everything I read (and watched) this spring: a roundup
a slow but stellar season for reading, an absolutely wonderful season for TV, and at the very least, a fun season for movies.
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Welcome back! We are two days away from the summer solstice, and wrapping up an admittedly slow, doozy of a spring at Alienated Young Woman. After an April where my Substack actually started to feel like the trappings of a Real Writer, I struggled to publish even one of my three planned articles in May.
Off-screen, so much happened, unhappened, and happened over again, including so much that changed my relationships with literature, academia, and criticism at large. I feel alternatively like I’ve aged so many lifetimes and like I must have inadvertently jumped into a parallel timeline without catching on. Now, however, I’ve entered an era of trying new things, including but not limited to:
going outside
having a Bachelors degree
buying a capsule wardrobe for summer
Charli xcx’s BRAT
revamping my Substack logo, wordmark, and background color (but only slightly)
dog-sitting
eustachian tube dysfunction
actually writing for enjoyment.
All in all, I’m feeling much more person-like than last month.
But, as I privately vowed while first listening to The Tortured Poets Department back in April, I will not attempt to publish something I haven’t processed internally. Introspection tomorrow. Today, thoughts on beautiful Scandinavian character actors, unexpected rom-com starlets, and Emily in Paris.
Reading
Surprise! The end-of-college-but-not-end-of-academia period of my life was littered with campus novels. My springtime reading included a promising streak of recent entries (most of which I covered in my latest reading guide), including Daisy Alpert Florin’s period autofiction My Last Innocent Year, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s otherworldly satire Disorientation, and Antonia Angress’s ensemble coming-of-age Sirens and Muses.
Later, however, as the academic summer kicked off and my responsibilities promptly dropped from Everything to Just Trying to Get The Substack Back On Track, I also found time to revisit some old favorites in other genres. I got reacquainted with finals season staple Emily Henry, whose latest novel, Funny Story, falls somewhere between Beach Read (hallowed ground) and People We Meet on Vacation (entirely unmemorable) in her larger romance oeuvre. With Funny Story, Henry keeps up both the predictable rhythm she’d settled into by Book Lovers and the more interesting post-breakup thread she introduced with Happy Place, making for an entry that, if it feels almost formulaic, at least feels undeniably on-brand.
I also had time to return to Agatha Christie, this time with a novel where some of her signature formulas were still being constructed. This month’s read was Murder at the Vicarage, the author’s first novel to feature the iconic Miss Marple. If it taught me anything, it’s that in 55 years of writing, Christie never missed a critical moment to subvert her own formulas.
Gold Star: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Doubleday, 2024)
I’m glad we’re talking about formulas! This season’s Gold Star goes to Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, a novel distinctly concerned with them (formulas and husbands). In The Husbands, Lauren is a single, generally settled thirtysomething living in London when she returns home one night to find a husband—one who certainly didn’t exist when she left—climbing down from her attic. Suddenly, everything about her life is altered ever so slightly to suggest the husband has been there all along. Even worse, when the husband returns to the attic, he’s promptly replaced by yet another mystery husband. Over the next few months, Lauren finds herself navigating a seemingly endless loop of infinitely-generating attic husbands, each one shepherding a new version of her potential life, before she’s forced to ask: how does anyone decide on a future?
With The Husbands, Gramazio has managed a pseudo-time loop novel that feels distinct from any of the myriad time loop stories that came before, and one that even manages to subvert its own repetitive urges. The Husbands is unrelenting without ever veering tedious or redundant, and Gramazio builds an intricate, complex world without sacrificing poignant character development. In a season where I spent plenty of time with familiar favorites, The Husbands was unlike anything I’d ever read.1
Honorable Mention: Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2024)
I’ve already discussed this one plenty, but one last time for good measure: Disorientation was truly a highlight of my reading year. In Disorientation, Ingrid Yang is a 29-year-old PhD student trudging through the final months of her dissertation on a beloved Chinese-American poet when a note left in his archive leads her to a scandalous discovery: he may not have been Chinese at all. What follows can only be described as an academic fever dream as Ingrid is thrown into an all-consuming investigation—of the poet, of the dark truths holding up her academic department, and of her dynamics with white men.
