Mingji Liu

Very brief book reviews, film reviews, and rants

By Mingji Liu ·

Short notes on books, films and television, collected from 2014 onwards. Newest first.

29 December 2025 — My 2025 reading round-up

I’m pleased to report that, after a long hiatus due to study and travel, my self-imposed program of relentless reading is back on track. It is sobering to think that if you’re in your mid-thirties and read only one book a month, you’ll manage perhaps 500 more books in your lifetime. That’s not many books. A grim and terrifying prospect. Happy holidays, everyone!

Life and Fate (1960) by Vasily Grossman

Like Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, this is a novel that just barely managed to escape the clutches of the Soviet regime and which its author never saw published in his lifetime. Crudely put, it is the Battle of Stalingrad told as a sprawling Tolstoyan family epic. It is unwieldy. It is unbalanced. At times cruel and shocking. At other times humane and beautiful. I’m glad (relieved, in fact!) that I finally got around to reading it.

The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño (2007) by Roberto Bolaño

Exactly what it says on the tin. “Last Evenings on Earth” is an incredibly badass short story. The saddest thing about this collection is that it includes his many incomplete posthumous stories, which read as though he was just about to mature into a new stage of his writing. He died too soon.

Letters to a Young Poet (1929) by Rainer Maria Rilke

Eh. Possibly an issue with the English translation, but this didn’t resonate with me.

The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (1987) by Vasily Grossman

The terror of Stalin’s purges seen through the eyes of a young girl. The horrors of the Eastern Front seen through the eyes of a mule. Grossman’s journalistic account — almost certainly the first on the Allied side — of the Nazi extermination camps is told with feverish precision. Excellent throughout. More people should be aware of Grossman.

Solenoid (2015) by Mircea Cărtărescu

Imagine combining the unrestrained, childlike fantasies of Bruno Schulz with the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, then throwing in the ramblings of a possibly schizophrenic Romanian schoolteacher. Now imagine doing this for nearly 900 pages. This is one deeply strange novel. The relentless insect metaphors grew tiresome for me, and I wished it dug deeper into its satirical treatment of life under Communist Romania. An avant-garde literary challenge that retains (some) coherency.

Rejection (2024) by Tony Tulathimutte

A collection of short stories obsessively ruminating on rejection in the modern world. The first story, “The Feminist” — a ferocious satire imagining a hard left-wing feminist transforming into a violent incel — is impressive. I found the second entry (“Pics”) quite upsetting, and the third (“Ahegao”) filthy and hilarious. Unfortunately, the rest of the collection runs out of steam.

The Slave (1962) by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Pretty good overall. Think Jewish magical realism. Imagine seventeenth-century Polish peasant life as an exotic, inscrutable realm. If that combination sounds intriguing, then you’ll have a good time.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (2011) by Bryan Caplan

Mostly solid. More people would benefit from reading things that make them slightly uncomfortable. Mood affiliation is mind poison.

The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis

I enjoyed this immensely, despite my unrepentant prejudice that Anglicanism produces the dullest strain of Christian thought (i.e., the British kind). Lewis’s theological imagination is jolly good fun.

Africa: The Definitive Visual History of a Continent (2024)

Gave me the pleasure of learning a few more facts about Africa.

Serviceable science fiction written for the Internet generation. The best stories in the collection are available online for free.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963) by Yukio Mishima

A washed-up merchant seaman and a gang of sociopathic schoolboys grasp for meaning in this shocking novella. Real men read Mishima to indulge their Freudian death drive. I went back afterwards and skimmed Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion again, which I now appreciate much more on a second pass.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025) by Kiran Desai

The emotionally torturous courtship of two Indians living abroad in America. Above average. I’ve read critics who defend the book’s middling prose in favour of its overall tonal effect, but I couldn’t excuse it so easily. You cannot write entire paragraphs composed solely of rhetorical questions and expect to get away with it more than a couple of times. For some reason, it made me want to revisit Min Jin Lee’s much more masterful Pachinko.

I’m also mostly done with Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, which I’ve found restrained to the point of being mostly boring. I was hoping for something closer to his bizarre lesbian revenge novella Beauty and Sadness, but alas, that was not the case.

13 December 2022 — My top eight book picks for 2022 (unranked)

The Savage Detectives (1998) by Roberto Bolaño

A semi-autobiographical epic by the late, offbeat Chilean scribbler Roberto Bolaño and a love note to Latin American literature. It’s (initially) about two obscure poets floating through the sometimes ludicrous, often sybaritic, occasionally violent world of bohemian writers in 1970s Mexico City. And then it spirals from there. Honestly, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read.

As I descended into it, an alien feeling came over me. I thought to myself: ‘Hmm. Maybe life is worth living. Maybe I should stick it out and see what happens next.’ There’s so much visceral, all-embracing life described in this book(!) And what does it all mean? My interpretation is it’s about two supremely important ideas: (1) It’s about ‘polútropos’: the painful wanderings and many-turnings of humanity, and (2) it’s about the end of the world, the slow-approaching apocalypse. That’s right.

My Struggle: Book 1 (2009) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I lie. I didn’t read it. I listened to it as a 16-hour audiobook while sitting in the dark, half-blind, mildly opiated, and recovering from laser eye surgery. It was dreamy.

This Norwegian series has a frightful literary reputation. I mean, from the title choice alone, you know you are in for some Bold Shit. Each entry is a brutally confessional retelling of major chapters from the author’s life, packaged with novelistic bowstrings. Infamously, after they were published, his (ex-)wife had a mental breakdown and his family was hounded by the media. As I said, Bold Shit.

