Pizza Slow (high quality)

  1. I mistakenly ignored the Wachowskis’s Speed Racer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Racer_(film)) on release and now junior has asked to (and so I also get to) watch it a second time (with Mom this time) this year, and it is really pretty incredible. Wildly underrated.

    Speed Racer (film) - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

    β€œassault [on] every single modern aesthetic”. --Lana Wachowskis

  2. Beautyland

    Marie-Helene Bertino

    Cover of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, published 2024-01-16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a 336-page hardcover
    Figure 1. Cover of Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, published 2024-01-16 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a 336-page hardcover.

    A lovely coming-of-age (I learned from a Bookwyrm post that you can call these a Bildungsroman) New York City story with a lot of heart. Another reviewer called it a β€œfunny-sad” which: yeah it’s that too. While I also more than enjoyed Auster’s similar 4, 3, 2, 1, in this case, the same kind of story (or, one quarter of the same kind of story), follows someone just under two years older than me to New York City so rather than the former’s dips into period-overexposure I had lots of β€œyes, hello” moments. I’m not a nostalgic person but that was a nice personal bonus.

    (Also Cheers gets another well deserved tip of the hat in Beautyland, like it did in Exit Zero.)