forestofglory

I haven’t had a lot of ability to focus on fiction lately. So I’ve most been reading a lot of novella and shorter length fanfic. But I have read and watched a few things in the last month or so.

Bingo Love by Tee Franklin, Jenn St-Onge, Joy San, and Cardinal Rae (Letterer) this a cute comic about grandmas in love. It starts with their first meeting in the 1960’s though so it does feature quite a bit of homophobia, but I thought it was very sweet. I would have liked a little more about them getting to know one another though, the relationship happened very fast! (Content notes: aging, dementia, death)

Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China by Craig Clunas I really enjoyed this book about Ming collectors and the objects they collected. One of my favorite genres of history is “how people in the past thought about things” and this was a good example of that.

Enter the Dragon I mentioned to R that I wanted to watch some older wuxia and wuxia adjacent movies, and that led to us watching this martial arts movie from the 1970’s which R remembered fondly. Sadly neither of us really liked it. There were very few female characters and they mostly met bad ends, and all the men were very stoic and didn't emote, so I never really cared about anyone. But it was still worth watching for historical reasons. R was pretty disappointed that this wasn’t as good as he remembered it though. (We have several other more wuxia adject things checked out of the library, but finding time to watch a whole movie together is a challenge)

Raya and the Last Dragon My brother got a Disney+ account and shared it with us. So we used that to watch this movie with the kid. It’s very pretty, and has lots of important female characters, and even one (1) alive mom!