Book 1 was extremely good. In it, Knausgaard recounts his journey to young adulthood and his bitter relationship with his father. The second half of Book 1 is singularly focused on a deeply tragic episode in Knausgaard’s life and executes it with such punishing detail that I started to feel distressed at points.

Not a lot here for me to say. These are very cherished stories in international literature. Many readers expound on how profoundly moving they found “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” or they rave about “Hadji Murad”.

Personally, I enjoyed Tolstoy’s depiction of the Imperial Russian campaign against the Chechens in “A Prisoner in the Caucasus”, the shocking values dissonance (for modern minds) in “The Kreutzer Sonata” and the uniquely Tolstoyan vision of Christian living in “Father Sergius”. And, of course, no one can refute the triumph that is “Master and Man”, a formidable tale about what it means to be human in the icy face of death.

My Struggle: Book 2 (2009) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Not as hard-hitting as Book 1 but nevertheless compelling. Book 2 dives into Knausgaard’s experience with fatherhood, his new life in Stockholm, his courtship of his second wife, and — this was my favourite element — his unusual friendship with Geir, a wilful, somewhat chauvinistic fellow writer. Also, he hilariously moans about how much he dislikes Swedish culture. It’s a fantastic, messy journey and I look forward to eventually mustering the stamina to tackle Books 3 through 6.

The author claims the My Struggle series is about the banality of life. I disagree! My view is that the books are about how we confront and navigate authentic moments of beauty and profundity in our prosaic lives, especially when it is far easier to hide under the comfortable banality of our daily grind.

The Power and the Glory (1940) by Graham Greene

Did you know that in the 1930s the Mexican government tried to crush and eliminate the Catholic Church? And that the state of Tabasco had an especially murderous anti-clerical regime?

Within this charged setting, Greene offers a compelling story of a fallen, alcoholic priest on a desperate quest to escape persecution. And at the same time, this disgraced priest must contend with his wavering faith and his unavoidable duties. Near the end, the novel rushes towards an inevitable finale where obligation and dignity clash against a person’s raw will to survive. It’s heady stuff.

The Last Samurai (2000) by Helen DeWitt

No, it has nothing to do with that damn Tom Cruise movie! DeWitt’s debut novel is an inventive and idiosyncratic tale about a highly intelligent, mentally unsound woman who attempts to raise (or rather, create) a child prodigy while living alone in poverty.

I did not like some sections, but I cannot deny that it’s a wonderfully special work of fiction and, as such, will recommend it to everybody. It’s about language, travel, education, film, music, pedagogy, and a kaleidoscope of other topics. It’s a book by a polymath that seeks to inspire others to be a tiny bit more polymathematical. Give it a try.

Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville

Possibly the oddest of the Big Classic Novels. It’s bombastic, it’s Shakespearean, it’s an account of 19th-century whaling methods, it’s an allegory for the American political experiment, it’s about Biblical lessons, it’s openly homoerotic, it has childish jokes, and fundamentally it’s about a wild crew of sailors on a doomed globetrotting quest and at one point one of them cuts off a whale’s foreskin and wears it as a raincoat.

What makes Moby-Dick so great can be expressed, funnily enough, with a Knausgaard quote. In Book 2 of My Struggle, he has this passage:

When I read Lucretius it’s all about the magnificence of the world… It’s about things. The physicality of things. Animals. Trees. Fish… I write to recapture the world. Yes, not the world I’m in. Definitely not the social world. The wonder-rooms of the Baroque age. The curiosity cabinets. And the world in Kiefer’s trees. That’s art. Nothing else.

Moby-Dick is great because all its intellectual drama and philosophical musings are inseparably welded to a grand, unknowable, and — most crucially — physical, natural universe. One that is no longer.

The Remains of the Day (1993) by Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s a quaint premise. A butler from a dignified estate drives a car through the English countryside. He reminisces about his life from a bygone era. He says gentlemanly sentiments and sits on a bench overlooking the ocean.

And why is it so satisfying? Ishiguro uses this framing to explore the inescapable questions we all ask ourselves: How should we live in the shadow of vast personal regrets? How can we carry on in the face of ‘what-could-have-beens’? Everyone ponders these questions on their darker days and everyone hopes to emerge from these musings a wiser individual.

9 December 2022 — Honourable and dishonourable mentions

Before I post my personal top book picks of 2022, I’d like to share some honourable/dishonourable mentions:

I won’t be posting a separate top movie list this year since I was underwhelmed by most of the films I watched. None of these are hidden gems or should come as a surprise.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a fantastic watch. The Lost Daughter cements the extraordinary filmability of Elena Ferrante’s writings. Y tu mamá también was a goddamn delight and I’m sad I didn’t watch it sooner. And Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters was my favourite film of the year – a masterpiece of cinema.

23 June 2022

why does every Ali Smith novel read like it solely exists to please Guardian book reviewers

17 December 2021 — Top eight books I read in 2021

1. Submission (2015) by Michel Houellebecq

The setting is deliberately inflammatory: the year is 2022 and an Islamist party is about to take power in France. It is startling, problematic, uncomfortable, and a very, very entertaining novel. Don’t confuse it for mere Islamophobic satire though. Houellebecq’s true target is the spineless intelligentsia that he sees as complicit bystanders of a Europe slipping into the spiritual void.

2. Shame (1983) by Salman Rushdie

Shame tells the grotesque power struggle between two elite families. In a nutshell, it is an allegory about the dysfunctional birth and maturation of the modern Pakistani nation-state, told through a magical realist lens. It is certainly his most thematically tight and structurally focussed novel. It also felt like his most reflective and meditative work. My favourite Rushdie novel.

3. Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) by Ted Chiang

A brilliant collection of science fiction short stories. In an interview, Ezra Klein rightly described him as a great writer of religious fiction (even though Chiang is an atheist), which makes his works even more fascinating. My favourite stories in the collection: “Tower of Babylon”, “Story of Your Life” (which was adapted into Villeneuve’s film Arrival) and “Hell is the Absence of God”.

4. Exhalation (2019) by Ted Chiang

Another great collection from a very unique and talented thinker. As with Stories of Your Life and Others, these stories are fantastical, philosophical, and deeply humanistic despite often involving decidedly non-human entities. My favourite stories here were: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, “The Great Silence”, and “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”.

5. Immune (2021) by Philipp Dettmer

From the head writer of a popular science education YouTube channel. A fantastic introduction to the incredibly elegant and absurdly complex mechanisms of the human immune system for general audiences. As the book itself notes, the sobering truth is that our immune system is the reason we’re all alive and, when it ultimately fails, will be the cause of death for many of us.

6. Maus (1980) by Art Spiegelman

The classic black-and-white graphic novel. About the Holocaust. With cartoon mice. Not only does it manage to be one of the most harrowing true survival stories that I’ve read on this subject, but it is also a compelling personal account of the complex, difficult relationship between Spiegelman and his own father, the core subject of the novel.

7. Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry

Told over the events of a single day, at face value this is a novel about a man drinking himself into both literal and spiritual damnation in a small town in Mexico. Love, loss, and intense self-medication is the name of the game. It is highly symbolic, at times very difficult to parse, and dense with references. The ending, despite its apparent inevitability, is still shocking.

8. As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner

“My mother is a fish.” The Bundrens, a hapless rural family in the Deep South decide to take the body of their family matriarch to be buried in her hometown. The journey is arduous, tragic, and absurd, and reveals the inner lives and secrets of a truly flawed and disturbed family. It’s a short novel and the first piece of Faulkner I’ve read. I was quite impressed by it.

Note that I excluded Ulysses since it wasn’t so much a book for me and more of an obligatory literary experience. Anyway, what’s next? Going to work through Tolstoy’s short stories early next year. Might try more Houellebecq. Might look into Domenico Starnone (who may or may not be, along with his partner, the actual Elena Ferrante). Always open to recommendations. Hit me up.

17 December 2021 — Top eight films I watched this year

Truth be told, this was a fairly flat year. I didn’t find many of the movies I watched that interesting (admittedly, that’s probably because I blitzed through my list of international films in last year’s lockdown). Anyway, here’s my end-of-year list in no particular order.

1. Miller’s Crossing (1990), dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

A beautiful and intelligently crafted film, with just enough of the Coen brothers’ signature quirks to make it feel enriched but not distracting. I’d happily call it one of my favourite gangster films, and certainly my favourite of their “pre-Fargo” filmography (I just didn’t feel that much for Barton Fink, sorry).

2. Pig (2021), dir. Michael Sarnoski

An emotional story that never relies on shortcuts or treats the audience like morons. Nicolas Cage! What a performance! While the premise is a bit… odd (is Portland really the right setting for cut-throat restauranteering and long-lost legendary chefs?), the themes of grief, reconciliation, and acceptance rise above it.

3. Still Life (2006), dir. Jia Zhangke

Loved it. Probably my top movie on this list and it is certainly Zhangke’s masterpiece. Set in a small town slowly being destroyed by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, this film is a powerful witness to those left behind by China’s relentless drive for progress. And, as in all his films, Zhao Tao is a thrill to see onscreen.

4. Dune (2021), dir. Denis Villeneuve

It’s far from a perfect film but it’s a hell of a cinematic experience when it rises to the occasion. As a long-time fan of the novel who has suffered the eccentric Lynch adaptation and the outlandish Sci Fi Channel miniseries, I was delighted to see Villeneuve handle the material with pure expertise. I eagerly await the sequel.

5. The Long Goodbye (1973), dir. Robert Altman

A damn slick film. Why wasn’t Elliott Gould a leading man in more films? Transposing Chandler’s hardboiled universe into the sleazy rump of 1970s Hollywood was an act of brilliance. It’s subversive and caustically funny to all the right levels. Also, the second film on this list to riff on the famous final scene from The Third Man.

6. Brokeback Mountain (2005), dir. Ang Lee

A masterful drama. I read the film as being about individual yearnings vs. familial/societal obligations (a common theme in Asian cinema), with the subject of sexuality more of a secondary matter. After all, its first act evokes Hexagram 4 of the I Ching (mountain over water), which speaks of youthful folly and success.

7. House of Flying Daggers (2004), dir. Zhang Yimou

While I still maintain that Zhang Yimou sold out after the nineties (his pre-2000s filmography is marvellous), this is one of his stronger wuxia films. The costumes! The landscapes! The music! The colours! (Oh, the colours!) The film’s depiction of a fantastical and tragic Jiang Hu world set in the Tang Dynasty is, at times, bewitching.

8. Apocalypse Now (1979 theatrical cut), dir. Francis Ford Coppola

Previously, my only foray into this film had been the bloated Redux cut and I couldn’t stand it. I’m happy to say this is not the case with the theatrical release. Sometimes leaner is better. The descent into madness is more compelling. The hallucinatory war sequences are more focused. And that ending hits harder. This is the end, alright.

