In the fall of 2019 I was newly living in the Midwest. In my free time, I’d take long, aimless walks, trying to tune to the flat cold of the place. On one such walk I got a call from my friend Anya Zalevskaya; she was in Odesa, she said, working on a film, a documentary about the Ukrainian (but also Romanian, Jewish, and Soviet) director Kira Muratova. When Anya called, it was almost midnight in Odesa. She was sitting on a bench by the Black Sea; I could hear the waves, the inhale of her cigarette. What film of Muratova’s should I watch first? I asked her. Ah, she said, The Asthenic Syndrome, for sure. 

1990’s The Asthenic Syndrome takes us to Odesa, too, but this is an Odesa at the fraying edge of a Soviet time-space where, significantly, we never see the sea. The film is shot in places that suggest a borderland, an edge, a wobble: construction sites, mirrors, photographs, headstones, film screenings, cemeteries, a dog pound, a hospital ward, a soft-porn shoot. This in-between sense is temporal, as well: Muratova notes that she “had the great fortune of working in a period between the dominance of ideology and the dominance of the market, a period of suspension, a temporary paradise.” As with the asthenic syndrome itself (a state between sleeping and waking), the film is a realization of inbetweenness, an assembly of frictions and crossover states we feel through form: through Muratova’s use of juxtaposition; through her uncanny overpatterning of echoes and coincidences; through the shifts of register between documentary and opera. The film doesn’t proceed so much as weave itself in front of us, in a dazzling ivy pattern of zones and occurrences. You could call it late-Soviet baroque realism.

The film is really two films. The first, in black and white, opens out into a funeral. It’s for the husband of Natasha, we learn—a middle-aged woman possessed, in the ensuing scenes, to the very end of herself with grief. Because grief invents the road it travels, Natasha—like her audience—does not herself know what she will do next. With terrifying speed, she quits her job as a doctor, insulting coworkers in the process; takes a drunk home, tells him to strip, beds him; shoves and insults passersby. All this is captured in the camera’s eye, however, with a disinterested dignity. And then, abrupt as Natasha’s shoving, the first film breaks into the second (I’ll leave you to see the how and the why—it’s great). 

At the epicenter of the second film is the exhausted Nikolai, a schoolteacher who nods off in moments of emotional intensity. Occurrences flare up around Nikolai like religious antimiracles—a carp torn apart by female fingers as “Chiquita” plays, a high school boy imitating a game show host, the agonizing panorama of the dog pound. This is the social and inner world in abjection, yes: but because abjection is possible, the film seems to say, so is human dignity. The question of dignity binds the viewer to the film’s concern: what is the human when it is shorn of category, of psychology, of system? What are we when we are together? What are we when we are alone?

In the Goodreads monthly roundups of new books to watch out for, they often highlight eye-catching titles, whether they’re poetic, surprising, or particularly punny. Today, they gathered up some of the best new titles (August 2022 to January 2023 releases) in their own post.

Goodreads notes that titles long enough to be a complete sentence are in style right now. These kinds of titles have long been common in manga, and perhaps the popularity of that format has brought this convention over to North American publishing.

The title that got the most buzz this year has to be I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. It’s the kind of title, combined with the cover design, that stops you in your tracks in a bookstore. Paired with McCurdy’s fame and dry humor in her writing style, and this was a big bestseller of the year.

Here are some of the 36 recent releases Goodreads selected as the best titles publishing has to offer.

Marcus, Jim, Andy and Luke preview a big ol’ weekend of the FA Cup!

Jim brings a troubling Mauro Icardi update, Roy Hodgson swoops down onto the pitch at Craven Cottage, and there are stunning revelations that Marcus once watched an entire Scottish Cup final in John Lewis’ TV section.

Plus, can Duncan Ferguson try to convince King Charles to become a Forest Green fan? And will his sausage fingers be allowed through the turnstiles?

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Dear Stephen King:

Last week, you had a tweet take off. I’ve seen it everywhere, including on several giant Facebook pages, Instagram pages, even on TikTok. The tweet, about book banning, is nice and sexy, attempting to break down the problem in under 280 characters. And you know, it was successful!

It got a lot of attention from your 7 million followers, as well as so many big names.

But, Stephen, this tweet, as thoughtful as I think you mean it to be, has done a lot of damage for the cause of anti-censorship in today’s world.

Nonfiction books are my jam, and nonfiction science books? Especially so. What I love is how broad the genre is. Science can include things like medicine, nature, ecology, marine biology, conservation, psychology, chemistry, microbiology, and much more. It can also include personal essay and memoir, and may weave in history. For me, that’s the beauty of science: its reach.

My shelves have been overflowing with books lately — there are so many great books out right now, and I’m still trying to catch up from 2022 — but my science bookshelves are particularly full. The diversity of science books right now is stunning, and it’s pushed me to read books in areas that I normally wouldn’t choose at first, like marine biology or ornithology.

