works of wanderlust

Category: reviews

I mostly write about things I like. If I haven’t written about it, maybe I just haven’t seen it… or maybe I didn’t like it.

  • book reviews: fathers day

    Coinicentally perhaps, all three of the last trio of otherwise-disconnected books I recently read had a thread of fatherhood-related importance running through them. 

    It was Father’s Day yesterday, and my last as the dad of a kid (because The Kid will be An Adult in a couple months) so while I’ll be a dad for the rest of my life my role is changing a little bit this year, and I’m not sure what that means yet. The fathers in each of these books were important narrative elements but each in a very different way, one a paragon, one a lunatic counter-example,  one a steady hand in a storm.

    Hyperion by Dan Simmons

    I have listened multiple times to the audio version of the entire Hyperion Cantos, a four book hard science fiction series set roughly six hundred years in the future in a society of humanity resettled onto hundreds of worlds interconnected by technologies, both alien and AI, that they don’t truly understand. This first book is a kind of Canterbury Tales story, a collection of backstory narratives told by a collection of pilgrims—one the aforementioned father travelling to complete his daughter’s journey—travelling towards certain doom towards the mysterious shrine of a threat that has defined each of their lives yet which is understood by none of them. The Shrike is a kind of technological demon of unknown origin, built by aliens or sent back from the future, with control over time and space and a merciless agenda the pilgrims can only speculate upon. I decided to read the text version of all four books after I obtained a complete ebook collection, and even though I’ve heard all four novels more than once I find I am reading more details on this pass though. The author incorporates as both a theme and a character throughout the novels a kind of embodied homage to poet John Keats who died tragically of tuberculosis in the early 1800s at the age of 25, and while visiting the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2023 I happened to see the commemotation of this marked upon his final home, if nothing else grounding this now-comfort read for me and urging repeated readings of this wonderful collection.

    The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

    If you have seen the 1986 film adaptation of this book which stars Harrison Ford as a misunderstood inventor driven mad by his pursuit of a Swiss Familiy Robinson-like escape from america to the jungles of Honduras, you’ve been misled about the tone of this novel. The novel is decidedly darker, and whomever turned this into a PG-13 romping adventure into the wilds did the source material a deep disservice. The novel’s protagonist Allie Fox is witnessed through the eyes of his fourteen year old son-made-narrator who details with gaslit devotion the madness of his father as he rages against the world as he flees with narcissitic paranoia further and further off grid to escape the perception of modern society as a prison. In a modern parlance we would recongnize these sorts of men who rule their families with thinly disguised emotional abuse as fountains of toxic masculinity, ripe for the propagandas of the right wing sovereignty cults or the red pilled movements. Seen from the eyes of his son, the collapse of this man into destructive madness is simultaneously pitiable and fearsome even knowing what such men have done to our societies over the last couple decades when they don’t take flight from their own shadows. This book shook me.

    Dust by Hugh Howey

    I did it. I sunk my teeth into the final book of the Silo trilogy and read the conclusion to this dystopic tale of society’s collapse at the hands of madness and righteousness. Even more than the previous two volumes Howey seems to lean into the misguided evils of people who blindly believe in things: their own infallibility, patriotic furvor, religious ideologies, among other subtler concepts. All of this emerges from the narrative web that Howey wove with the rich collection of characters and stories that only just started to interconnect even as the second book concluded. In the third and final installment the disparate storytelling becomes an obvious whole as the plot bounces between the characters and their chances of fortune that have led them on a plot-based collision course with each other and the ultimate conclusion of the story. The author isn’t shy about raising the stakes with any and every chapter, beloved characters meeting fatal fates with a regularity that would make Game of Thrones readers blush, but the harsh reality at the end of the world is that between desperation and ignorance is the rawness of survival against the odds. I wonder how the mini-series that prompted me to dig deeper into the orginal novels will handle it all.

  • media: andor, season one

    Oh, just what the internet ordered: some more commentary on Star Wars.

    To be honest, my relationship with this franchise is certifiably bipolar. Up, down, deep, shallow, love it, hate it, roll my eyes at the wonderful blur of a galaxy far, far away. I mean, if there was some kind of independent adjudication of fan-ness in the Star Wars media landscape I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top, but I’d probably have a ranking.

    I am told in a tale perhaps apocryphal, that I attended a screening of the original in 1977 at a drive in movie theatre, asleep as an infant in the back of the car.

    I have watched the films, read the books, played the games, absorbed the lore, studied the history, run the themed race, ridden the rides, toured the studio, bought the merch, and drank the star wars kool-aid in big gulps.

    But ever since Disney bought the whole thing… I get it. You’ve heard this story before. Everyone complains: Disney borked it, right? Yeah… no… maybe… kinda… sorta… what does that even mean?

    I remember walking through the queue to Star Tours in Disneyland last summer and feeling this sense of vague disconcert. There was this sense that as fun as the ride was, as immersive as the queue was built, that there was a vibe that whoever had built this thing, well, they just didn’t get it.