And some honourable mentions:

13 December 2021 — Books that didn’t make my end-of-year list

This was a very productive reading year. I clocked over 8,000 pages (according to Goodreads) and filed away some Chunky Dead White Male Classics. And none of them made my 2021 top list! Here are my remarks on books that didn’t make the cut:

28 December 2020 — End-of-year top ten films

Cinema is dead! Long live cinema! Here’s my obligatory end-of-year top ten films list. In no particular order:

  1. The Guilty (2018): Danish high-concept thriller focussed entirely on one person sitting in a room. It is utterly gripping from the moment the plot kicks in till the moment the credits roll.
  2. Yi Yi (2000): A wonderfully tender Taiwanese slice-of-life drama about a modern-day middle-class Taipei family during a very challenging time in their lives.
  3. Free Solo (2018): Everyone told me to watch it and I didn’t regret it. A superb character study. I was squirming on the couch during its most vertigo-inducing moments.
  4. Thunder Road (2018): A low budget comedy-drama about a psychologically damaged police officer struggling in a small American town. Deeply moving by the end.
  5. Feels Good Man (2020): A documentary on the Pepe the Frog meme! It manages to be insightful, hilarious, and at times surreal, even for those familiar with the troubled subject matter.
  6. Mulholland Drive (2001): David Lynch at his Lynchiest. The emotional swells of the story and the chemistry between the two female leads overwhelms even its most cryptic sequences.
  7. Ran (1985): Kurosawa’s epic adaptation of King Lear. Incredible visuals coupled with chaotic, unforgiving energy. Perhaps my favourite Shakespeare adaptation to date.
  8. The Act of Killing (2012): An unbelievably haunting documentary about the brutal Indonesian Communist Purge. At its essence, it is about whether art can unravel man’s inhumanity to man.
  9. Uncut Gems (2019): A grubby, anxiety-inducing thriller that feels like a train is ramming through your skull. Like everyone else, I enjoy hating on Adam Sandler, but he’s impressively good in this.
  10. I, uh, can’t decide on a tenth film. I’ll make it a three-way tie between Tangerine (2015), Twelve Angry Men (1957) and The Lighthouse (2019). Three completely incomparable films.

22 December 2020 — Top five books

Another year, another bump up for my eye prescription. My top five books that I read this year (in no particular order):

  1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
  2. The Sellout (2015), by Paul Beatty
  3. Circe (2018), by Madeline Miller
  4. The Odyssey (2017), translated by Emily Wilson
  5. Blindness (1997), by José Saramago

If I had to pick my favourite from the lot, it’ll have to be The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

8 September 2020

Just finished Summer, the final book in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. A wonderful, interconnected series where each book manages to simultaneously be a sturdy slice-of-life family drama, a bittersweet meditation on the importance of art, and an urgent reminder of the need to confront contemporary political challenges.

The first book caused a moderate stir in 2016 when it managed to become the first ‘post-Brexit’ novel, reflecting on that particular issue. Written with equal fervour, this fourth and final entry has similarly achieved, by my reckoning, the status of being the first piece of literary fiction partly set during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And with that, the beginning meets the end and the seasons come full circle with the remarkable literary accomplishment of this Quartet. Can happily recommend these books to anyone looking for something to read during the two-week Melbourne lockdown extension.

11 November 2019 — Ryszard Kapuściński

With 2019 nearing its inevitable tailspin, I am happy to report that I’ve accomplished my literary goal of reading every major English translated work by Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. Now all I have to do is brush up on my polski so I can complete his oeuvre.

The Soccer War (1990)

Like Travels with Herodotus, this book is a grab bag of his adventures around the world — but with an emphasis on his experience as a journalist witnessing civil wars and violent regime change throughout the Global South. But unlike his previous works, in which he depicts himself as a meek and poetic soul, in The Soccer War he comes across as a reckless maniac. In one incident during the Nigerian Civil War, he describes driving solo into hostile roadblocks and getting robbed, assaulted, and nearly set on fire. In another, he writes about how he and his colleagues smuggled themselves into the Congo, were caught, and nearly executed by Belgian paratroopers. Harrowing if true — with italics around the if. I’ll certainly say that Kapuściński was more a hearsayist than a rigorous fact-checker. In one unusual passage, he recounts the suicide of Mario Terán, the Bolivian army sergeant who executed Che Guevara. The only problem is that Terán is very much still alive to this day!

The best passage in The Soccer War, in which he underscores how absurdly volatile some parts of the world are:

In the course of one month I had driven through five countries. In four of them, there were states of emergency… Two parliaments had been dissolved. Two governments had fallen. Scores of political activists had been arrested. Scores of people had been killed in political conflicts. Over a distance of 520 kilometres, I had been checked twenty-one times and subjected to four body searches. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of tension, everywhere the smell of gunpowder.

Imperium (1994)

A fragmented and meandering book about Kapuściński’s experiences travelling through the countries of the former Soviet Union over several decades. Maybe it’s the translation, but I found some of the prose uncharacteristically slow-going. The strongest aspect of Imperium is actually the quotes he curates from other sources, which he uses to paint an image of the Soviet system in all its monstrous, incompetent cruelty. The destruction of the Aral Sea. The madness of the Palace of the Soviets. The incomprehensibility of the Holodomor (about which he makes some startling links to the writings of the great Bruno Schulz). And Kapuściński, despite being a self-confessed non-Kremlinologist, makes some intriguing speculation on the future of post-Soviet Russia. His analysis on the relationship between Moscow and Kyiv, for example, almost reads like prophecy in light of the recent annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in the region.

The best passage in Imperium, in which the maestro plays Solzhenitsyn and visits what remains of the Kolyma Gulag in Siberia:

I thought about the terrible uselessness of suffering. Love leaves behind its creation—the next generation coming into the world, the continuation of humanity. But suffering? Such a great part of human experience, the most difficult and the most painful, passes leaving no trace. If one were to collect the energy of suffering emitted by the millions of people here and transform it into the power of creation, one could turn our planet into a flowering garden.

