I don't think I remember the first half of 2014 that well, but here goes nothing.
Best Books
God, I have to scour my GoodReads account and Facebook statuses to remember what I read. Did I read Murakami this year or last? I don't think this is going to work... Goodreads has a gap spanning 18 months.
So, here's what I'm going to do:
Best Books I Read in the Second Half of 2014
1) Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
See, I don't know how many of you know this about me, but I have a pretty strong morbid streak. I had seen Gone Girl in the theater (one of the maybe two or three movies I left my house to see), and I decided to read--because I could not find a decent digital copy of Gone Girl, and only at Christmas did my aunt give me her paperback--her other books instead. I read Sharp Objects first. It was good, it kept me interested, but I kind of knew what was going to happen. It didn't captivate me as Dark Places did.
So I saw the Gone Girl movie, and I got to googling who Gillian Flynn was. Oh: Two other books! Great!
Here's the opener on the Dark Places Wikipedia page: "The novel deals with class issues in rural America, intense poverty and the Satanic cult hysteria that swept the United States in the 1980s." Yes, please!
I had been looking for something like Dark Places for a very, very long time. At that moment, Dark Places had been everything I had ever wanted, and I want to sincerely thank Ms Flynn for writing it.
2) Corruption in America - From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizen's United by Zephyr Teachout
This is, in my estimation, the companion book to Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig. In fact, the two of them appeared together on Bill Moyer's show on PBS not to long ago discussing Campaign Finance Reform.
Corruption in America deals with the historical attitudes toward corruption in government, and how the narrow definition of corruption (as specifically and exclusively "quid-pro-quo") is anomalous and not representative of prevailing attitudes of corruption held not only by most other previous Supreme Court opinions dealing with the subject, but also the body politic.
If Lessig provided the future, the plan; Teachout provides the history and the justification.
CFR is really the only issue that matters because if it is not fixed, Ted Cruz and others like him will continue to be placed in high positions by the decree of corporate interest (Ted Cruz was placed in charge of NASA). We can't have nice things until our government is dependent upon We the People instead of the Brothers Koch.
3) East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I know, I know, this perhaps should have been first. This book centers around a powerful theological debate about human potential and redemption. God, I sound like an Amazon blurb. Honestly, I still can't decide between East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath, which I adored. But I really don't remember it as well as I should. Details are missing and I feel I cannot explain it adequately.
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Beyond those three, which are the best, I read some Stephen King (Bag of Bones and Cujo, which I finished into the new year), Penpal, which started as a short story on Reddit.com/r/nosleep, a horror/creepypasta forum, which actually kinda creeped me out, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which was OK, and Real World by Natsuo Kirino, about a group of disillusioned high school students who become infatuated and fascinated by a local boy who murders his parents in cold blood.
I also read Everything I Never Told You, which was listed as the Best Book of 2014 by Amazon.com, and that was decent. A bit too low-key, but still enjoyable. It's hard to find anything really different when everyone is writing prizebait and when you feel you've read
I bought graphic novels. Two of them, in fact. I have Black Hole by Charles Burns and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (the same Bechdel of the famous "Bechdel Test"), which I finished yesterday in one sitting. It will, I expect, if it is not upstaged later in the year, feature in my 2015 Best Books list. I also finally read Blue is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh.
Right now, my plan for 2015, as far as books are concerned, is to finish the following, in no specific order:
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (I'm on page 205 right now)
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Watchmen by Alan Moore (the only superhero comic I will ever read. Seriously, I hate superheroes)
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
War & War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (his name is so much fun to type and say. I've already finished The Melancholy of Resistance, which was wonderfully weird)
There are other books I need to get to, like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin and Watership Down, which I have wanted to read for a very long time, and to crack open the lovely Penguin copy of The Iliad (I read The Odyssey already) my neighbors gave me when they moved.
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Best Movies I Saw in 2014
1) The Babadook
As soon as this movie was announced I was head over heels in love, and when I saw it, it wasn't quite what I had expected, but I was absolutely not disappointed. People who manage to see this movie basically fall into two camps: They either respect it for what it is, or they hate it because they were expecting a creature feature (The Babadook is never revealed). The Babadook itself is a psychological bogeyman, onto which all of the main character's anxieties are projected. The performances in this film are, dare I say, more intense and terrifying than Hitchcock. Watching Essie Davis spiral out of control as her anxieties are projected and reflected by the phantom Babadook is breathtaking and terrifying. She drives this film. It is brilliant, and, like Dark Places, everything I had wanted.
2) Gone Girl
This movie was awesome. It was directed by David Fincher, who also did the phenomenal adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Hey, while we're at it, where are the other two movies?), so when his name appeared in the opening credits, I felt assured that I was in for something good. I was not to be disappointed.
3) Under the Skin / Blue Ruin
I saw these two movies at pretty much the same time, and, for some reason, they are linked in my mind. I love low-key science fiction, and, while Johanssen isn't much more than a pretty face in this movie (it is very minimalistic), watching her seduce and suck the life out of unsuspecting men was rather intriguing for my morbid sensibilities.
Blue Ruin, however, was also minimalist, but was thoroughly grounded in a microcosm of damned inevitability. The setup is as quick and dirty as the violent acts Dwight commits, and the final confrontation was wonderfully intense.
4) Rigor Mortis
I read that people hated this film. I really liked it. It's a really unusual vampire film from Hong Kong that incorporates Chinese folklore in its mythology. I will grant that the final scene is a bit silly, but everything that comes before it was comparable to Let the Right One In.
5) The Book of Life
Of course I'd see this movie. It's by the same studio responsible for Paranorman, which I also loved, and this is no less brave in dealing with death, this time centering on a story about the Dia de los Muertos, which is even more hardcore than Halloween in the West. It was, in some ways, almost too similar to Paranorman, but it isn't the same sterilized, lifeless candy put out by other kid-centric studios.
The other notable movies I saw this year are Two Days, One Night, a French movie starring Marion Cotillard about a depressed working mom who must convince her coworkers to forego a bonus in order for her to keep her job, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Wes Anderson wins every award already. Unfortunately, I have not had an opportunity to see Birdman or Nightcrawler yet.
In 2015, I am waiting for It Follows, which currently has, I think, a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