    Here’s my point and I’ll move onto the review: you’re in the queue to Star Tours, boarding a fictional vacation trip, and one of the destinations advertised is Tatooine. This is the case because you’re supposed to be excited about visiting something from the universe of Star Wars, but if you were in the world of Star Wars, as a character with agency and thought and free will, you would avoid Tatooine at all costs. It is a truck stop in a backwater in the middle of lawless nowhere. You would never in a million years book a vacation there. That’s the whole point. It’s like seeing an advertisement for the industrial area behind the airport suggesting you could go visit the shitty bar by the gas station and bet on the dog fights in the back alley. Why the hell, in universe, would there be a tourist cruise headed there?

    Because. Simply. Tatooine is intellectual property and most people legitimately don’t look beyond the “gee whiz I saw that on thuh teevee…” so it sells just fine in Disneyland.

    And that vibe is where my frustration with modern Disney-owned Star Wars has tended to exist for the last few years: it’s all just intellectual property being shuffled into disconcerting new recipes that make no real sense and have no real sense of the stakes of this universe. It’s all pretty much been a low-thought, gee whiz theme park ride, particularly a lot of the new limited run series on Disney Plus.

    In other words, it took a great deal of contrary information suggesting that Andor was something that rose above this dreck, or at least aspired to lift itself out of the gee whiz-ness of the intellectual property churn factory built by Disney over the last decade to make me want to actually commit about ten hours to watch it.

    But we did.

    We finished watching the first season this past weekend… and I will suggest that if nothing else it has tried and almost certainly done a reasonably good job of building something fresh from the universe, adding to the story rather than blithely churning intellectual property and recycling the old pulp of the films. Sure, it leverages and contributes to the structure of the broader story, but it risked something bigger, created stakes, incited emotion and felt more real than the manufactured backstories that have populated my overpriced streaming subscription lately. It wasn’t perfect. There was some inconsistencies and a few tourist glances towards Star Wars Land TM. Yet, it was compelling and we wanted to keep watching, to see what happened, and you started to care about all the characters, even some of the terrible evil ones. No, not perfect, but pretty good.

    And if nothing else, it hardly ever felt like a sightseeing tourist vacation to a truck stop by the airport.

  • game: civilization seven

    Would you say that I got this game for free?

    I mean, I didn’t pay for it. I ordered it using points. AirMiles(TM). So it wasn’t strictly free because, I mean, those points have a kind of real and tangible value, but they are not money in the sense that I could buy anything but whatever random crap is listed on their catalog on any given day. I didn’t pay for the game, I guess is what I’m saying, and using points made it feel like something I got for free (even though I didn’t really, I suppose) and I mention it because I’m still very torn on how I feel about this latest insallment in the Civilization series inasmuch as I’m feeling pretty smug about not having spent real cash on the game.

    I’ve been playing Civilization VII.

    And shortly before that I had been playing Civilization 6, which was both a mature game which had been tweaked and refined and bug-squashed long since, and which I picked up up for literally a few bucks on a big digital sale lowering the stakes dramatically for what turned out to be an excellent purchase and investment of my gaming time.

    And? Before that I’ve played every other installment of this game going back to the original in the 90s. 

    All this is just me setting the stage and suggesting my bonafides when it comes to a player of this particular game series and type.

    If you’ve never played a “Civ” game let me elaborate as best as I can bring it down: It’s like a big game of Risk on a huge interactive video game map of a randomly generated world—except rather than just rolling dice and moving armies you need to build the cities and grow the economies to raise and support those armies, ensure that they have resources to fight, negotiate diplomacy with other societies, fend off natural disasters, counter religious uprisings, research and build new technologies and so on and on and on into a kind of complexity that is hard to explain in a single paragraph.

    Look up 4X games which stands for eXplore, eXpland, eXploit, and eXterminate, and which in a vague sort of way truly summarizes the core of the gameplay.

    I play Civilization and have played it for pretty much my entire adult gaming life as a kind of slow, serious, strategic gamer’s pursuit. Civilization is like the chess of the video game world: that is to say a lot of people take it serious as f. 

    So it is a big deal when a new installment ships. Civilization VII shipped just a few months ago in early 2025 and generally—well—people hate it, frankly.

    Personally I’m torn.

    Here’s the thing about that. I play it with seriousness, but I am not serious about the game. I just dabble in seriousness, and in saying that my stake in the game is not about the fine-tuned mechanics of a elaborate and complex simulator leveraging the raw strategy of a well-honed plan of tactical gamers pursuit vibes. I’m just playing to go with the flow. I don’t just click and click and click some more. I think about my moves, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that on a scale of hard-core Civ-ness, I’m like a 4 out of 10.

    I’ve played three games of Civilization VII since I got it for not-exactly-free from my reward points, such a middle aged dad thing to do by the way, ordering video games on a physical disc using your airline rewards, and three games in I’m like… hmm… uh… yeah. It’s… okay. I mean, I like the innovative thinking. I like that game companies are trying new things. I like that this is more than just an updated graphics engine smeared over the old engine. It is a new approach, and that is a awesome and we should all celebrate risk taken in the name of advancing new ideas and updates.

