Eat any good books lately?

[chronovore]

Exactamundo.

[benji]

Much like its subject, this gets worse as it goes on. Kevin Feige was a source for this so unfortunately he's treated as perfect, basically the smartest man to ever exist and someone with a career that's been flawless. Everyone else is treated more fairly and some get especially critiqued. But it basically stops at Endgame in terms of anything about the actors, directors, the films themselves, etc. But it still goes on. You just don't learn anything like what happened to Black Widow which was in development forever or any reasoning behind Eternals or the new Disney+ shows. They're sort of mentioned off hand as Feige continues to be perfect and it recounts how stuff like X-Men come back under Marvel's control. I think it should have probably been deliberately just the MCU up until Endgame but the same length for more content, rather than trying to keep up-to-date all the way to Kang getting fired. There's also a kind of amusing relation to the product itself because the book discusses how early on directors and actors had all this say and now Feige's team and "pre-visualizers" are increasingly deciding so much of the film before anyone else and the directors are handed these productions they can just allow Marvel to do the work for them on if they want to and make no real decisions about.



That was good enough that I'm interested in his sequel which will be the 1960's. The stuff about the actual industry is probably the most interesting. The chapters about the movies are often him just talking about the plot and actors and how much he likes them. There's paragraphs where he'll be like "monster movies were popular" and then lists like 30 monster movies or whatever. I have no idea why he does this, he's not saying they're good or bad, just listing them. One of the top Goodreads reviews that I see when I score the book was complaining that he's a left-winger who fills his comments with too much liberal crap about racism and women. But he literally argues multiple times that he disagrees with the current popular trend of evaluating everything by 21st century standards, mentioning things that are "problematic" with films for the purpose of arguing to look at them in the context of the time and see how progressive they actually were.

He also makes some negative comments about modern films but even if I probably wouldn't agree with his overstanning of the films he grew up with I do agree with his comments about pacing, editing and framing. Older films are slower, have fewer close-ups with nothing but the actors face, use the entire width of the frame for deliberate purposes, don't hyperactively cut as much, etc. I prefer this sometimes too!

[benji]

Just a sort of standard history so I don't have much to complain or praise. I did like the author mentioning how many times Truman rewrote events in his memoir even from his own diary and often mostly semi-irrelevant conversations to make other people look like jerks. Also, the image on the cover doesn't look this bad and looks fine, wtf Goodreads what did you do to this.



Similar to the above I don't have a lot to say other than one thing. The book spends all its time disproving the title, there was no miracle, instead a sustained deliberate effort that started with a number of advantages. Namely that half the people hated Seward and also most of his non-Lincoln opponents. As if determined to make clear it was not a miracle the book spends some time on how the Lincoln guys, because the convention was in Chicago, got to decide where delegates sat so they stuck New York away from everyone else and put the Lincoln states next to all the swing states so Seward people couldn't get over to grease palms and shake down people during the convention itself.



This was fine but it's mostly interviews with producers and executives. The "newest" name rapper to be interviewed was Ice Cube and he was only interviewed about NWA. So while like a lot of these books it's pretty interesting as it starts it skips over stuff and drags as it moves more towards today. Though most of the narrative of this book stops around 2000 anyway, I'm not really complaining about just a small discussion about Kanye or whoever, I mean like Jay-Z gets talked about in context of his first recording but everyone is talking about him as JAY-Z JAY-Z so you get a sort of "Jay-Z was a good rapper and he went to record an album... yada yada... he's a billionaire mega force married to Beyonce."

The other complaint is how much of the book is people talking about their region and everyone talking about how important regions are. "He had a Houston-LA flavor with Miami beats over Memphis vibe." "He from the Bronx so we don't fuck with dat we ride Brooklyn style." Nobody knows what the fuck this means, especially not us cacs. But it's whole pages and chapters of this. The thing is that the chapters about the smaller cities are more interesting than the NYC borough wanking that's the bulk of the book. Nobody outright says it but the book strongly suggests that a lot of the independent dudes in places like Houston, Atlanta, etc. were making tons more money than stars making it big in NYC and LA. Because the big labels, even stuff like Def Jam, are giving you pennies per copy sold while indies gave you many dollars and because of that region stupidity you would sell large in the region just on this factor. It wasn't until they were talking about Master P and No Limit that the reason why people weren't doing this, it took a lot of work, you had to actually go around and talk to people and understand pressings, inventory and so on. Ironically, though not mentioned in the book, the internet has essentially levelled this by eliminating the physical distribution problems. No wonder the labels have hated it forever.

[Potato]

Started reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.



About 1/4 way through it and the story is just starting to kick off after some pretty heavy scene/world setting. 

Really enjoying the writing style, which I'm a bit surprised about considering so much of the conversation about this book has been the whole gothic lesbians thing.

Remains to be seen if the story takes precedence or the "look, lesbians" thing gets in the way of that. Up to this point, it's been basically non-existent, but the seeds are definitely being planted.