April Media Roundup

Every book, movie, and television show I watched over the last month.

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the ellexamines monthly media roundup. Leave me a comment letting me know your thoughts on everything I read/watched.

Below please find my April reads ranked from least favorite to favorite:

Code:
💐 High fantasy
🌷 Urban/paranormal fantasy
🏵️ Horror
🌼 Suspense/mystery
🪻 Literary fiction or plays
🪆 Nonfiction
🌹 Romance or romantasy

🪆 Undoing Gender by Judith Butler ★★★☆☆
One of my favorite elements of this book is its argument that our current society devalues “kinship,” ties, devaluing bonds that fall outside of a marital structure, considering “their loves losses less than “true” loves and “true” losses.” This is something I’ve been thinking about frequently recently. I have a platonic life partnership (or honestly, multiple relationships that I would consider on the same level as a romantic partnership), and on a societal level, my relationship will probably never be considered equal to my romantic relationship. If I lost Maddy tomorrow, it would be a breakup of a five-year relationship to me; to others, it would be a simple blip. To get to a place where we view my relationship as valuable, we must reconceptualize how we view non-marital relationships; we must undo our biases.

🌼 The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, #4) ★★★½☆
This was a more predictable short story collection than the 0ther two I’ve read thus far, but its highlights were still solid.

🪆 Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz
Funnily enough, this is the first Annalee Newitz I’ve ever read, and it did not disappoint. While this is a bit more of an essay collection then a coherent full narrative, I found each individual essay to be extremely well formulated. Both the history of psyops in America provided by this book and its incorporation of narratives around resistance is extremely strong. I particularly loved learning about both the history of the term brainwashing, which became a pro-American psyop of its own, and the Ghost Dance movement. I’ll definitely be picking up more nonfiction by this author and returning to this one.

🌷 Adrift In Currents Clean and Clear (Wayward Children, #10) by Seanan McGuire ★★★★☆
One of my favorite installments so far in this series. I generally split this series mentally into two categories - origin stories and ensemble pieces - and my take is that the ensemble pieces are consistently great, while the origin stories are occasionally great and occasionally a bit nothing. The standout of Adrift In Currents Clean and Clear is the world - it’s far cozier fantasy than I’m used to from particularly this series’ standalone novels, which makes the inevitable tragedy far worse. I totally did not remember Nadya’s role in Beneath the Sugar Sky, but her backstory was wonderful nonetheless. I wonder how long this one has been brewing.

🏵️ Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher ★★★★½
One of my favorite Kingfisher horror novels so far; I totally did not see the final twist coming. I love how T Kingfisher writes friendship; the dynamic between Sonia and (spoiler alert!), as well as the dynamic between Sonia and Rose & Jackson Kent/Ma Kersey was just utterly delightful.

I actually skipped the director marathon this month due to some housing stress and lots of travel. We’re going to see if I can get back on track with this this following month. The only thing I watched: All of The Traitors, Season one, while my friends and I were at the beach together. We are slightly obsessed with Cirie Fields.

I’ve been cranking Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide for the last couple of days. Great album, though I actually still need to listen to the back half. My favorite track so far is “Deny Deny Deny” and my second favorite is “Doors.”

Back in January, I got the chance to see Chess on Broadway, and since the release of the soundtrack, we’ve been on 24/7 “The Deal” lockdown.

My other favorite new songs this month include MUNA’s “Dancing On the Wall,” Mon Rovia’s “Heavy Foot,” Holly Humberstone’s “To Love Somebody,” and Eva Rose’s “Better Than a Man.” And this week I’m cranking Hayley Williams’s “Kill Me” after watching about a million clips of her performing.

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