My Friday the 13th blessing for you is this: May you live in a town where there are plentiful tattoo artists doing excellent Friday the 13th flash. (It’s a thing! It’s a neat thing.) And may you meet all the black cats in your neighborhood. (They’re good luck, I’m certain.) There are a bunch of movies coming out this weekend, as everyone loves an auspicious release date; there are very few new SFF books this week, but that’s okay, because we all have lots of older books we could be reading (don’t we? Just me? Okay, then). I hope you get a long holiday weekend, and I hope your community looks out for each other. Stay warm, hug your pals, and call your reps!
Wuthering Heights, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Crime 101… It’s a Very Weird Week for Movies (Complimentary)
Every week is a weird week for movies if you look hard enough—there’s always some peculiar combination of things on screens somewhere!—but this week feels extra odd. It’s almost Valentine’s Day, so naturally Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights arrives in a flurry of swooning and wall-licking. Reviews have been all over the place; Vulture has dug into the question of whether Heathcliff is white. (He probably isn’t.)
But if swooning isn’t your bag, there’s also Sam Rockwell and company facing the AI apocalypse in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Alternately, you can see Storm, the Hulk, and Thor do crimes in the blandly titled but quite polished-looking Crime 101. (The 101 apparently refers to the highway? This feels intentionally confusing.) Or, if you would prefer to stay home, the widely praised (and Oscar-nominated) Sentimental Value premieres on MUBI February 13th, and the Richard Linklater-directed Lorenz Hart biopic Blue Moon premieres on Netflix on February 14th.
If you just want to watch a lot of action, Predator: Badlands is now on Hulu. Honestly, it’s a wonder any of us ever stop staring at a screen.
Romance Readers (and Writers) Deserve Better
There’s a lot of talk lately about the “inevitability” of AI. I could go off on a whole tangent here about the purposefully over-general misuse of that term, but that’s not exactly my point at the moment. My point is Gita Jackson’s Aftermath article “No, AI Written Romance Novels Are Not Inevitable.” Jackson is responding to a dire New York Times piece with the title “The New Fabio is Claude.” The Times piece is about two “authors” (scare quotes mine) who use AI to “write books” (scare quotes also mine).
Jackson’s rebuttal is satisfying, pointing out the ways in which at least one of these writers wishes to hide the involvement of AI in her work, and how well (or not well) the writers’ “work” has actually been received. But it also made me think about how insulting the Times piece, and the writers quoted in it, were being toward romance readers. Romance readers are sharp, smart, and they take no shit. Romance writers are involved, passionate citizens. Remember how SFF readers used to be treated like we weren’t readers of “real” books? Romance is still getting that treatment—as the NYT article demonstrated. Enough already!
Happy Birthday, Gromit!
As I write this, it is February 12th—which is apparently Gromit’s birthday. Thank you to Letterboxd for pointing out this very important holiday! For the uninitiated—if any of those still exist—Gromit is a very good boy. Perhaps the goodest boy. He is the dog companion of Wallace, with whom he stars in many shorts and features created by Aardman Animation. In the first Wallace & Gromit short, “A Grand Day Out,” the pair discover they are out of cheese, so they go to the moon. I mean, obviously: the moon is made of cheese, right? In subsequent adventures they face a nefarious penguin, a were-rabbit, and one of Wallace’s inventions.
You can watch Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection on Apple TV, and the assorted movies on other streaming platforms. Get yourself a slice of Wensleydale and settle in.
Pour One Out for Your Favorite Mass-Market Paperback
For your weekend reading, might I suggest revisiting your very favorite book—or series—that exists in mass-market paperback? The small format’s death knell has been sounding for a while, and got louder when the distributor Readerlink announced last summer that it would stop distributing mass-markets by the end of 2025. But it feels especially real right now. The Reactor social media manager has been buying up her favorite authors’ work in mass market. I’m rereading a favorite from my teen years, Jo Clayton’s Moongather, and marveling at how small and light it is. Even The New York Times is on it, writing what amounts to a eulogy: “Short, squat and printed on flimsy paper with narrow margins, it was the kind of book you’d find on wire racks in grocery stores or airports and buy for a few bucks. Those racks have all but disappeared.”
You can still find them, of course, on the shelves of your local used bookstore or secondhand shop; in attics and basements around the country; on your own shelves, if you are a book collector of a certain type. (If you could see into my office right now, you’d see mass-markets double-stacked on a shelf behind me.) Read ‘em while you’ve got ‘em.
I’m going to miss mass market paperbacks immensely! I have bookcases full of them. I’d check out the hardback of a book from the library and read it. If I really liked it, or it was part of a series, I collected, I’d wait for the mass market and buy that edition. For the longest time, it was all I could afford. I still pick up stuff at my local used book store, but I’ll miss browsing for new ones.
I just gingerly opened my $1.50 Ace edition of “The Left Hand of Darkness.” It’s snuggled up in the bookcase next to “Picnic on Paradise” and “Dreamsnake.” What a time to have your mind opened via your back pocket.
In U.S. colleges and universities, 101 is the usual number for a freshman introductory class: Twerking 101 in the fall semester, followed by Twerking 102 in the spring. That’s how I would interpret this.
I’m more a book accumulator than a collector, but I’ve always resented the amount of room trade paperbacks take up. Shelf hogs, all of them…