Hsieh’s satire has understandably attracted comparisons to RF Kuang’s Yellowface, published a year later, in which an unsuccessful white author stumbles upon an unfinished manuscript belonging to her recently deceased friend, a Chinese-American literary darling, and decides to pass it off as her own. The comparisons are more than fair; Hsieh and Kuang—though one interrogates academia while the other indicts the publishing industry—are exploring similar themes about what representation means and how far it can truly take any of us, both under the cover of an almost surrealist satire. Admittedly, I do generally feel more genial toward Yellowface than many of its critics, despite some of the novel’s harder-to-ignore plot issues. Still, Disorientation—though it does struggle with similar issues in its own climax—is also all the more precise in its satire, and somehow, even more batshit.
Full Reading List:
The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones (Catapult, 2024) (Review here)
Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress (Ballantine, 2022)
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt & Co. 2023)
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2023)
Funny Story by Emily Henry (Berkley, 2024)
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2024)
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (William & Morrow, 1930)
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Doubleday, 2024)
Currently Reading: Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Avid Reader Press, 2024), and Tavi Gevinson’s zine/novella Fan Fiction.
Watching
TV
Last season was admittedly a bit of a dud when it came to TV. Not so for spring. Last winter’s venture into Tobias Menzies Cinematic Universe with The Terror and Manhunt brought bountiful returns this spring, when my continuing exploration led me to his rom-com turn in This Way Up. That, in turn, led me to co-star Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters, which eventually led me to Bad Sisters alum Claes Bang’s star turn in BBC’s Dracula. All that to say, my spring TV-watching track record was so strong that I couldn’t even narrow it down to just one series to crown as my Gold Star.
This was also a huge season for leading TV recommendations with “Hear me out…”. First, it was me saying “Hear me out” when telling people about Dracula, BBC angels Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffatt’s (not at all faithful) miniseries adaptation of the classic novel. While Dracula admittedly veers off the rails to an alarming degree for a series so brief, I finished still holding firm in my belief that Claes Bang is the best on-screen Dracula we’ve had to date. Even in Dracula’s most convoluted moments (and there were several), Bang’s performance captured the nuance of the vampire—the sexiness, the foreignness, and the underlying tragedy that all sometimes get lost in screen adaptations. He was Dracula, and to such a precise degree that I’ve decided to save my remaining thoughts for the potential of a longer piece about rethinking Dracula—novel, character, and adaptation—altogether.
But this season was also about receiving “hear me outs.” Other people’s “hear me outs” brought me to Elsbeth, an inverted whodunit.2 that follows the titular character (Carrie Preston, of True Blood fame), a successful defense attorney from Chicago when she’s commissioned by the Department of Justice to investigate corruption in the NYPD, only to find she also has a gift for solving murders.
Elsbeth has everything. A delightfully perfect balance of comedy and traditional crime procedural. Near-constant mentions of an unseen gay son. Jane Krakowski!! It also rivals the original Law & Order in terms of Broadway-legend guest stars per season. Arian Moayed as a deceptively charming bartender! Laura Benanti and Andre de Shields as a high fashion comedic duo! Jane Krakowski!! And that’s only the beginning. Preston’s True Blood co-star Stephen Moyer even guest stars in the pilot as a sexy but menacing drama professor, and with season two on the horizon, trust that I’ve already started a 35-person list of guest star requests.3
My second “hear me out” was a big one. After no less than three years of recommendations, I finally fulfilled my aunt’s dream of us watching all three seasons of Emily in Paris on vacation. And… I didn’t hate it!! I am almost entirely confident that if I think too long about the show’s gender politics, one of my eyes will fall out and I’ll spiral into a state of abject despair. In fact, my entire viewing experience may have been skewed by the magic of vacation, because I attempted a second watch while writing this and could barely get through the pilot.
Yet for those all-too-brief five days on the beach, there was something all-consuming about following Emily (Lily Collins, in the role she was born to play) approach every situation with decision-making so poor it sometimes seems almost sociopathic. Darren Star has seen the darkest truth about his greatest creation, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw—that it’s far more compelling to create a protagonist so stupid and self-centered they become hateable than it is to create a beloved one—and taken his instincts to the extreme. And, as an exercise in sonder, every single character is written like the lead of some entirely different series. Would I rather be watching Luc and Julien’s? Probably. But somehow, I can’t stop watching Emily.