    But there is a hitch—and an itch I can’t quite scratch.

    The game is—I dunno—bumbling. 

    There is just something about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s as if the game is simultaneously too complex for its own good and yet insufficiently rigourous in allowing the player to control all that complexity. There is stuff that happens, automatically, behind the curtain, out of sight, that I just simply don’t understand as I’m playing. And I write this not as a good veil-of-war kind of sense where such secrecy promotes strategic play: I say in the sense of it sometimes feels, just feels, like the game is playing itself and that I am reduced to little more than button mashing the turn meter forward. It just bumbles along, tap, tap, tap, bumble, tap, tap, tap, bumble—and I’m left thinking, like, am I playing this or watching it play?  And that is the type of game that leaves you with a kind of vague emptiness when you’ve progressed far enough along.

    It likely doesn’t help that I’m playing this on Playstation, to be honest. On a desktop I assume I’d do more mouse-hovering and poking around the UI to see what I was missing, read the help tips, or something. So is it a UI issue or a game issue or a hand-holding issue or—I don’t even know what is bugging me. But as it stands, I got the PS5 version with points not the other one, so that’s what I have been playing.

    Or should I say watching?

    And even though I write all this I still want it to be good. Maybe I write all this because I want it to be good. This is a beloved franchise. This is a piece of my gaming persona.  This is my chess. 

    I’m just torn on if I like it or not—and actually a little bit glad I didn’t really pay for it, either.

  • book reviews: rainy spring

    Ugh. I didn’t read as much as I should have through the winter, and yet now, maybe only because I’m still riding the high of enjoying my new ebook reader, I have been power walking through a whole collection of books.

    That said, very little planning has gone into my May reads. I have very much been waltzing through the whims of whatever the universe throws at me, in the first case revisiting a book in print that I’d previously listened to, then stumbling into an unlikely girly memoire, and finally elevating a sequel I was pretty sure I was going to put off until autumn.

    But read what you want to read. Read what you feel like reading. Just read.

    And recently I read:

    Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

    This was a tough read, but for a strange reason: my first encounter with this book was when I listened to the audiobook version a couple years ago, and the narration and voice acting in that version is beyond top notch, bringing the whole story to life. Reading it as a novel this time through I could still hear the voices and cadedence of Porter’s acting chops. Beyond that, this is a delightfully nerdy romp through a first contact type story and a utopian perspective on why nerds should be in charge of everything. If you enjoyed The Martian, this is a completely different spin on the puzzling out life or death engineering problems in space by the same author, but with a pleasant stylistic overlap that bridges any of the plot differences. I have been making an effort these past couple weeks to avoid checking the star ratings on things (post upcoming in a couple more weeks) but I suspect that if you checked the reviews on this title you’d find no shortage of raves.

    Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

    Um, so yeah. What the heck am I doing reading a twenty year old quasi-spiritual memoire of a divorced woman traveling and meditating in the quest to clear her soul? I will admit, when The Algorithm recommended this to me, the low friction, low stakes, no cost value proposition of having the library on my ebook reader left me simply figuring that I would read the first chapter or two to quench my decades-long sidelong curiosity about this book which rode the bestseller list for like three years… and then move along. I read the whole damn thing. Maybe it’s a middle age quirk. Maybe I really have honed some previously emotional derelict part of my own soul these past couple years. Maybe there is a kinship between folks farted out the baskside of prim society and left to recreate themselves that bridges space, time, and gender. Who knows for sure. But putting aside my idle skepticism about the author’s spiritual awakenings and the manifesting of prayer and all that drivel, there was a relatable struggle to be found in these pages that has not uniquely been discussed in such books, but was certainly a perspective that I didn’t mind adding to my pondered-upon list.  

    Shift by Hugh Howey

    I lied in my last post. I surmised I might wait a month or six before jumping into the second instalment of Howey’s Silo trilogy. Instead, I had barely let the first volume cool off and I was onto the second. Sequels are always tough, I find. Part twos in a trilogy can be amazing tales of raised stakes (think Empire Strikes Back) or disappointing romps deeper into a story that can’t resolve until the final book. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the story. Instead what is here is a lot of backstory. Where in book one the mystery is the silo itself, what unravels in book two is a step back to nearly the present day (relatively speaking, at least) and we are introduced to the people and the politics that created the world in which book one exists, the histories of the world outside the silos themselves and the histories of the people who are stuck inside, too. I don’t just want to give a recap, however. Once again Howey is twisting dozens of very human stories together around this dystopic concept. Everyone is a complicated actor, both hero and villain, both struggling for their own survival and yet questioning their own mortality and morality. It is a romp through the psyche of post-apocalyptic humanity that is worth the trip.

  • media review: weird al

    I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

    I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

    Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

    The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

    Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

    It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

    Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.