(New Series) Biweekly Bookshelf: May 2020, Part 1

This blog is long overdue for an update, isn’t it? I hope to revive The Future is Unwritten with regular updates through an idea I’ve thought about for a while: a blog series about books called “Biweekly Bookshelf.” It’s a simple premise: I’ll try to make a post every two weeks with thoughts in every book I’ve read during that time. This will be similar in format to the Spook Month series I did last October, but focused on books (of any genre) rather than horror films. In each post, I’ll discuss books that I’ve already finished at the time of writing and books that are currently in progress. This means that “Completed” books will have my more conclusive thoughts while “In Progress” texts will have my thoughts on the book so far and can be concluded in the following post. I’m trying to keep a daily reading practice, so hopefully you’ll enjoy reading these posts with at least three or four new books to be discussed in each update.

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Spook Month, Update #4: A Concise Conclusion, and what comes next

In October, I watched a horror film nearly every night and shared my thoughts on them as a blog series. Unfortunately, my plans to write a fourth update went to hell when my laptop’s hard drive crashed near the end of October. I continued watching horror films for the fun of it, but with no plans to write about them until I got the technical difficulties sorted out. My computer is up and running again, but I don’t feel prepared to give my full thoughts on all the movies I saw in late October. A few weeks have passed, so the films aren’t so fresh in my mind.

But I don’t want to leave Spook Month without any closure. What I’ll do instead is finish the series with micro-reviews of the last few films I watched. Most of these are reboots and remakes, my intended theme for Spook Month #4, but there are a few others in the mix. So, here are my thoughts on six more films in exactly thirty words each:

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Spook Month, Update #3

Welcome back for Update #3 of SPOOK MONTH, a blog series in which I share thoughts on my first viewing of horror films to celebrate the month of October.

The first few Spook Month posts have mostly featured classic films that are now several decades old. This time I’ve mixed it up a bit by watching some films made in the last five years. I guess you could say I’m starting to form themes for each of these posts. Later updates might focus on horror remakes, and maybe a post solely on horror-comedy films, and so on. As before, all these posts will be SPOILER FREE, in case readers haven’t seen all these films themselves. Let’s take a look at this week’s films:

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Spook Month, Update #2

Welcome back to Spook Month, a month-long blog series where I take you through my movie list as I educate myself in horror. Today I’ll share my thoughts on five more horror movies I watched since the last update. I want to mention that all posts in this series will be SPOILER FREE, so there’s no need to worry about spoiling these if you haven’t seen them for yourself. I sometimes worry that my writing will be too vague if I avoid specific plot details in my posts. Perhaps in future film write-ups I’ll include a “spoiler section” at the end for particular scenes or details that are on my mind, leaving the remaining paragraphs spoiler-free. I’ll stay with a spoiler-free format for these Spook Month posts, since they’re all about quick impressions rather than deep analysis anyway. So here are the spooks I watched lately, with a whacky mix of zombies, demons, clowns, oh my:

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New Series: SPOOK MONTH, Update #1

I never watched horror movies growing up. The genre lacked any appeal to me, since I was exposed more to stuff like action, comedy, and action-comedy by family and friends. Those genres have a more laid back and relaxing viewing experience, and horror seemed to be the opposite of that. Horror movies as I understood them sounded stressful and traumatizing. I remember talking with kids my age with a lifelong fear of clowns, ghosts, insects, murderers, zombies, and other spooky things based on horror films they saw at too young an age. It was around my college years that I started to understand horror in a different way, largely from an academic perspective. I took some film studies classes where horror films were good examples of what filmmakers could do with practical effects, lighting, cinematography and so on, which I thought was cool in an aesthetic kind of way. I also saw some interesting videos from horror enthusiasts whose talks about horror film lore, film production, and the best and worst of horror movies in their many eras and subgenres sold me more on the fun of horror (the Cinemassacre YouTube channel is a good source for this).

But I’m still far behind anyone who grew up watching horror. So with the start of October, I figured it’s a good a time as any to explore the horror genre in what I’m calling SPOOK MONTH, a month-long (or more…?) series in which I’ll watch a bunch of horror films for the first time and share my thoughts. Daily updates are a bit too demanding on my schedule, so for consistency I’ll make a post every few days with some brief thoughts on all the horror films I’ve watched since the last update. My biggest source for films will be reddit’s r/horror community. They have a “film guide” wiki page with community-voted lists of the best horror films in any sub-genre one could imagine: zombie films, ghost films, body horror, horror comedy, Stephen King adaptations – the lists go on, and they also have annual voting to build a list of the community’s Top 50 favorite horror films overall. Even longtime horror fans could probably find new movies to check out from that movie guide, so check it out if you’re curious.

So to begin the series, here are my thoughts on five horror movies I’ve watched over the last few days.

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Sweeping dust, polishing rust

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Four months. Has it really been so long?

Apparently so. But in hopes of bringing this blog back on the regular, I’ve been brainstorming some ideas for new writing projects. Back in winter of this year, I gave myself goals for this blog that ended up a little too time intensive and ambitious. The biggest project I had in mind was a long-term series of posts comparing novels to their film adaptations. While I’d still like to bring that idea back at some point, I found myself way over my head trying to organize even my first essay in that series – which happened to be about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a complex beast of a film in its own right and which could hardly be any further from its source material. So I’m setting the bar a little lower for now, with some posts that aren’t necessarily daily, but hopefully a little more frequent than seasonal or annual updates. Here’s what I have planned for the short term:

  • Movie impressions/reviews. I’m making my way through a long list of movies that I’ve never seen yet, so I figure I’ll do a bit of writing while I’m at it. I’ll keep it simple: just a couple paragraphs on my thoughts about each movie. That includes elements and themes that stand out to me, my overall impressions on the film and whether I’d be interested in seeing the movie again, plus maybe some trivia and theories I come across while reading more about the film, which I tend to do with movies and other works. I’ll keep all posts in this series spoiler-free in case readers are interested in seeing these movies themselves.
  • Finally Watching Anime. The title is a joke, and possibly just a placeholder until I think of something less lame. I currently live in Japan and have been studying the Japanese language for over five years now. I’ll admit that one of the things that got me interesting in learning Japanese when I was younger was video games and some things I had read about translation and localization. But I never got too deep into the anime fandom, even though I’ve had a vague interest in it for some time. I could probably count all the anime series and movies I’ve seen on my fingers. So to get myself more ‘caught up’ on anime about ten years behind many of my friends, I’m planning to watch some anime series and movies and write about them here. Studio Ghibli seems to be a good starting point. The posts will probably be similar in style and length to the other movie reviews, but I might not hesitate so much to give spoilers in anime posts if there are particular things I want to discuss. Posts with spoilers will be marked with a disclaimer at the top just in case.
  • Some book analysis/reviews? I’m not so sure about this one, but we’ll see. I usually take meticulous notes when reading difficult texts, so I may write some brief essays or book reviews if I read something particularly interesting. I’ve had a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on my shelf for a while now. The novel is quite long, and I hear it’s so complex that undergrad classmates of mine used to vent about having the text assigned in ten-week English courses. Knowing that, I may tackle that novel with a pen and paper in hand and make interpreting that text its own mini-series.

So that’s what I have planned for now. I appreciate anyone who reads these posts, and feedback is always welcome if you want to make me check my emails to approve your non-spam comments. Looking forward to a more productive four months going forward!