This is just a small sampling of science books that have come out in the last few months, as well as some books that are coming out this spring. Topics run the gamut from cells to surgery, from diversity in conservation and environmental activism to the exploration of the possibility of aliens, and much more. You’ll notice that many of the books on my list blend science and memoir or personal essay, as opposed to a more straightforward nonfiction science book. I think this speaks to the power that science has for us, to push us to reflect on our own lives, and examine where we stand in the scheme of things and where we fit into the environment or universe.

Let’s take a look at some of the books you’ll definitely want to add to your TBR.

Daphne Du Maurier’s career was long and storied; her life was equally so. Her books were huge bestsellers when they were published, and many live on in edition after edition. Du Maurier was a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a literary critic, a nonfiction writer, and a biographer. In short, she was a Writer with a capital “W.”

To begin, a short biographical sketch: Daphne Du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England, into a literary and dramatic family. Her father was a well-known actor-manager, and her mother was an actress. Her maternal grandfather was a Punch cartoonist and is the author of Trilby (1894). Her cousins were the children that J.M. Barrie patterned the Darling children after in Peter Pan, and her father was friends with one Sir Alfred Hitchcock, who directed three of her works (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and The Birds).

If Du Maurier were writing today, she would fall squarely in the “popular fiction” category. Her work has a quality of being easy to relish, fun to read, and also sticking with the reader. She was a master at leaving just enough strings still dangling at the end of a novel that the reader ends up batting like a kitten at them far after the reading is done.

She is at the top of my “favorite authors whose work I need to explore more deeply” list, so I’ve put together a primer for getting started with Du Maurier that we can all work through together.

I sometimes fear that if I don’t buy a book, I’ll forget about it and it will be lost in the great chasm of time and space. That even if I add it to my Want-To-Read shelf on Goodreads, it will fall into the depths, never to be seen again (which is a possibility; I have over 5,000 books on there). But really, how much do I remember about the books I already own, across three different formats and nearly ten different platforms? How many times do I see a book on social media and wander over to Amazon to buy it on Kindle, only to discover I had already bought it (sometimes years ago, sometimes only days before)? How many times do I grab a book from the library, only to discover I already have my own copy of either an advanced reader copy (ARC) or even one that I might have purchased in a different format?

This year, I’m taking that same energy that I have for new books to rediscover the ones I own. 

I have written many times about how many books I own. How many books I then proceed to borrow from the library and get from Kindle Unlimited. (P.S. I’m back on that KU train. Couldn’t stay away.)

You don’t need to read those articles to understand that…it’s a lot. A lot a lot. 

And I was feeling those numbers in late fall of 2022. I feel those numbers regularly, but I was sort of despairing about the obvious proof that I would never read all the books I wanted to. I was also in a horrible slump and hadn’t finished a book in a ridiculous amount of time, which for me could have been a few days or a couple of weeks. No books were going out, but plenty were coming in — whether they were retail therapy or review copies sent from publishers. I was starting to feel the pressure, but I couldn’t break myself out of it. 

Great historical fiction is immersive. As a kid, it often made me feel like I’d time traveled. Karen Cushman’s middle grade novels from the 1990s, The Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine, Called Birdy, transported me. Historical fiction also made me realize what I had in common with people from the past and which social issues still existed in my own time.

The phrase “girl power” was everywhere in late 1990s pop culture, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I associated it with loud, angry rock bands. My family has always encouraged me to be independent and opinionated, but I probably thought independent women were a recent phenomenon. Although the aesthetics were totally different, Cushman’s novels helped me realize people have felt trapped by societal expectations and fought them throughout history.

Catherine, Called Birdy is an epistolary novel written in diary format. Birdy’s entries contain everything about her daily life in 1200s England, from mundane chores to saints’ days. As Sarah Rettger wrote about Birdy on Book Riot in 2013: “Wouldn’t you choose keeping a diary over doing your daily spinning?” The 1995 Trophy Newbery copy I read had a cover illustration of Catherine rigging a bucket to pour over a suitor’s head.

Lena Dunham adapted and directed Amazon Prime’s 2022 movie adaptation of Catherine, Called Birdy. She remembers the book as a childhood favorite. The movie, starring Bella Ramsey as Birdy, captures the character’s unique voice and rebellious personality. Her exclamation of “Corpus bones!” is repeated frequently in both the movie and the book.

Birdy is a vivid character — never vague. She’s ambiguous, though, because readers can interpret and identify with her for various reasons. She wants to be a monk, not a nun, demonstrating how thoroughly she rejects traditional gender roles. Her brother Edward, a monk, says she wouldn’t succeed at disguising herself as a boy.

Including the third films in both the Ant-Man and Magic Mike franchises