May 2024 Media Recap

[tullycat]

May wrap-up! My brain maybe isn't soup?


Cat tax, featuring one of my books for this month.



Books:

• Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher
  • A fantasy book about the third daughter of a royal family being sent to a convent to keep her ~in wait in case she is needed to marry the king of the neighboring kingdom if her sister dies. However, when she realizes something isn't right with the king, she goes on a quest to bring him down. I think the most important part of this summary is 'quest'....if you don't like the sound of someone journeying to acquire people/items, you won't like this book. The fantasy part of it isn't as fully fleshed out as I would've liked it...there was a mention of cannibals roaming the outer lands and then zero mention of it again. Okay? How did these cursed cannibals come about and why were they mentioned if there was zero stakes associated with them? There wasn't even a cannibal run in during the quest! I later learned that this book was originally a short story and honestly that explained a lot to me. I think it was probably stronger as a short story....I don't know that it needed to be made longer lol. I rated this 2.5 stars, but other people in book club liked it more than me so ymmv.
• Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang
  • My favorite story was definitely the title story. I would recommend reading it even if you're not interested in the rest of the book. It's about a linguist making contact with aliens but also about a mother and her child. (The movie Arrival is based on it). Other stories I liked: Hell is the Absence of God, Understand, and Liking What You See: A Documentary. The other stories were just fine and there was one that I really should have skipped because it dragged me down lol. I was surprised that so many of the stories had some type of religious flair to them? I just wasn't expecting that from a sci-fi collection. Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes it didn't!
• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar
  • This is a nonfiction book with examples of how parking interacts with our lives and built environment and cities and I suppose the world, as the title says. I remember it being pretty US focused...understandably when you look at our car culture compared to pretty much every other city. Honestly I thought this was a fascinating read and really explained the hidden costs of parking - both literally (if parking is mandatory for apartments/free for residents then the cost of parking gets added to rent, which means that the builders' only choice is to make luxury apartments since that's the only way to recoup costs) and figuratively (the opening chapter describes people getting murdered over parking...) I finished it a couple weeks ago but I'm already looking at parking around where I live like 'wow this bank parking is so inefficient, it just sits empty from 5 pm to 9 am and the entire weekend....why not make it residential parking at night??' If you have any interest in urban planning/walkable cities/etc I would recommend!
• The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff
  • Set in India, when a woman's husband disappears, her village assumes she killed him and she starts to field requests from other women to make their husbands disappear. This description makes it sound like a comedy, but it was a little dark in some parts. I also read this for a book club and the black humor worked for them, but there were parts (especially the end) that just felt overly dramatic to me. I think this was one of the few books set in India that I've read, so I feel like I have zero context for how true some of the societal aspects were (the author is Indian American and said she wrote the book after visiting her family), but overall it was a fairly entertaining read. I think the part I enjoyed most was watching the main character reconnect with her childhood friend throughout the book and watching the MC realize that oh, perhaps she has been an unreliable narrator in her own life.
• The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
  • The OG dark academia~ This is the second book I've read by Tartt (I read The Goldfinch first and hilariously lost it when I tried shipping it from west to east. Let's hope I don't have to live out the plot of this book too). I think Tartt's writing style is so great and this book was well crafted. In January, I complained that I hated when books used the 'something bad happened but we're not going to tell you what it was until halfway through' plot device, so I loved that this book opens with Richard telling us that their friend Bunny died. We watch the lead up to the murder and then the unravelling of the friend group after the murder in a satisfying way. I did also find it funny that I read The Likeness by Tana French before reading The Secret History...Tana you totally wrote an au of The Secret History haha.

