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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CIRIE FIELDS MY ICON!!!!! If you want more epic Cirie content, I would ***highly*** recommend Survivor S16 (also home to several other survivor all-timers). My fiance and I gobbled it down mouth agog at Cirie's incredible gameplay. Have also been dancing on the wall to Muna's said new single and getting hyped for their album. NGL, spring releases this year have been excellent (I've also been dancing to Avalon Emerson's new album, Underscore's new album, and Metric's new album if you want more recs)
Noah Kahan's new album is incredible and so highly anticipated. But it doesn't feel like spring music for me, and so I've been avoiding listening to it as much as I would if it were fall.