27 September 2019

Recently watched the Detective Pikachu movie. A wealthy industrialist builds a city from scratch in ten years with its own unique institutional framework? Guys… I think this is secretly a neoliberal film about charter cities.

16 September 2019

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is to The Handmaid’s Tale like Terminator 2 was to the first Terminator movie…

Spoilers ahoy!

10 September 2019

Just started my copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and so far it is utterly wonderful. For someone who has repeatedly denied being a feminist writer or a science fiction writer, it sure is unfortunate that Atwood keeps accidentally writing landmark works of feminist speculative fiction.

In preparation, I reread The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in over a decade. A wild, distressing ride from start to finish. Nevertheless, I forgot, for instance, that the book has brief moments of goofy 80s sci-fi writing. Characters communicate with Compuphones and Computalks, and pay for things on their Compubanks.

I also forgot how surreal the ending was. I’m not talking about the conclusion of Offred’s story, but rather the book’s weird meta-epilogue which features two stuffy academics of “Gileadean Studies” in the far future giving conference speeches about the historical events of the story. There are awful jokes, confusing scholarly detours, and mocking stabs at sexism in academia and cultural relativism. The whole thing is brilliant emotional whiplash. Imagine if the Hulu television series concluded with a thirty minute parody TED Talk — how would that be for an outrageous ending? I certainly hope “Professor Maryann Crescent Moon” and “Professor James Darcy Pieixoto” make an equally strange appearance in the sequel.

30 August 2019 — Paul John Peated Select Cask

A review of “Paul John Peated Select Cask” Indian Single Malt Whiskey.

Distillery: John Distilleries Country/Region: Goa, India Age: Unknown/probably false on the label Strength: 55.5%

NOSE: Faint and musky. Like a sad ghost escaping a cardboard box. Homeopathic levels of peat, with hints of unlabelled garage chemicals and puddle water. Simple.

PALATE: Surprisingly unresponsive. Bargain bin confectionery, salty florals, black pepper, bitter olives, chewed ball-point pen.

FINISH: Aggressive. Lingering and unwelcoming. Sizzles on the soft palate like a skin rash from a crop-duster. Its acidic elements overwhelm all other flavours.

Further comments: One would be remiss to engage in any colonial tomfoolery and spurn a fine drop based on its country of origin, but in this instance the marketing has done little to dissuade skittish consumers.

“Made from grains harvested and processed in a cool climate” it claims, ignoring the fact that Goa has an average winter temperature of 25°C. The online material goes on to proudly contradict the above by asserting that Goa’s warm temperatures shorten the time the whiskey needs to age. This, I do not think, is how the physics actually works.

A concerning concoction fit only for self-flagellating dipsomaniacs. I, for one, am certainly glad I did not actually pay money for this liquor, and I’m sure my surviving gut flora is pleased as well.

Final score: “Jesus-fuckin-Christ-it-burns”/10

25 July 2019

Currently reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As far as I can tell, the whole point of the novel is that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was great since it gave the intelligentsia of Prague lots of time to have sex with each other.

22 July 2019 — Melbourne Tea Festival

Went to the 2019 Melbourne Tea Festival in North Melbourne this Sunday. So suck up your sencha and bring on your oolong because, after a suspenseful two-year hiatus, tea is fuckin’ back on the menu!

Some piping hot, brewed thoughts:

TL;DR: Melbourne Tea Festival? If you drink enough, more like the Melbourne PEE Festival, amirite?

26 March 2019

Loving Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities at the moment but damn it lost me when it went on a ten page rant about charter cities.

20 March 2019

Just finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Hysterical realism is real. It’s a blight that must be stamped out. Only literary naturalism should be permitted.

12 February 2019

Tonight I finished The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. An epic of Russian satire. This is a book where a giant black cat gets into a gunfight with the Soviet secret police. IT’S AMAZING.

23 January 2019

Knocked out a wonderful fantasy trilogy over the summer break: N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, a series that won her the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row(!), as well as making her the first ever African-American writer to win the top category.

The books tackle a ferocious range of themes — oppression and ideology, minority rights, motherhood, climate change, political and social belonging, and has one of the wildest variants of the Gaia hypothesis that I’ve come across. As the series progresses, it becomes a mashup of genres (feudal dark fantasy, post-apocalypse, body horror, biopunk, etc., etc.) and yet amazingly, it all works. Check out these books, you nerds!

29 December 2018

Currently on the road. Watched some films to kill time and hide from the sweltering tropical heat.

The House That Jack Built, dir. Lars von Trier

A film about a serial killer who cuts off women’s breasts, mutilates dead children and pontificates about how great Nazi aesthetic is. Yet this supposedly “edgy” and “provocative” film commits the worst crime of all: It’s really, really boring. It’s pretentious and not even that grisly. The last chapter and the epilogue were sort of interesting, but that’s about it. Also, that recurring Bob Dylan reference was weird and stupid. What a disaster.

Roma, dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Yeah, it’s great. It’ll probably win Best Foreign Language Film and then you’ll all watch it on Netflix (if you haven’t already). It would’ve made the #3 slot of my top five films of the year if I had seen it earlier. Roma is downright beautiful in its scene composition, and the film depicts one particular subject matter in an incredibly stark way that I’ve never seen done before. A minor gripe: One of its big, highlight scenes is a carbon copy of a Children of Men sequence. Copying your own homework, Cuarón? Tsk tsk.

