A game for one to thirteen billion players

I had two lovely trips to the BFI film festival this year!

Super Nature is a film by Ed Sayers, which he put together from footage filmed by many, many other filmmakers around the world, shooting nature on Super 8 cameras. Each segment lasted less than two minutes and none of the locations was repeated in 90 minutes, up until the combined montage at the end. I thought it was incredible - really compelling, with an important message of conservation and connecting more with nature. I loved that the filmmakers were both nature activists doing important conservation work and also random people filming animals, plants and/or landscapes in their general environs. I was mesmerised throughout.

Blue Moon is a Richard Linklater film, which is basically a one-man Ethan Hawke show (though I loved all of the minor characters as well - especially the bartender) as Laurenz Hart lamenting the success of Richard Rodgers' new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein on the opening night of Oklahoma! One of the aspects of the film was various characters searching for the best word for something - and the word that springs to mind when I consider this film is - painterly. It plays out almost in real time across one evening and is mostly Hart speechifying to a captive audience in a bar round the corner from the theatre. It was very well done, though very sad - a portrait of a not particularly likeable man, brought down by his own vices. Masterful but perhaps a bit too invested in its own pretension.


Today, I also finally finished the Miss Percy Guide series by Quenby Olson with the third instalment - Miss Percy's Definitive Guide to the Restoration of Dragons. I enjoyed this series overall, though I did feel this one was rather dragged out, without a huge amount going on. I loved spending more time with these characters and finding out where they all ended up - but there was a lot of dithering, hanging around, waiting for something to happen. And the ultimate climax was a bit of a non-event - though I supposed that was in keeping with the cozy vibe. I'm glad I finished the trilogy and it was a fun listen overall, but not one I'll likely revisit.

The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman is a fascinating portrayal of the horrors of life in Warsaw during World War Two, with a particular focus on the fate of the animals in the Warsaw zoo and the heroic efforts of two of the zookeepers to save hundreds of Jews by hiding them in the cages and helping them escape capture by the Nazis.

It's a tough read, which is to be expected - but, in addition to all the war atrocities I was already tangentially aware of, there's an awful lot of horrible things that happen to many of the animals in the book.

Still, I'm glad I read it (though I did think about giving up several times), as it told me a lot of interesting and important things about life in Warsaw at that time. It also showed a beautiful family, doing amazing things during turbulent times.

The prose was often lyrical and meandering, which jarred terribly with the often very baldly stated horrors - perhaps deliberately so. It also skimmed over certain things that left me with questions, whilst occasionally also lapsing into multi-page almost essays about various aspects of history, which were a bit tedious.

Overall, though, a well-written book about perhaps a largely unknown part of a very well documented war.

The Humans by Matt Haig has been on my shelf for quite a while, probably because I've had mixed experienced with this author in the past.
The blurb on the back of the book makes it sound like the protagonist has some kind of psychotic break and starts feeling out of place among other humans. But the start of the book clearly states that he's been abducted and killed and replaced by an alien - and, from what I read, that does seem to be the case.
The alien's mission is to remove any and all evidence of a mathematical discovery that its race feels humanity isn't ready for - including killing anyone who knows about it.
And that where one of my problems with the book comes in - I get the feeling that the alien may end up deciding humans aren't so terrible after all, but 'he' still does some fairly terrible things along the way, and I'm always sceptical about how far characters can be redeemed, depending on what they actually do before they 'learn' better.
I also found the style and approach very off-putting. I can see what the author is trying to do - using an alien character to highlight bad/weird/amusing aspects of human society from an outside perspective. But it's very heavy-handed - and also quite boring, in that 'he' spends a lot of time describing completely mundane things that are fascinating/confusing to 'him', but that the reader knows and understands all too well.
Additionally, I get the feeling it's mean to be funny - but it's not the kind of humour that works for me at all. I just found the whole thing quite unpleasant, inconsistent and nonsensical (the way the alien behaves and responds to things makes no sense if 'he's' trying to blend in) and felt there wasn't enough actual plot in amongst the 'essay' sections, commenting on how humans live and behave.
I can see why people might like this book - but it just wasn't for me and I DNF'd it shortly before the 100-page mark.

The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable is set in the early 1700s in Venice and charts the life of Anna Maria della Pieta, a young woman abandoned at an orphanage at birth, who grew up to be one of the most celebrated violinists of the age. She was taught by Vivaldi, and the novel fills in the gaps of her story, suggesting she may have had quite an influence on his music.

It took me a while to get into this book, since I didn't like Anna Maria much, especially as an eight-year-old, but also in her later teenage years. She shows unbridled ambition and self-absorption, to the exclusion of all else, and to the detriment of her friendships with other girls in the orphanage.

But the book is well written and vivid in its depiction of 18th century Venice and the world of these girls in particular. It's a fascinating portrait of the orchestra and Vivaldi's involvement with it, though it also has heavy themes of patriarchy, misogyny, abuse of power, marginalisation due to both gender and class, and a very toxic institutional environment.

It was very good, though I'm not sure I really enjoyed it - I was ultimately glad I persevered, though. I initially feared the ending would be too harsh, then that it would be too easy - and it managed to find a balance between the two, which was satisfying.


Paradise Lost by John Milton - in graphic novel form by Pablo Auladell - is an interesting way to tell the story of the fall of Lucifer and the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. It's not done in an art style that particularly appeals to me, but I really liked how the different realms and allegiances were denoted by text box colour - and some of the full-page spreads were quite spectacular. I enjoyed revisiting some of Milton's poetry and the reading experience as a whole was a good one.