Ok - should you see Spider-Man: Far From Home?
Absolutely!
Now let me try to tell you why with as little spoilers as possible...
After the events of Avengers: Endgame I think there were a lot of "but what about..." questions by the audience, and Spider-Man: Far From Home attempts to answer as many of them as it can while staying true to a pretty fun, Spidey-goes-on-vacation style story.
The action scenes are a lot of fun, and the big players; Spider-Man, Mysterio, Nick Fury, and Maria Hill are all pretty great, but for my money this fill really shines with it's use of the supporting staff and focusing on Peter's normal life and attempting to balance it out with his superhero responsibilities.
For me, the standouts of the film are Peter (Tom Holland) and MJ (Zendaya), Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Betty (Angourie Rice), and a lot of great work from Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Although the action is really great, the way Spider-Man has always worked best in balancing the focus between the fight scenes and real world stories.
In the end, the film was funny, more emotional than I had expected, and has me looking forward to more in the future.
So I've just spent a month away from pretty much all of my regular tech (including this blog!) and it's about time I explain what is what.
In late May I picked up Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and found myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say. At the simplest level it came down to the following three principles:
1) Clutter is costly
2) Optimization is important
3) Intentionality is satisfying
Looking at my technology usage overall I found there were a lot of things that were taking up more and more of my time with less and less return for my effort.
So, I decided to follow the author's advice and spend a month (June) in a state of declutter - I dramatically dropped my (non-work) time online, cut myself off from video games, YouTube, Facebook, and cut down TV watching to a pretty low level (for me).
The result was to find that I'd been spending much more time on being passively entertained than I was comfortable with. So it's time to make some priority changes.
Luckily for the readers of this blog - it actually was one of the big things I really missed - writing out to all of you is a fun part of my week and something I definitely want to make a higher priority for myself - so thanks for all the reading over the years!
The book itself is a pretty simple to follow guidebook on how to cut down your technology use in your day-to-day life, and my only actual complaint was that the author should have ended each chapter with key points or added an appendix putting them all together at the end. Readers can do this for themselves (I know I did), but it's much simpler if it's all spelled out in a way that can easily remind you what the goals are.
Well worth reading and full of advice I'm hoping to take going forward, Digital Minimalism was a pretty great read!
John Stack's 2009 novel, and first in his "Masters of the Sea" series is Ship of Rome, which takes place at the beginning of the First Punic War (Rome vs. Carthage) and follows two men, the captain of a pirate-hunting ship named Atticus and his friend Septimus (leader of the ship's marines). Much of the first book moves back and forth between the two men's world views (Atticus is of Greek descent and seen basically as a second class citizen throughout, while Septimus is a member of an old Roman family and resents his work on a ship rather than the work with the legions he began his career in).
The novel follows the two men through the initial outburst of the war and was pretty fun overall; there were romance subplots and a pair of senators who duel for control of the early republic, but the book really stands out in the depiction of naval war, yes there re some anachronisms (specifically the use of slave galley's for the era), but the scenes are pretty action packed and the tension gets quite high throughout.
Well worth the read and it definitely has me looking forward to the sequel.
One of four rereads for me on David MacClaine's list of 50 Historical Fiction novels set in Ancient Rome, I read Roma a few years back when I was reading Saylor's mystery fiction following his character Gordianus the Finder.
Roma takes place over more than 1000 years, from the earliest days of what would become Rome but was simply a good place to find salt, through its time as a trading post, a city, a kingdom, and eventually the Republic. The novel is basically eleven interconnected short stories following the ups and downs of a family line while also showing how Rome as a city grew over time.
As a follow up to Alfred Duggan's Founding Fathers, it gives a nice overview of where the first half of this fifty book list is going to cover, and also does a nice job of giving a flavour to the setting, but shying away from one simple character we get to follow priests, leaders, warriors, slaves, vestal virgins, and more, giving a much more complex picture that one protagonist could have given us.
A great way to introduce yourself to both the subject matter and Saylor's work (of which I'm a pretty big fan), Roma is an excellent read and well worth your time.
Like a lot of people, I took some time this weekend to check out Us, Jordan Peele's follow up to his 2017 film Get Out.
Us is the story of the Wilsons, Adelaide, Gabe, Zora, and Jason, and the family vacation they take that goes terribly, horribly wrong. If you've seen the trailer, you can see the basic concept - what if your home was invaded... by you? One of the creepiest (and most effective) aspects of the film is the fact that both the protagonists and the antagonists are played by the same actors, and leads Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke are both really great playing both regular folk and their own terrifying reflections.
Without going into spoilers, I'll say the film was a lot of fun, kept me on the edge of my seat, and is my current front-runner for favourite film of 2019 (although to be fair I love horror and it is only March).
Well worth seeing, but bring a friend, you wouldn't want just yourself for company, not for this film.
So I picked up Joyce Carol Oates Hazards of Time Travel simply because I liked the title and I'd enjoyed her 1995 novel Zombie. The book starts in a dystopian future and follows a young woman named Adriane Strohl through her last few days of high school and her subsequent imprisonment in a University in 1959 Wisconsin.
On the surface, the book felt a lot like 12 Monkeys to me, wherein our protagonist is punished by being sent somewhere that is arguably better than where they came from. Are there problems? Absolutely, Oates has found a great way to highlight the negatives of late '50s America by showing it as a University based on blandness, everyone working hard to be consistently forgettable. Renamed Mary Ellen, Adriane stumbles through her first year learning and relearning exactly how closed off America was during the period and for me, some of the greatest strengths of the book come from the character study of Mary Ellen/Adriane, rather than the dystopian future or the science of the time travel.
An interesting read that left me with more questions than answers, but honestly, isn't that what we want from speculative fiction?
My fourth novel by Carey in the last three years, Someone Like Me is a really interesting look at what we do and do not control in our lives.
The book follows a woman named Liz Kendall, who in the very first chapter is being attacked by her ex-husband Marc. But as he begins choking her, something different happens; Liz loses control and quickly defends herself, incapacitating her ex and saving her own life.
Unlike the post apocalyptic setting of The Girl With All The Gifts, Someone Like Me takes place in modern-day Pittsburgh and although there are a number of genre elements (I don't want to get too specific to avoid spoilers), and works all the better for it. The novel feels like a ghost story mixed with a thriller and had me fully invested in the lives of Liz and her family almost immediately.
Although the violence may be an issue for some, in the end I found the book to be really hopeful and powerful in its look at how we deal with trauma and how it can affect ourselves and those around us.
A really great read.
