The Pleasures of Reading,
Viewing, and Listening in 2023
by Raven Belasco
TELEVISION
2023 was a helluva year. But I’ve been very thankful that, at the end of a long day, I’ve had amazing shows to sit down and watch to decompress.
I’m not sure how I found it, but one of the shows that brought me the most pleasure was The Diplomat on Netflix. If you had said you had an “American political thriller series” for me, I would have given you side-eye. But this show is so much more than that. It was created by Debora Cahn, and has a fantastically feminist viewpoint. Keri Russell is Katherine “Kate” Wyler, who against her will ends up as the newly appointed US ambassador to the UK. She must deal not only with the job, but with Rufus Sewell, her husband, who is always putting his thumb on the weights, with sometimes catastrophic results. The rest of the cast is a revelation (and very diverse) but David Gyasi as UK Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison really shines out. The show is witty, delves deep into emotion, and keeps up a delightfully chaotic pace. I am desperate for another season.
Happily, I got a third season of Lupin this year! If you haven’t been watching this French action-mystery thriller starring Omar Sy, well, you have three full seasons of delight ahead of you. Sy is the professional thief Assane Diop, son of a Senegalese immigrant. Assane’s father was framed by his employer, the powerful (and really vile) Hubert Pellegrini, and now Assane is ready to get revenge—but in the style of his hero, gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. The show is full of amazing acting, brilliant effects, and a focus on love and family. My favorite character is actually the dog, J’Accuse, who has been trained to bark whenever the evil Pellegrini’s name is mentioned. I suggest you watch it in the original French with subtitles—the English dubbing is disappointing.
An unexpected delight was White House Plumbers, satirical political drama miniseries starring Watergate masterminds and President Richard Nixon's political operatives E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) who are tasked with plugging press leaks by any means necessary. Through egotistical bungling they accidentally bring down the Presidency they are desperately trying to protect. Excellent acting, costuming/sets, and beautifully written.
All the Light We Cannot See is a four-part limited series on Netflix. Set in WWII in France just as the Americans show up to liberate the country, a blind French girl and a young German soldier find each other through a shared passion for radio. That romance only really shows up right at the end—before that it’s all a desperate race to keep the radio announcements going despite Nazi efforts to shut it down, because those radio transmissions are guiding the American bombers. It stars Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and a brilliant cast of actors who are all bringing their A game.
Another WWII offering on Netflix is Transatlantic, about the historic Emergency Rescue Committee that operated in Marseilles, Spain, and Portugal after the fall of France. Their goal was to get out people the Germans particularly wanted to murder, especially,well-known artists and scholars of the time including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and more. The cast is diverse, the actors are being directed to their very best, and the costuming and set design are brilliant. It will make you laugh and cry—or at least, I laughed and cried. I plan to rewatch it again soon.
Saving the best for last, Fall of the House of Usher is gothic horror miniseries, eight gorgeous and deeply upsetting episodes. Again, amazing writing and acting. The works of Poe all get name-checked or easter-egged as the Usher family comes apart in the most horrific ways. I think Poe would be proud of this show; it is truly unique horror for this age, as his stories were. This little snippet still sends shivers down my spine every time I watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIK-q6JoOeU
Just watch that show, dammit! It doesn’t matter if you don’t generally watch horror, this is simply too good to miss!
FILMS
As for films, these are the ones I made time to see in the theater this year, and all were worth it:
They Cloned Tyrone
The Harder They Fall
Barbie
All were amazing in their own way. Make time (and a big bowl of popcorn) for them.
BOOKS
Most of what I read this past year was nonfiction research for my Blood & Ancient Scrolls series. One of the joys for me in writing about vampires is that I can play around in any part of history I like, and I “have to” do a bunch of research for each story set in the past, or for each character who has a chip on their shoulder from that Thing that happened in Constantinople in 360 AD, etc.
Lucky for me, the last novella I wrote in the year had a section set in the khaganate of Khazaria in the 900s. So aside from all the other research I had to do for the rest of it, I got the excuse to read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, who is one of my most favoritest authors. The book itself is from 2007 and is set exactly in the same time and place as the end of the novella I wrote. So you see, I “had” to read it! It’s a “swashbuckling adventure” that follows two Jewish bandits (who style themselves “gentlemen of the road”) who become embroiled in a rebellion and a plot to restore a displaced Khazar prince to the throne. It’s a fun little romp, but also as thoughtful and deep as one expects from Chabon. It was a treat for me to get to call this “research.”
I had a couple weeks to read for pleasure this past summer, and used it well by digging into the first three books in the Mycroft Holmes series by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. If you love Holmesania, these books are perfectly satisfying and were just right for a vacation-read.
AUDIOBOOKS
This part of the recommendations is harder for me, because I mostly listen to audiobooks to fall asleep at night, and I have a bunch of series I just roll through over and over. So let me tell you, I can give you the plot of any Cadfael book in detail that would bore you. Likewise, the Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. However, I do share audiobooks with my partner when we do long drives, and the habit these days to listen to the latest John Scalzi, which, this summer, was The Kaiju Preservation Society. I really cannot sum up the gorgeously ludicrous plot, but all you need to know is this is as well-written, perfectly plotted, and as filled with endlessly fascinating characters as all Scalzi books are—plus huge kaiju stomping about the place causing chaos. Simply: a treat, and read by Wil Wheaton, a double treat!
Also, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian Muraresku didn’t come out this year (it was 2020) but I got it on audiobook this year, and it’s even better in audiobook than it was reading it—and since it completely rocked my universe when I read it, that’s high praise indeed. If you haven’t found it already, it’s described as “a groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization” but it becomes so, so much more as Muraresku goes on a quest to discover the literally hidden Mysteries. It’s gorgeously written, and really comes alive when the author reads it to you. I could not recommend this more highly.
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