Mostly Charmless: From LiveJournal to the End of the World

One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to force myself to put pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to keyboard. Getting into a rhythm of writing at least once a week has helped me so far in 2026, and I find myself writing a bit more compared to earlier years. Not quite where I want to be, but it's a start, and these newsletters have helped me get back into the habit. I want to use both going forward, where these newsletters are solely focused on books, movies, and shows, and my blog will continue to be a potpourri of things that interest me or care enough to write about.

I used to write a lot at school and college, and then later on during the heyday of LiveJournal. After the great LJ collapse following the explosion of social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, et al) and its Russian takeover, I moved over my blog to Blogger, where it's stayed more or less dormant. I know of at least one user though who checks my old posts fairly regularly, presumably by searching for her name. Sadly, Google hasn't spent any time enhancing Blogger, adding it to their long list of projects that were either killed or left to die on their own. Such is the fickle world of tech.

Alright, on to this week's books and binges!

A book

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

"...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic."

The quote above, from Arundhati Roy's masterful The God of Small Things, pretty much describes how I feel about the book itself. It's a book teeming with intense thoughts masquerading as words. The way she describes Kerala - the people, the culture, the goddamn jackfruits, I was completely bowled over when I read it for the first time almost thirty years ago. I was convinced I liked it because it was about my home state, but, much to my surprise, it went on to win the Booker and smash all kinds of records for books by an Indian author. I've read almost everything else she has written, which is mainly non-fiction, and have found myself agreeing with most of her causes as well, not just because of the way she wrote about them.

So, naturally, I sought out her memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me as soon as it was published, and read it in a couple of sittings in less than 24 hours. As I was hoping for, she continues to wield words with a power very few modern authors display. The book is her story, and perhaps even more importantly, her relationship with her mother. She loves her, she hates her, she cannot live with her, she cannot live without her. You do not need to know anything about the two Roys to read and enjoy the book, you don't even need to have read The God of Small Things.

The following lines resonated with me for a long while, for more reasons than one. Highly recommend the book.

"The more our world fractures into dagger-shaped shards, the more we club each other to death with our genes, our gods, our flags, our languages, the colour of our skin, the purity of our roots, our histories both true and false — the more my answer to that question (Where are you from?) remains the same: I'm here now."

A movie

Train Dreams on Netflix

I should confess that I am one of those annoying people who wait to pounce on unsuspecting folks who praise a movie, going "oh, I read the book a while back." I sometimes try to finish entire book series before the movie or show gets released, just to stake my claim of having been there before the general public got in. Does oodles to my self-esteem having gotten one over you, you know. Sigh.

Anyway, I could not do this for Train Dreams as I did not know the novella existed until after I watched the film and did a bit of digging around. The movie released at Sundance last year, and got quite a bit of critical acclaim then. It found its way to Netflix towards the end of the year, and is quite a wonderful film. It stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, logger and railroad worker from the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century. Only an hour and forty minutes long, it takes its time showing us Granier's life, his stoic approach to work and family, and the tragedy that awaits him. It never lapses into sentimentality, and stays grounded in the moment. It's about loss, about searching for meaning, and about not providing all the answers. Watch it when you have the time, and keep your phone away. It's worth it.

A show

Plur1bus on Apple TV

So you like movies, you like shows. You know that shows with women as the main characters are worth watching. You have your Sex and the City, your Grey's Anatomy, your Buffy, or if you are feeling adventurous, your Fleabag and your Killing Eve. But what if I told you there is a show with only one real woman character - not just in the scenes relevant to the character, but in the entire world the show is set in? And that the character is not particularly likeable, quick to anger, and behaves badly almost throughout the first season? Or rather, acts like a normal person would, not like a teevee lady.

Welcome to Plur1bus, the next masterclass in television from Vince Gilligan, he of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It stars Rhea Seehorn, who plays Carol Sturka, a well-known author of fantasy fiction. An alien virus strikes the earth and very quickly spreads everywhere, leaving just a dozen (or so) people who are strangely unaffected. The virus doesn't do the usual fictional virus thing where people turn into flesh-eating zombies. Actually, hold on. You might want to watch the show to check if what I said is true. Suffice to say that Carol is unlike almost everyone else in the world because of the virus, and she feels very, very alone.

The show faced a lot of criticism because of how Carol was depicted, as people felt she should have been more likeable. I'd argue this criticism would not exist if it was a male character, as there are hundreds of shows where the leading man is an obnoxious misogynistic heel, but is loved by everyone. My other hot take is that the show is actually about AI, which you actually get to realize fairly quickly without Gilligan bringing it up even once. The second season is due a year or two later - a very long wait, but from what I've seen so far, is sure to be worth it. Highly recommended.