Can We Have A Do-Over?

Well, here we are, all the lads. Right at the end of the year, and the house has tonight slimmed down from a surprisingly-still-comfortable six (admittedly, one of the six is very small, but she does make her presence felt) to a somewhat lost-at-sea one. I have spent the day by myself in the usual manner: ineffective tidying up, staring at a computer screen for more than I really should, observing model runs more than is strictly necessary on a day off, and wondering just what dark magic I pulled in November to get $1/gallon of petrol at Kroger this morning.

As promised, for once, the list of books I read in 2024 is up. You’ll see that it’s a list that is dominated at the top and tail by series, and feels a lot more genre-bound than the last couple of years. The year started with me finding out that Games Workshop was finally about to end the Horus Heresy after something like fifteen years, which meant I spent Christmas and the early new year going through the Siege of Terra cycle¹. And then there was a gentle couple of months going through Ballard books I haven’t read yet, finally finishing the Arthur Maclean collection, and the Rosemary Tonks reissues that are available in the US (I’ve had to grab hold of actual physical copies of the others from the UK). But then, aside from a detour into the Palin diaries, Stafford Beer, and Owen Hatherley’s wonderful journey around DC and New York, come August, I fell into a Donald Westlake-shaped hole.

I remember enjoying William Goldman’s adaptation of The Hot Rock, so the Dortmunder books were an easy sell. What happened was this: I’d get an email saying one of the series had been reduced to $2, and I’d buy the next in the series. This took me all the way up to the end of Good Behavior (I’m very surprised this hasn’t been turned into a film — breaking into a NY skyscraper to rescue a young nun who is under a vow of silence via a series of increasingly convoluted approaches seems a great mid-range film. Although those don’t really exist these days…). And then the offers dried up and instead it directed me to the Parker books…waves at November and December. Honestly, I’m not even sure if I liked them all that much; they’re absolutely taut, but possibly just a little too clipped and tight. But then you can read one in a night…and I often did. And then Amazon decided to offer the last 16 books in the series for $22 or so. I couldn’t really say no at that price. I have forced myself to stop at the end of Butcher’s Moon (after which, Westlake didn’t write any more Parker novels for twenty years), but expect January 2025 to be rife with them, particularly as I’m going to be flying to San Francisco at the end of January.

So that was the year in books. A decided lack of nonfiction. TV? Well, I have a half-written rant about Adam Curtis’ The Way sitting in my note drafts for most of the year. Did it feel like a CBBC drama from the late 80s with a few “Curtis trademarks” applied on top? Absolutely. The thing is that I think that’s a good thing, unlike almost everybody else. And while I really can’t defend the “Welsh Catcher” bits, the swingers opener in episode 3 I will absolutely die on a hill for:

“Why are there swingers? What does this have to do with the plot??”

• Why does everything have to be a telegraphed part of the plot? Have all these revivals and spin-offs rotted your brains?

• Does the opener serve a purpose? Why yes, it allows a relatively natural conversation to talk about what’s going on rather than an infodump between just two characters (i.e. the sister and her husband)

• It also uses the swinger scene in an attempt to be clever. How successful the attempt is, I’m not sure: but yes, it’s an adult post-watershed drama on BBC1. But it’s a ‘sophisticated’ drama, so we’re playing with more risqué themes…but as well as having that cake, the show knows despite all the ‘sensitive’ filming in the world, the scenes in something like Sense8 are really at a core level just as salacious² as Barbara Windsor’s bra popping off, so it tries to eat the cake as well. And hence the juxtaposition with Carry On Camping and Benny Hill. It knows, you know, and it’s generating an auto-critique of itself while also building on the AI theme of the programme. It is at least trying!

• Also, everybody standing outside the big sod-off Grand Designs window staring in at them is funny.

Anyway, even if it was terribly uneven, I will go to bat for a show that explicitly rejects its premise and ends with a demand for new stories³.

Right, I will spare you all from my retrospective on Reality Bites, except to say that Ethan Hawke’s character totally voted for Trump in the 2024 election and nothing you say will convince me otherwise. Happy new year everybody…