Content Consumed: Back at it, baby

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Content Consumed

6 min readMar 20, 2023

Hola! I’m back after an astonishingly beautiful and truly perfect wedding and honeymoon. I certainly missed a lot of content, so consider today’s edition half catching up and half tuning in.

In today’s edition of Content Consumed…
📣 A wild round-up of talking points
🎥 My final take(s) on The Last of Us
📚 Poolside reviews: the 4 books I read on vacation

Talking points! TV, style, magazine covers, memes, March Madness and more.

Okay there are a ton of things to touch on that don’t need full grafs from me. Let’s do this.

Swarm looks incredible, but not my genre. The premise: a young woman’s obsession with a pop star takes a dark turn. The pop star is modeled after Beyoncé, and her fan base after the Beyhive. If I was into horror, I’d be in. It’s Donald Glover-produced and looks fantastic.
Cara Delevigne is less than a year sober from hard drugs and is on the cover of Vogue discussing it. There’s been chatter online about how it might not have been the best idea to do this so early in her sobriety journey, and I think that’s a fair take.
Wish I discovered Law Roach sooner! The stylist just retired from fashion because he’s fed up with the industry. Don’t worry though—he’ll work with Zendaya forever, as he has for over a decade now. Check out some of his iconic works.
Has the Hunger Games meme renaissance begun only because the full series just got on Netflix? Maybe! I beg that it continues.
All I do is lose money on March Madness brackets. But I won’t quit. (Mostly because my husband reminded me that I won second place with both my brackets last year.)
Finally, I’m so, so excited for the Succession season 4 premiere next weekend—and the best part? Our new couch arrives the day before.

My final take on ‘The Last of Us’

I think my overall thesis is that I expected too much.

It’s HBO. It’s a Sunday night show. It’s Pedro Pascal. Obviously, The Last of Us was going to be hyped up beyond belief. So, I expected a lot from it, nearly as much as House of the Dragon and Succession (other HBO faves).

But that was too much.

One of the main issues I found was my own (and, from convos with friends, other people’s) lack of belief in Ellie and Joel’s relationship. The time jumps, the flashbacks, and the separate-but-together journeys all made it difficult. The most I was convinced: when Joel found Ellie after she murdered the cannibal-pedophile guy. That hug seemed legitimate and full of real emotion. But I think Joel lying to her at the end—“Yeah, they didn’t find a cure, there’s more immune folks like you, oh well”—would’ve been more devastating if we believed more in the chemistry they were supposed to have.

Another issue is that video game adaptations must be so tricky. Half the time, when you could tell a sequence or scene was taken straight from the game, it was super cool. Half the time, however, it was super awkward and drawn out and/or rushed and then didn’t make sense.

I’ll watch season 2 when it arrives. But this won’t be coming close to my top shows of the year list.

4 Mini Book Reviews: From Ireland to the Bahamas to the Hungarian Plains

When you spend dozens of hours traveling and even more hours poolside, it’d be pretty crazy not to pick up a book or two.

So, I read four books over the two weeks I just spent in Oaxaca de Juarez and the Riviera Maya! Let me give you some mini-reviews.

THE BEST:
‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney

It’s what everyone says it is! Normal People is real, dark, and painful at every turn. The words Sally Rooney writes are not necessarily poetic in nature—until you reach the dialogue. The dialogue, the relationships she crafts: it’s a unique gift. I’ve decided Sally Rooney is not overrated and I’ll watch the show when the weather’s a bit better. I can only handle so much.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

THE TRICKIEST:
‘The Queen of Dirt Island’ by Donal Ryan

The intensity of this book, especially in its formatting, can’t be overstated. Is a character talking? Is this inner dialogue? Who is our narrator? Sometimes, these things are difficult to decipher due to the lack of quotation marks and the endless extended paragraphs. But it’s worth it to follow these four generations of troubled but strong Irish women. Here’s where I might have an issue—I still haven’t decided!—it was written by a man. He frequently describes sexual assault and domestic violence, and how women react to it short-term and long-term. I know it’s similar to the modern debate of who should be able to play minority characters (like straight men playing gay men, cis people playing trans folks, etc). I don’t know where I fall on this and I’m still working it through in my brain. I just know I was a little disappointed to see this book wasn’t written by a woman. But that’s the thing… he could’ve fooled me.
⭐⭐⭐⭐

THE MOST DISAPPOINTING:
‘We Should Not Be Friends’ by Will Schwalbe

I was really looking forward to this memoir, a tale of the unusual and decades-long friendship between a gay theater nerd and a wrestling jock who meet when they join a secret society at Yale.
Spoilers: they weren’t actually good friends for most of the book, half of this feels like a medical diary, and the rest of it is a promotion for the jock’s Island School for kids in the Bahamas.
⭐⭐

THE MOST UNUSUAL:
‘The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring’ by Patti McCracken

I’m a sucker for true crime history books with a narrative arc, so this was right up my alley. (Compare to: Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland). McCraken did a masterful job of setting: I felt the dust of the Hungarian Plains on my face, smelled the reek of illness, and felt shadows of Romani witches behind me. (Really, an accomplishment for a reader sitting poolside in Tulum.) It must’ve been such a feat to track down all of this information and make it digestible, creating characters of depth from real people a hundred years ago. I loved every suspenseful minute of it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