Gold Star: VEEP (HBO, 2012-2019) and Bad Sisters (AppleTV+, 2022-present)
I am finally a person who has watched VEEP. Thank God. In the era of iconic older comedians revealing themselves to be fundamentally shitty, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has yet to disappoint. As the narcissistic, morally bankrupt Vice President Selina Meyer, she’s smarter, funnier, and less politically correct than any comedian who has publicly proclaimed themselves to be “politically incorrect”—mostly because she’s in on the joke.
There was no doubt in my mind that with VEEP, JLD would produce one of the best sitcom characters of all time, but the series may very well boast the strongest ensemble cast in sitcom history. From mainstays Reid Scott, Anna Chlumsky, and Tony Hale to recurring appearances by Sarah Sutherland and Clea Duvall, to all-timer turns from Sam Richardson, Timothy Simons, and occasional guest star Sally Phillips, VEEP seemed to have a once-in-a-generation knack for eliciting comedic performances that make “career best” feel like an understatement.
So, maybe in addition to being the season of “hear me outs,” this was also the season of embracing the funniest women alive. Because, as with JLD and VEEP, long before starting Bad Sisters in March, I was already certain of one thing: Sharon Horgan never misses. But God, am I glad I continued following the thread.
Horgan both created and stars in the black comedy, a reimagining of the Flemish series Clan following the Garveys, a family of five long-since orphaned sisters living in Dublin. If Elsbeth was an inversion of the typical murder mystery structure, Bad Sisters—which divides its storytelling into two timelines—throws the idea of a murder mystery entirely on its head. In the past, four Garvey sisters secretly make elaborate plans to murder the fifth’s cruel, controlling husband, JP (Claes Bang, in yet another completely transformative performance). In the present, two desperate insurance investigators attempt to prove that JP’s seemingly accidental death was anything but.
Not only does Bad Sisters subvert any and all expectations about the murder mystery, but it also sees Horgan’s writing at its most precise—and its best. The Garveys and those who surround them are haunted by tragedy—from sudden deaths to mental health struggles, disabling accidents, and abusive relationships—but Bad Sisters somehow manages never to feel bleak. Instead, think Big Little Lies, with the sharp, idiosyncratic humor Horgan has been honing her entire.
Honorable Mention: Hacks (HBO, 2021-present) and This Way Up (Hulu, 2019-2021)
After three years of saying “I should really get into Hacks,” I’ve finally gotten into Hacks. The series, which just concluded its third season, follows Ava (Laura Dern-tier nepo baby Hannah Einbinder), a wunderkind comedy writer who finds herself unemployed and semi-blacklisted thanks to an unsavory tweet when she takes a job writing for legendary—and past her prime—Las Vegas comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart, a third entry on this season’s “funniest woman alive” list).
Hacks is equal parts poignant and spitfire, a comedy about comedies (and sometimes doomed love story) that balances an underlying tragedy that could be overwhelming with whip-smart humor that rivals my lost love The Other Two. With stellar supporting performances from Kaitlin Olson as Deborah’s problem child DJ, Carl Clemons-Hopkins as her long-suffering advisor Marcus, and duo Paul W. Downs and Megan Stalter as Deborah and Ava’s bumbling agents Jimmy and Kayla, Hacks is only getting better with age.
The second honorable mention goes to This Way Up, because, as I said, Sharon Horgan never misses. In This Way Up, she’s at peak form in her supporting role as Shona, the Type A older sister of main character Áine (Aisling Bea, who also created the series). Áine, meanwhile, is adrift, an ESL tutor in her early 30s living in London and struggling to rebuild after a mental health crisis that left her hospitalized.
Thankfully, after career-best homotragic showings in The Terror and Manhunt and a promising comedic turn in You Hurt My Feelings, Menzies doesn’t disappoint in his rom-com straight-man role. Instead, he joins Bea and Horgan, alongside Aasif Mandvi, Indira Varma, and Kadiff Kirwan, in the kind of impeccably cast (and impeccably utilized) ensemble other sitcoms yearn for. So, maybe in addition to being the season of “hear me outs” and the season of the funniest women alive, this was also the season of pitch-perfect ensembles.