Vice, dir. Adam McKay

I’m always amazed by the recency bias inherent in statements like “Trump is the worst president ever”. Seriously? Like, have you guys already forgotten about the Bush administration? Two disastrous wars in the Middle East. The birth of the modern surveillance state. Extraordinary rendition. Enhanced Interrogation. The prelude to the Global Financial Crisis. And to top it all off, Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice-president was a literal, fucking comic book villain.

Needless to say, I was excited for this film. Definitely watch it for Christian Bale, who practically transforms into that monstrous toad-in-a-human-suit that was VP Cheney. As for the narrative itself, it’s sadly clumsier than I would’ve liked. A whole bunch of things were poorly explained or rushed (e.g. the Plame affair, the birth of ISIS), and at the end of the film, there’s a montage of contemporary America, showcasing everything from climate change to the opioid epidemic, without explaining how it all links back to the story. Here, the filmmakers are effectively throwing their hands up in the air and saying “We don’t know! But Cheney probably had something to do with it!” Messy.

Mostly enjoyable. Has its slick, funny and startling moments, so it has a mild recommendation from me. It’s pretty wacky seeing Steve Carell play Donald Rumsfeld, mind you.

11 December 2018 — Best of the year

A quick summary of my list for those in a hurry.

Top five books of the year:

  1. The Barefoot Investor for Families
  2. The President is Missing, by Bill Clinton & James Patterson
  3. That Sean Penn novel that got published this year
  4. I Quit Sugar, by Sarah Wilson
  5. 12 Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson

Top five films of the year:

  1. Slender Man
  2. Unfriended: Dark Web
  3. Sherlock Gnomes
  4. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
  5. Fifty Shades Freed

30 August 2018

Finished another great book: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Charlie’s in the bushes. Ride of the Valkyries. Seven-six-two millimeter, full metal jacket. Tet Offensive. Domino theory. Smells like victory. They drew first blood, not me! “Some folks are born made to wave the flag — Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.” This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. (Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?) Lost my leg in ‘Nam. Tonight I will be Miss Saigon… “Rape, murder! It’s just a shot away.” Someday this war’s gonna end.

22 August 2018 — MoMA at the NGV

MoMA at the NGV was satisfactory and I score it a six out of dix even though most of the pieces on play were the gallery’s B-side tracks as opposed to their hit singles too precious to release from the starry jewel box on 53rd Street in Midtown so there weren’t any particularly great Cézannes or O’Keeffes or even a single ruddy Rousseau for that matter but seeing some Matisse always warms the heart as does Jasper Johns and despite everyone crowding around Dali’s small but O so persistent memory I was much more delighted to see Chirico’s absolutely thrilling Gare Montparnasse Ah it’s good to see you again my old amico and before I go I must make the odd remark that the artwork labels for kiddie visitors were sometimes more interesting to read than the quote unquote adult labels above and this isn’t the first time the NGV has done this and O by the way Mister Warhola sucks because he’s practically the Nokia ringtone of pop art and now I’ve finished my review so goodnight.

11 August 2018 — Shoplifters

Thought I’d mention that I saw another film at the Melbourne International Film Festival the other day — one of the MIFF headliners: Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, about a family of petty thieves and swindlers living on the fringes of Tokyo’s society. As to be expected, it’s pretty great, with a charming and often funny screenplay that wades deeper into moral ambiguity and poignancy as the story progresses.

The only other Kore-eda film I’ve seen was his 2016 drama After the Storm which, despite having an almost insultingly simple premise, still remains fresh in my mind even now when I try to recall scenes from it (it also helps that the film stars Hiroshi Abe, aka Lucius the greatest bath house architect of the Roman Empire). Whereas After the Storm seems to reveal a vein of complacency and stagnancy in Japanese society, Shoplifters is primarily focussed on those that its economy has left behind. It’s always nice to see a tightly written slice-of-life story based in modern Japan that’s about, y’know, normal everyday people, as opposed to anime caricatures, subcultural oddities, and incoherent hijinks that Westerners find amusing.

6 August 2018 — Ash Is Purest White

Watched Ash Is Purest White last night at the Melbourne International Film Festival and it was a bloated—though occasionally entertaining—muddle of a movie.

Ash Is Purest White is supposedly a sprawling crime drama about how power, loyalty, and sacrifice are tenuous concepts in contemporary China. It has a number of Zhangke’s directorial hallmarks: A fetishisation of firearms; coal mines; strange Chinese funeral practices; kitschy western pop music; surreal interludes into the paranormal; and his wife in the lead role. While all this sounds good on paper, the film is sadly incapable of sticking the landing.

This is in part because it copies the exact same plot structure of his previous film, Mountains May Depart, without making any particularly interesting adjustments:

  1. It’s the late 1990s/early 2000s and all the characters are excited about how the country is beginning to reform.
  2. Time skip!
  3. Oh no, all the characters are lost and sad because China has changed too quickly…

Whereas the first two-thirds has some slickly acted and choreographed scenes, as well as some sharp moments of humour, the final third is unjustifiably tedious. The screenplay ran out of ideas. The editor fell asleep at the table. At least three times I was sure the film would cut to black and roll credits, but the damn thing just kept on going. Plus, it has possibly the most boring gangsters in any movie I’ve ever seen. All you see them do is play mahjong, chain smoke, eat noodles, and drink baijiu. Gangsters don’t do that in China. Everyone does that in China.

This was disappointing since the director, Jia Zhangke, has made some really interesting films. His 2013 film A Touch of Sin is a nasty, brutish tour of modern China that touches on a wide range of issues, from corruption to the sex trade to the Foxconn suicides, and posits that the only way some people can cope under such crushing injustice is through vigilantism and lone wolf violence. It’s a film that makes you want to take a cold shower afterwards. Similarly, Mountains May Depart has a deeply ambitious story and includes a bizarre third act set in a futuristic Melbourne where the PTV trams are slightly bigger and firearm ownership is legal in Australia again (somehow).

