Your Weekly Joy: October 6, 2021
Here's what you should be watching, reading, and listening to this week.
Hello, dear readers! In lieu of a regular piece of analysis, I thought I’d do another installment of my “Your Weekly Joy” this week, since I’ve been reading and watching a lot these past few weeks. If you’re in need of some good recommendations to help contend with what I like to call autumn melancholy, then look no further!
Watching Joy
Only Murders in the Building
Like a lot of other people, I have fallen completely in love with Only Murders in the Building, the new Hulu series that takes a light comedic take on the mystery series phenomenon. It stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as three residents of a New York City apartment building who find themselves on the trail of a suspicious murder. It has a light and deft comedic touch, allowing you to enjoy spending time with these characters, laugh at their antics, and remain invested in the central mystery, all at the same time. It only has two episodes left, and I can’t wait to see what happens.
Scenes from a Marriage
Though I haven’t watched the original television series of the same name, I’ve found myself raptly watching the new HBO adaptation, starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain as a married couple whose seemingly perfect marriage slowly dissolves around them. This is one of those series that is the very epitome of “quality TV,” but don’t let that scare you away. The two leads deliver performances so rawly human that you won’t be able to look away. It’s the kind of show that has you taking a good hard look at your own life.
Foundation
Though Foundation has struggled a bit to get traction with critics, it’s an epic sci-fi series in every sense of the word. It follows a group of characters who, faced with the inevitable collapse of a galaxy-wide empire, do everything they can to preserve as much of civilization as possible before the dark age descends. Three episodes have aired so far, and so it’s a bit premature to make final judgments. However, if the show starts to gel in its next few episodes, it could do for Apple TV+ what Game of Thrones did for HBO.
Reading Joy
Son of the Storm (Suyi Davies Okungbowa)
This is a bit of a golden age for epic fantasy, and it’s especially amazing to see the many young African voices that are blazing new paths in the genre. Okungbowa is one of the most promising of these new writers, and his novel Son of the Storm shows why. Set in a fictionalized and highly stratified version of Africa, it follows several characters as they all grapple with the big questions: who they are, where they come from, and what power they have to change their destiny and that of their homelands. It has everything you could want from epic fantasy, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Death on the Nile (by Agatha Christie)
There’s a good reason that Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Mystery. In her many, many novels she showed a remarkable skill in creating both fascinating characters--Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, as well as the many murderers and thieves--all while keeping the reader guessing as to the perpetrator of the crime. Death on the Nile is, in my humble opinion, one of her best books. For one thing, it features my beloved Poirot (I love him, even if Christie herself eventually soured on him), and for another it has so many mysteries going on that it’s a real effort to figure out how they all fit together (or don’t). It’s a page-turner from beginning to end, and it brought me a lot of joy!
“The Interdependency Series” (by John Scalzi)
I’m always on the lookout for a good space opera; though I like hard sci-fi well enough, for me there’s something uniquely pleasurable about the epic scale associated with this subset of the genre. Thankfully, I managed to stumble upon John Scalzi’s “The Interdependency Series” while browsing at the local library (yet another reason why it’s better to actually go to the library itself), and I immediately lost myself in the first book, The Collapsing Empire. The series follows a trio of characters as they contend with the inevitable collapse of the Flow, the phenomenon that has kept the empire intact for a thousand years. Each novel is briskly paced, but that doesn’t mean that you still can’t lose yourself in Scalzi’s richly detailed world. Plus, the characters are pretty damn great, too.
The Women of Troy (by Pat Barker)
In The Silence of the Girls, acclaimed novelist Pat Barker gave a voice to one of the Trojan War’s most enigmatic figures, the woman Briseis, who was captured by Achilles and became a pawn in his struggle with Agamemnon. In the sequel, The Women of Troy, Briseis is now married to one of Achilles’ generals and must try to make her way in the world now that Achilles has perished in battle. Barker’s prose here is as sleek and brutal as before, a peculiar yet compelling mixture of the ancient and the modern. The Women of Troy shows us, once again, why Barker excels at depicting the horrors of war.
Listening Joy
The Gorillaz
I’ve been a fan of The Gorillaz ever since I first saw the music video for “Clint Eastwood” way back in the early 2000s. Every so often, I’ll look them up to see what they’re doing, and they always manage to blow me away. I’ve been keeping their discography on shuffle on my Spotify, and their sound is consistently eclectic. I’ve been particularly struck by their most recent album, Song Machine: Season One: Strange Timez, which includes some great collaborations, including The Pink Phantom (with Elton John and 6LACK) and Desole (with Fatoumata Diawara). What always amazes me about this group is how deftly they move between different emotional registers, from exuberance to haunting melancholy and everything in between.
So, there you have it! I think you’ll enjoy this week’s recommendations. I know that they’ve all done a lot to get me out of myself, to not feel as overwhelmed by my autumn melancholy and my general sense of malaise and despair at the state of the world.
Stay tuned for next week’s recommendations!