The comparisons to Fleabag are apt—both Bea’s series and Waller-Bridge’s follow acerbic London thirty-somethings navigating fraught romantic lives and complicated family dynamics in the wake of a private tragedy—but This Way Up is more lighthearted, tonally closer to something like HBO’s Girls. At just 12 half-hour episodes spread out over two seasons, it’s a quick watch, but one that packs so much nuance, humor, and poignancy into that brief period. Like Hacks, despite the underlying tragedy, This Way Up manages to be witty, irreverent, and above all else, hopeful.
Full Watchlist:
Bad Sisters (AppleTV+, 2022-present)
This Way Up (Hulu, 2019-2021)
Dracula (BBC, 2020)
The Crown (Netflix, 2016-present)4
VEEP (HBO, 2012-2019)
Elsbeth (CBS/Paramount Plus, 2024-present)
Bridgerton: Season 4 (Netflix, 2021-present)
Hacks (HBO, 2021-present)
Emily in Paris (Netflix, 2020-present)
Currently Watching: Fantasmas (HBO, 2024-present)
Film
Admittedly, this was not quite as exciting of a season for movies as winter was. Still, starting off strong, I continued my off-kilter rom-com streak with Celeste and Jesse Forever, co-written by and co-starring Rashida Jones as Celeste, a successful trend analyst who divorces her loving but immature artist husband, Jesse (Andy Samberg in a perfect role!), only for the pair to decide they can remain best friends.
I also ventured into some more straightforward, mainstream rom-coms, including the (somehow both morally questionable and toothless) Harry Styles RPF-inspired The Idea of You. Starring Anne Hathaway (who is at least having so much fun) as a 40-year-old single mom who falls for 24-year-old boy-bander Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine, who is just okay), The Idea of You was a film I forgot most of immediately after it ended, and one that could have gone so much further with its One Direction dramaturgy. But it also prompted me to rewatch both leads’ real best rom-coms5 and revive my textual-historical analysis of the seminal Midnight Memories, which is something, at least.
Of course, now that it’s on Netflix, I also had to give a chance to 2023’s favorite rom-com, Anyone But You. It was… everything I thought it would be, which was mostly just “fine,” but it did teach me some valuable lessons, most importantly:
Charlee Fraser is an absolute star. I quite literally forgot about Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney the second she stepped into frame. I can only hope her brief but outstanding filmography will have grown exponentially by this time next year.
I’m hesitant to say we’re “so back,” but trust that once we get real writers back into the rom-com space, trust we will be so back.
This was also a big season for Weird Movies, that is, both movies that are naturally, inherently, gloriously weird, and movies that Really Want You To Know They’re Weird. On one hand, I was lucky enough to see Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera at Lincoln Center, an Italian period piece about a British art thief in 1980s Tuscany searching for a mythical underworld to reunite with his lost love. La Chimera is equal parts heartwrenching, fantastical, winding, and sincere, featuring a breathtaking Josh O’Connor performance in the year of breathtaking Josh O’Connor performances. In the Season of Weird Movies, this may be the one that stays with me the longest.
On the other hand, I also had time to catch William Oldroyd’s Eileen, ironically adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s least ‘In Case You Haven’t Noticed, I’m Weird’ novel. As the obsessive repressed lesbian Rebecca, Anne Hathaway was everything I’ve ever wanted in a lesbian Anne Hathaway role, and, in a movie full of People Doing Voices, she gave us one of her best voices. For that, at least, I have to be grateful.
Somewhere in the middle was Kristofer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, which, if nothing else, kept the engines running on the second coming of Nicolas Cage. He’s expectedly brilliant as Paul, Dream Scenario’s mild-mannered, ultra-normie professor protagonist who discovers he’s inexplicably become the subject of thousands of people’s dreams. At first, Paul revels in his newfound fame, but when the dreams start to turn into nightmares, he’s forced to navigate what it actually means to be a public figure known for something he can’t control. Produced by Weird Movie prince Ari Aster, Borgli’s semi-dystopian comedy is nothing if not imaginative, and Cage perfectly measured even in areas where the plot starts to drag. Maybe it’s fitting that the entire thing feels like a dream.