All in all, like Chinese history itself, the film is too damn long.

30 April 2018 — A review of (almost) everything I watched and read in April

Winter by Ali Smith

A much stronger work than Autumn. Just as how Autumn was a meditation on transience and memory in the shadow of Brexit; this book reflects on the themes of authenticity and reconciliation in the brunt face of UK conservative politics more generally. Funny, playful, crisp. Looking forward to Spring.

Space Is the Place, directed by John Coney

Thanks to a friend for bringing this to my attention. This very bizarre 1974 film is one of first true examples of the Afrofuturist science-fiction genre and stars Sun Ra, an avant-garde jazz musician who in real life claimed to have been abducted by aliens from Saturn (no, seriously). The plot’s about Sun Ra (all decked out in Egyptian pharaoh getup) trying to send the black youths of Oakland to a utopian space colony through the power of jazz music. In one scene, two NASA engineers beat up sex workers in a brothel. I liked it, despite the scientific inaccuracies.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

A clever supernatural/historical fantasy tale about ghosts in the afterlife squabbling over the soul of Abraham Lincoln’s son, who died at the start of the American Civil War. It won the Man Booker Prize last year, so you don’t need me to tell you it’s eminently readable. I’d just like to confirm that it’s a markedly better book than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

If you ever thought to yourself ‘gee, I sure wish I could read something with intensely difficult subject matter, which will make me sad and never want to touch another novel ever again’, then this is the book for you. A brutal and emotionally draining door-stopper about four male friends in Manhattan who have absurdly successful and absurdly tragic lives. More than once, I had to get up and pour myself some whiskey before continuing with a particularly dark sequence. I have a pet theory that each of the four main characters can be matched with each of the four main Seinfeld characters, but I think I’m deliberately trying to miss the point.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s memoirs about his impoverished early years in Paris. In them, he effectively brags about drinking large quantities of alcohol and hanging out with artists like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. At times, it reads almost as a parody of Hemingway with thudding lines like ‘It is very good to make love to the person you love’ or ‘There’s not much future in men being friends with great women’. I guess Midnight in Paris was spot on with its depiction of him.

The Good Place

It took me a while to warm up to this TV show initially, but I now think it’s delightful. Philosophers all over the world can hang up their capes. The plebeian masses have reached peak pop culture philosophy absorption. There’s no more work left to do.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Surprised I didn’t get around to seeing this play earlier. But now that I have, I know exactly what Waiting for Godot is about. A close esoteric reading of the text clearly shows that it’s about French ambivalence with joining the European Coal and Steel Community after the Second World War, and the political anxieties surrounding the 1950 Schuman Declaration. Duh.

Mountains May Depart, directed by Jia Zhangke

The only other Jia Zhangke film I’ve seen is A Touch of Sin which is, in my opinion, an overly damning vision of a broken and irredeemable modern China. This film tones it down somewhat, but remains deeply sombre. Taking place over three time periods (1991, 2014, and 2025), this film tries to capture the shifts in Chinese society through the relationship between three friends. An ambitious film which works for the first two-thirds and falls flat in its third act (which weirdly enough, takes place in a futuristic Melbourne).

A Taxi Driver, directed by Jang Hoon

Not to be confused with the Scorsese thriller Taxi Driver, or the godawful Queen Latifah comedy Taxi. A South Korean film about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds of democratisation protestors were killed by government troops. The main story, about a taxi driver who smuggled a German reporter into Gwangju to cover the protests, is actually true. What seems less accurate is the film’s weird preoccupation with how great the Korean taxi industry is and its excessive car chase sequences. It’s like if someone decided to make a film about the foreign reporters who secretly covered the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but thought it would be a good idea to throw in some rooftop chase sequences and kung-fu fight scenes.

Avengers: Infinity War, directed by Late Capitalism

BOOM! POW! POW! POW! PEWPEWPEW! BOOOSH! BAAAM! ZAAAP! ZAAAP! WHOOOMFFF! DAKKADAKKADAKK! KABLOOSH! VOOOSH! NOOOSH! XOOOSH! KRACCCK! SHLAAM! POOOM! VROOOM! SHABOOM!

17 March 2018 — A hasty review of things I watched/read this week

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood

Despite her unconvincing protests to the contrary, Atwood very clearly possesses the sensibilities of a wild, pulpy science fiction writer. This book — the final in a trilogy — is a sprawling vision of bio-cyber-punk dystopian excess, populated with evil mega-corps, genetically modified monstrosities, greenie doomsday cults, and Atwood’s weird attempts at internet slang. The Handmaid’s Tale seems like a quaint fairytale in comparison. Not as good as The Year of the Flood which is itself nowhere near as good as Oryx and Crake. Her captivating world building is hampered by eye-rolling coincidences and a plot that develops a tad too slowly and unevenly.

Annihilation by Alex Garland

The novel this movie was based on was a goddamn creepy read, filled with moments of paranoia, body horror, and cosmic existential dread. The film, for the most part, does a great job of capturing the confronting, cryptic tone of the books. Like in the book, an all-female cast of soldiers and scientists is compelled to explore a horrific, twisted dreamscape. The last stretch of the film is visually and aurally intense in ways I won’t spoil. Recommended for anyone that wants a thought-provoking, anxiety-inducing Netflix experience.

