December Favorites: Miss Marple, a Crow Who Thinks He's a MoFo, and a LOT of Jukebox Musicals

So, this might have been the best Winter Break of my life to date. 

It's been long enough since pandemic lockdown stuff ended that our two-week mostly staycation felt AWESOME. For a while, I was kicking myself that we didn't go on a quick pre-Christmas trip like last year's super fun New York City adventure, but you know, I think the extra downtime was worth it. No packing, no figuring out pet sitters, no travel stress, no sightseeing must-dos... just plenty of relaxation and plenty of time with each other. We tried a couple of new-to-us restaurants, Syd played the best Cards Against Humanity combo that I have EVER seen, we watched a ton of movies, I read so many books, the kids and I got a lot of work done on our respective farms over in Stardew Valley, and we just did absolutely nothing notable or interesting, and it was perfect.

Here's a few of my favorite things that I read, watched, or listened to in December:

READ

A few months ago, I complained on my Craft Knife Facebook page that I'd read a couple of Poirot novels but didn't like them, didn't like the character of Poirot, and couldn't figure out what the big deal was. A very kind and gracious reader commented that what I should be reading was Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, as she's far superior to Poirot and has a much better knowledge of poisons.

Y'all. Miss Marple is EVERYTHING to me now. She is FAR superior to Poirot. She has a MUCH better knowledge of poisons. She is SO good at all the machinations involved in figuring out murders and luring the murderers into revealing themselves. One time, she pretended to be choking to death just so a murderer would stand over her in just the right spot that someone whom she'd already machinated out of the room on an unrelated errand could enter the room at exactly the right moment to be presented with a tableau so similar to a murder she'd fleetingly seen that she recognized the hitherto-unrevealed murderer and he was arrested. 

Also, she has the best garden in the village.

I've taken to bringing a Miss Marple with me when I sub once a week for teachers in the local high schools. They're easy to follow and pick up and put down, easy to jump right back into, and they're short enough that I can often, if the classes aren't completely feral (which sometimes they are...), finish the book before the final bell rings. 

Here are my favorite Miss Marple books so far:

• A Murder is Announced
• Murder at the Vicarage
  
• 4.50 from Paddington
• At Bertram's Hotel
• A Caribbean Mystery

I'm stoked that I still have a few more novels that I haven't read yet, as well as all of her short stories. And the same delightful commenter told me that I should also try Tommy and Tuppence, so hopefully that will keep me in Agatha Christie until the end of the school year!

BookTok is my jam, and a few weeks ago, a single TikTok gave me a whole list of new TBRs that I requested from the library and read over Winter Break. They were all good, but OMG I could not put Hollow Kingdom down until I finished it, and then when I did finish it I I immediately found Will, put it into her hands, and said, "Read it right now so we can talk about it!". We have spoken of nothing but that and the running of our Stardew Valley farm since:

I love myself a good zombie apocalypse, so that was my original draw to the book, but wow it's so much more than that. It's tender and beautiful, and has a lot to say about how precious and valued we are, to ourselves and to others, even when we're absolutely only average and definitely not that special. Trigger warning for pet death, but even then it's not pet death the way it's usually used just to make us sad so we feel like the book has emotional impact, but pet death that's treated with all the love and respect and grief that it obviously ought to have.

And while double-checking the author's name, I just now discovered that there. Is. A. SEQUEL!!! I emergency requested it so hopefully Will and I have time to read it together before we move her into her out-of-state college dorm.

I languished in my public library's Holds queue for I'm Glad My Mom Died for MONTHS before I finally received it a few weeks ago. I wasn't even that excited to read it, but, you know, the hype! And also I felt obligated to read it as fast as possible because the line behind me was just as long (I just checked, and my library currently has 15 copies of the book, with 49 people still in line to read it). 