Watched:

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
  • Veronica mentioned these movies and I saw they were on Hulu so I said what the hell and watched a couple. Honestly...not for me. And I had seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes in theaters, so I should've known better lol. But sometimes you just want background noise of a silly action movie.
• Challengers (2024)
  • I quite enjoyed it, but not enough to actually read any of the resulting fic. Not being a tennis fan probably helped, because apparently this takes places in an alternate tennis universe (yet they stressed it was set in 2019 to avoid Covid lol)
• The Idea of You (2024)
  • One Direction fic-turned-movie starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine. Completely ridiculous and forgettable but good for Anne Hathway for getting her check. I texted Veronica the entire time which made it much more enjoyable.
• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
  • I listed this as one of my favorite movies for years on Tumblr. If I were still using Tumblr I think I would quietly remove it from the list haha. It was fine but nothing more for me.
• Furiosa (2024)
  • For the three of you that read my round-ups, I did watch Mad Max in March so I was well primed for this movie. I enjoyed it! I think I liked Mad Max more though...Mad Max made me think Furiosa had a much deeper/personal connection to the wives, but the Furiosa movie essentially makes it seem like she helps them purely out of a sense of morality/justice if that makes sense. Don't know why I stuck so hard on that point lol. I doubt it jumped out to anyone else like it did to me and the movie still worked. I loved the world building of these movies the most though.
• Still chugging through Boys Planet! Episodes 6 and 7 this month. I think if I had watched BP live, I would've been a massive Taerae stan lol.

Music:

• Artists:
  • Ateez (123)
  • NCT Dream (123)
  • Twice (110)
  • TXT (107)
  • IVE (87)
• Tracks:
  • Sweat, Zerobaseone (22)
  • Heya, IVE (19)
  • Accendio, IVE (15)
  • Nothing, Kiss of Life (15)
  • Blue Heart, IVE (14)
  • BBB, Purple Kiss (14)
  • Ice Queen, IVE (13)
  • I'm Ready, Chung Ha (12)
  • Reset, IVE (12)
  • Wow, IVE (12)
• Albums:
  • IVE SWITCH, IVE (85)
  • DREAM()SCAPE, NCT Dream (46)
  • Golden Hour: Part 1, Ateez (38)
  • The 4th mini Album 'VERSUS', Viviz (38)
  • BXX, Purple Kiss (31)

The entire IVE album went triple platinum on my Spotify clearly. Does it make sense that I listened to more IVE tracks and album than NCT Dream yet Dream somehow is tied for the top artist spot? Not really haha. And yes Golden Hour making its way onto my top albums for the month with a single day is a sneak preview of June. In fact, let me go play it again...

Concerts:

• P1Harmony
  • I saw them on a whim on their last tour and had a good time, but didn't feel the need to dive any deeper into their music/members afterwards. FNC must be $$$ Spotify because oh my god did Spotify love to push their songs to me. So I ended up blocking the group on Spotify and Twitter simply because I didn't like them enough for the constant promo haha. And yet I ended up at their concert again (because a friend really wanted to go and I was fine going too). My feelings after this concert are the same as they were.....I have no need to dive deeper into their music/members and I will not be unblocking them anywhere hahaha but the show was still a good time. They were sooo happy to be in a bigger venue this tour, which is something I vividly remember about last tour...Keeho saying there was a lot of pressure on their second tour to succeed. Near the end, the members walked down the aisles to return to the stage. We were at the end of the aisle so Intak walked past us. Having little knowledge of the group I was just like you seem like a nice boy but this is doing nothing for me haha. Kpop is so funny once you take like a single step backwards from it.
• CIX
  • MY BOYS...! This is my third time seeing them and I've loved it every time. I am Jinyoung biased but oh wow was Seunghun my concert bias. Bro was on fire the entire concert...used a hand mic the whole time to let us know he was Singing. Clearly winning Build Up really gave him confidence! Minor disappointment that Jungle is no longer on the setlist...rip to a queen. But really the only disappointment of the night. The venue was not sold out (I don't know if it was even half sold) so their sales in the US always make me nervous that they'll stop coming. But they all sounded very firm that they were coming back soon so hopefully they will continue to stay together and tour more 🥺

Comments

[tullycat]

Yes I loved it!