Autumn by Ali Smith

A cosy, witty, compact novel that is also an exercise in ‘wabi-sabi’ aesthetics, as told through the lens of British memorabilia, odd friendships, and female pop artists. I was surprised that I laughed out loud in quite a few places. Although it’s been lauded as the first, great ‘post-Brexit’ novel, it’s fairly common knowledge that Smith shoe-horned the Brexit elements after the vote turned out the way it did. To be honest, the book is neither improved nor diminished by its Brexit elements. It’s just sort of there. Regardless, I did enjoy it enough to immediately go out and buy Winter, the second instalment in Smith’s Seasonal cycle.

The Death of Stalin by Armando Iannucci

A fantastic, vantablack comedy about the chaos that erupted in the Soviet Union following the demise of history’s most infamous Georgian tyrant. Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev? Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov? Jason Isaacs as Field Marshal Zhukov? Brilliant! Plus, no one bothers with a Russian accent, which makes the movie even better. The film did a pretty good job of portraying how things actually were: Stalin’s son really was an alcoholic fuck up; Beria (head of the NKVD) really was a bloodthirsty rapist; and yes, Stalin loved cowboy films (fun fact: he also ideologically loathed them and once tried to send assassins to kill John Wayne). And surprising absolutely no one, The Death of Stalin has been banned in Russia.

Episode 10, season 1 of Degrassi: Next Class, by Canada

After being coerced into watching this, I feel intensely compelled to unpack this multi-layered, post-structuralist neo-drama. It is obvious that Zig, led by the psychopomp of post-truth paradoxes, must confront his subliminal struggle with subdialectic feminism. In distinct contrast, Miles and Hunter, being trapped in the stasis of neo-capitalist consciousness, must re-contextualise the semiotics of the military-industrial complex within the rubicon of class divisions. Frankie, on the other hand, clearly needs better friends than Lola and Shay.

4 February 2018 — Altered Carbon

So I just binged all ten episodes of Altered Carbon on Netflix. I have an addictive personality and my eyes sting a bit. Here’s a review!

Based on a relatively obscure 2002 cyberpunk novel, this is an ultra-violent, high-concept, big-budget serialised TV drama that would have been impossible to make ten years ago. As such, I was very excited about it and it has largely met my expectations.

The setting is classic ‘hardboiled cyberpunk’ to a fault. Drunk detectives; dystopian mega-cities; flying cars; neon lights; rogue hackers; oppressive corporations; the future sucks and it’s raining all the time. Yes, they’re genre clichés, but they sure do remind you a bit of the world in 2018…

The big idea the show explores is this: Death has been cured. Everyone has what is essentially a ‘hard-drive’ near the base of their brain, so that if they die, they can just ‘reinstall’ their consciousness into another body. As it turns out, however, the consequences of technological immortality can be fucking horrifying.

Rating-wise, I’d give the first half of the season a solid 7/10 for staunchly committing to its premise. The acting was okay and the action was serviceable, though the dialogue was often a little too on-the-nose. If anything else, they went all in on the set design and costumes, turning it into the Blade Runner homage you secretly always wanted (you goddamn nerd).

That said, the second half of the season is a 5/10 as the third act devolves into a cheesy, melodramatic mess of weirdly paced character interactions and story ideas. Still watchable, but you might need to pour yourself a stiff drink.

A warning in case this sort of thing puts you off: The level of abject neo-noir violence committed against women in this show can get quite intense (on par with films like Sin City). It certainly began to leave a sour aftertaste for me towards the end. (Though the main screenwriter for the show is a woman, oddly enough.)

Overall, I’d say try one or two episodes if you’re either (A) into bleak science fiction spectacle, (B) interested in unsettling, existential ideas about humanity and technology, or (C) waiting for season three of The Expanse to come out later this year.

As an addendum, here are some creepy, existential-crisis-inducing ideas that shows like Altered Carbon have explored. My crazy guess is that at least one or two of these could become actual issues within our lifetimes:

  1. Technologies that can sufficiently alter human sensory perceptions as to make people question reality.
  2. Total corporate ownership of biological components of the human body, or of technologies deeply integrated into the body.
  3. The ability to torture or harm the neurological state of individuals without actually rendering permanent damage to their bodies.
  4. With sufficiently advanced computing power, the inability to distinguish between an actual “conscious” (whatever that means) digital entity, and merely an advanced program that can mimic human conscious interactions.
  5. A relationship between growing life expectancy/healthspan and aggressive wealth concentration. Similarly, a “genetic apartheid” emerging in society as a result of access to technologies such as gene-therapy.

Might as well start getting worried now, right?? Now, where did I leave my smartphone with all my personal data…..

31 December 2017 — Black Mirror, season 4

Brief review of Black Mirror season 4 (mild spoilers):

Probably the weakest season so far, despite having the best production value of the series.

Best episode: “Hang the DJ”, closely followed by “USS Callister”. Both are a blast, as long as you don’t think too hard about how the tech actually works.

Worst episode: “Arkangel”. Lame acting, plus the entire story could’ve happened without the key plot device gizmo.

“Crocodile” is up there as one of the most fucked up Black Mirror episodes ever and I weirdly admire it for going all in on its premise. “Metalhead” was based around an interesting idea (the real-world implications of LAWs), but the episode didn’t do much with it. The final episode, “Black Museum” was trying waaayyy too hard and ended up being a goofier version of the “White Christmas” episode.

Felt like this season was missing an episode set in the real-world like “The National Anthem” or “Shut Up and Dance”. Could’ve also done with an episode with bizarro satire like “Nosedive” or “Fifteen Million Merits”.

TL;DR: Charlie Brooker is a hack. Cancel your Netflix subscription. Worth a watch. This is still some of the sharpest original writing on TV at the moment.

11 September 2014 — Ten books that have stayed with me

“List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way.”