausted; you alter the size of the deck based on the player count. Then each player picks the values/colors for their wild cards and scores their longest run of consecutively numbered cards in each of the four colors. That’s all there is to it.

TEN works best with more players, of course, as there’s more competition for the cards and within the auctions. You can’t plan on certain cards still being in the market, or know that once your opponent took a green 3, they’re not likely to keep another one, whereas in a two-player game, you’re probably going to get most of the cards you need, and the auctions are anticlimactic. Two-player still works, as long as you are fine with the higher scores and the probability that you’ll both finish at least two nine-card runs.

You can definitely throw this in a bag without the box – you don’t even really need the tokens if you have a pile of coins, and the cards are just a fat deck you can secure with a rubber band – and the teach is super quick. My younger stepdaughter had no problem grasping the game, and in our most recent play I beat her by just a single point, with only a little help required to get her to see how to maximize the points for the wild cards she had at game-end. The push-your-luck aspect of TEN is so fun and so easy for people to understand that I can’t imagine anyone over the age of 7 who wouldn’t be able to play it. I’m going to start bringing it on more trips.

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→ May 7, 2025
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Vermiglio.

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, Ada, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

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→ May 5, 2025
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Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

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→ April 29, 2025
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy uses a single, devastating incident – an accident involving a school bus that killed six children and a teacher – to explore the nature of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation back in 2012. The depiction of how a regime of apartheid – a word used by an Israeli official Thrall quotes in the book – makes life for ordinary Palestinians so much harder, and in this case probably resulted in more deaths and severe injuries than there otherwise would have been, comes across even more starkly today in light of the last eighteen months.

Abed Salama is a father living in the Palestinian town of Anata, on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall Israel built along the Green Line in the West Bank, whose only son, Milad, was on that bus at the time of the crash. An unqualified driver entered a busy intersection on a poorly-maintained road for Palestinian at high speed, slamming into the school bus, which then caught fire, burning several children and a teacher to death, although heroic efforts by several people rescued many children from the same fate. Thrall explains how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict shaped the lives of many of the adults involved, with many of them involved in Palestinian rights groups, some of them designated as terrorists by Israel, while Israel’s control of the West Bank and push to claim land through force and settlements has boxed Palestinians into tiny enclaves that often leave them without access to key public resources – like quality hospitals. Even the roads are segregated; Israel built a major highway to bypass the intersection where the accident occurred, but it’s off limits to most Palestinians.

Thrall, who is Jewish and lived in Jerusalem for several years, places blame for the accident and its aftermath squarely on the Israeli government – on several governments, really, dating back to Israel’s independence, the Naqba, and ethnic cleansing efforts like Operation Bi’ur Hametz, which wiped Palestinians out of the city of Haifa a few months after the UN partition order. Abed’s entire life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; he was involved in the DFLP, a Marxist-Leninist group that was under the PLO’s umbrella, and was tortured and jailed for several months by a military tribunal. (Thrall notes that over 99% of verdicts by military tribunals against Palestinians are ‘guilty,’ and that at one point 40% of Palestinian men had been arrested during the occupation of the West Bank.) Abed’s extended family includes people working for the provisional government who maintain relationships with Israeli authorities – and get special privileges for doing so – and people who are or have been jailed for fighting Israeli forces, sometimes simply for throwing stones at Israeli officers. He explains how the Oslo accords presented Palestinians with a lopsided deal that they had little choice but to accept, creating concentric zones of control that limited Palestinian authority in the West Bank to those enclaves, where moving freely between them meant passing through checkpoints and facing possible arrest or detainment. It’s a brief history of the conflict from a side that isn’t as commonly presented here – I wasn’t aware, for example, of how little land the Palestinians truly controlled after Oslo, knew nothing of the Haifa operation, and have no memory of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded over 100 more in a mosque during Ramadan, possibly a reaction to the first Oslo accords. The list goes on.

The main premise of the book is that none of this had to happen as it did, but that systemic and structural barriers made the accident more likely and its outcome far worse than it needed to be. The economy of the West Bank depended almost entirely on Israel, which tightly controlled the movement of people and goods within the territory and across the border into Israel. The Palestinian authorities – which are still rife with corruption, a point Thrall doesn’t address – lacked the funds and especially the power to build or maintain basic public infrastructure, including roads, hospitals, and firehouses, because of the garrote Israel has placed around its economy and territory. Thrall even quotes an Israeli official referring to the highway on which the accident occurred as the “apartheid road,” because Israel built its own highway (60) through the area and that portion of the road is forbidden to anyone with a Palestinian license plate. Several of the victims of the accident went to the local hospitals, which are understaffed and have inferior equipment, because getting them across the border into Jerusalem would have taken too long. Thrall even points to the ages of the bus and truck involved in the accident as the result of Israeli policies that have left Palestinians much poorer than their neighbors – although, again, corruption in the Palestinian Authority has to be a factor here.

I don’t think Thrall soft-plays the violence committed by some Palestinians against Israel, but it’s not his focus beyond implying that Israel’s response to any such attacks has been to tighten its grip on the West Bank and Gaza. They built the separation wall and argued it was to protect against terrorist attacks from Palestine. They have limited Palestinian movement even within the West Bank under the guise of preventing further attacks. Thrall doesn’t argue directly against Israeli security efforts, making no claims about their effectiveness or lack thereof, but presents evidence that the de facto police state that exists at least in the portions of the West Bank that abut Israel make daily life much harder for Palestinians who have nothing to do with any Palestinian terror groups. The result here is families devastated by the losses of their children, in several cases even unable to see their kids’ bodies, identifying them by scraps of clothing because their bodies were too burned for recognition. That is a tragedy that should affect every reader, regardless of one’s views on this particular conflict.

(I’m going to keep comments open here for now, but given the nature of the subject and the tendency I’ve seen for this topic to lead to personal attacks, I may close them at any point and will delete any comments that resort to insults or other invective.)

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