Gold Star: Challengers (2024, dir. Luca Guadagnino)
What else?6 Genuinely, what else was released this spring that even came close to this?7 So much has already been written about Challengers that we’re veering into corn-plate territory after less than two months, but how could anyone not talk about it? It brought sexiness back to movies even without really bringing sex back to movies. It blew Luca Guadagnino’s most revered past projects out of the water. It made the camera the tennis ball!
And more than anything, it cemented Guadagnino’s status as the shepherd of the young movie star. Zendaya (who, to be fair, has long since proven her star status) gave one of the best performances of the year as one of the best characters of the decade. Josh O’Connor gave a career-best for at least the fourth time in his career. Mike Faist was transformative in the role all of his musical theatre training was building toward. Everyone was so beautiful they were almost hard to look at. I can no longer watch traditional cinematic love triangles, or even just groups of three people, without audibly saying to the screen, “Just try a Challengers!” I experienced this film inexplicably seated next to a 7-year-old boy still wearing his school uniform who reacted to every gay moment by audibly gasping “Oh God, why?” to his father, who had not Googled the movie beforehand, and even that could not keep Challengers from being my favorite watch of the year.
Honorable Mention: Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein)
I won’t say that I didn’t expect to love Game Night, because I did. It still surpassed my expectations. Without giving too much away, Game Night follows a group of party game enthusiast friends, led by couple Max and Annie (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams in quite possibly their best roles), whose weekly game night takes a turn when Max’s wealthy older brother offers to host an immersive mystery role-play night, promising the winner his coveted Corvette. Except, as the friends quickly discover, their “immersive mystery” may not be a game after all.
Game Night is the kind of mid-budget comedy the people who tweet about missing mid-budget comedies yearn for. It somehow boasts an absolutely ridiculous cast, including McAdams, Bateman, Jesse Plemons, Lamorne Morris, and even Sharon Horgan (who, as I said, never misses), all of whom are unironically pumping out Top 5 performances. Game Night (much like its predecessor and twin flame Date Night) should be a fairly run-of-the-mill, three-star action comedy. Instead, from an impeccably paced, joke-dense, gleefully absurd script to an ensemble where every last cameo is at the top of their game, it’s firing on all cylinders.
Full Watchlist:
Dream Scenario (2023, dir. Kristofer Borgli)
Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012, dir. Lee Toland Krieger)
Immaculate (2024, dir. Michael Mahon)
Fargo (1996, dir. Joel Coen)
La Chimera (2023, dir. Alice Rohrwacher)
Challengers (2024, dir. Luca Guadagnino)
The Idea of You (2024, dir. Michael Showalter)
Game Night (2018, dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein)
Eileen (2023, dir. William Oldroyd)
Jaws (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Anyone But You (2023, dir. Will Gluck)
Next Up: My Summer Reading/Viewing List
Books:
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (forthcoming from Catapult, July 2024)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)
The Fetishist by Katherine Min (Penguin, 2024)
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang (Dutton, 2024)
Bonus: Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (forthcoming from Ballantine Books, September 2024)
TV:
Derry Girls (Channel 4/Netflix, 2018-2022)
Mary & George (Starz, 2024)
Chewing Gum (E4/Max, 2015-2017)
On Becoming a God in Central Florida (Showtime, 2019)
Film:
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Stress Positions (2024, dir. Theda Hammel)
Kinds of Kindness (releasing 2024, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Zola (2020, dir. Janzica Bravo)
Thanks for tuning in to the seasonal roundup edition of “What I’m Reading,” a biweekly recommendation guide from Alienated Young Woman. If you’ve enjoyed this post, consider sharing it on your socials. Subscribers receive two free reading guides per month and one long-form review.
Collage by the author.
In addition to Spring Gold Star, The Husbands also earns a second award for Best Novel Where Substack Factors Into the Plot.
Also known, I learned, as a “howcatchem.”
Joe Manganiello will be there. Alexander Skarsgård’s agent will not answer the phone, but God, they should.
Moment of brave, vulnerable honesty: In truth, I only made it through Season 4 and three non-consecutive episodes of Season 3. What can I say? Genuinely, what can I say?
Red White and Royal Blue and Ella Enchanted, respectively.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I wanted so badly to have seen I Saw The TV Glow by the time I wrote this, which I have to believe would have made at least an honorable mention. Alas, we endure.
And do not say “Dune Part Two” to me. I’m not going to watch Dune Part Two.