I can't say that I enjoyed the book, because the author is very forthright about some really tough stuff, but I was absolutely fascinated by it. I highly disapprove of the use of child actors, especially the ones who seem to spend their entire childhoods working instead of being children, so I'm generally up for any memoir by a former child actor trashing the experience. But this book is also really well-written, and I know I already said that McCurdy is very forthright, but she's SO forthright about her experiences that I had a knot in my stomach reading her vivid depictions of abuse and trauma, but also, I'm super proud of her for how she powered through and the way that she hopefully seems to be doing a lot better now. The only thing I was left wishing was that we could get even a brief recap of the hours and years and types of therapies that she's surely undergone to be as healed as she is.

WATCHED

Okay, I know I'm the last person on Earth to see Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I also had to wait for it to be my turn to check it out from the library (current count: the library has eight copies and 31 people in line!). I'm not super into movies in general so I wasn't anticipating it, but Matt is a bigger movie buff and requested it, waited patiently for it, checked it out as soon as it was his turn, and wheedled me into watching it that night.

And, um? It's WONDERFUL! He didn't tell me it was sci-fi, or I'd have been moderately more enthusiastic about the prospect. But if you don't like sci-fi, it's not sci-fi enough to turn you off. But I am in just the right place right now to watch an emotional but not syrupy movie about mothering your grown daughter and worrying that you're doing a terrible job at it. Also, there was a tiny little moment early in the film that I laughed out loud in delight about. And then later, they took it a little further and I was again delighted. And then later, it happened again. And then it became part of the tangled plot, every time getting more ridiculous and wild, and I was so there for it I can't even tell you. 

In other news, I'm usually militantly vigilant about avoiding lifestyle creep (as befits a middle-aged, underemployed woman with not nearly enough retirement savings, sigh), but December was a perfect storm of lifestyle creep. First, the teenager who will shortly be attending college out-of-state needed her first very own cell phone, which means that we finally had to upgrade the crazy-cheap, crazy-old AT&T account that we'd been grandfathered into a billion years ago and managed to keep this entire time because we rarely upgrade our phones. But y'all. Have y'all ALL had unlimited data ALL THIS TIME?!? If you'd told me this, I might have upgraded our phone plan years ago!

Okay, I wouldn't have, but I would have been very, very, very jealous of you!

Around the same time, we went to renew my ESPN+ subscription, a piece of lifestyle creep from last year that I cannot bear to give up because that's where the hockey games live, and ugh, you guys, it only cost another forty bucks for the entire year to add Hulu and Disney+ to our subscription. Do we *need* a full year of Hulu and Disney+? No, no we do not. But do I *want* to watch that latest season of The Handmaid's Tale? Yes, yes I do. Do I want to watch Moana every time I'm feeling sad? Why yes, yes I do! Was I thrilled beyond measure to sit down to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special? Also yes! 

And then. Y'all, and then! We're near the end, and I've been having a marvelous time because the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is for some reason WAY better than it needs to be, when Kevin Bacon takes the microphone to sing with the alien band that had made a brief appearance earlier. He starts to sing, and I'm all, "OMG he's singing an Old 97s song!!!", and Matt, who has not said a word about this the entire time even though he knew this information already and also knows that the Old 97s are one of my favorite bands and he, himself, has seen them with me twice at a local bar and witnessed me freak out with excitement both times, just casually throws out, "Yeah, I think that alien band is the Old 97s." 

And that, my friends, is how you subject yourself to watching the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special twice in a row with me, because obviously I have to watch the entire thing again right away to make sure I don't miss a single scene that the Old 97s appear in. 

It was, like, two scenes. I was nevertheless vibrating with high-key excitement the entire time.

LISTENED TO

Did anyone else spend a huge amount of their teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, or was that only a Gen X thing? I spent a HUGE amount of my teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, something that I had forgotten about completely until a teenager asked if we could watch Sing 2, which prompted an emergency visit to the public library's online catalog (a site that I literally have bookmarked on my phone, because you would be surprised how often emergency visits to the library catalog are called for around here!), and then just a couple of days later (the library currently has six copies of Sing 2, with two of those copies on the shelves) a Sing movie marathon. I don't normally love jukebox musicals, but for some reason I do like Sing, and at the climax of Sing 2, I had the exact middle-aged mom HOLY SHIT WOW moment that the producers hoped I would have, when the reclusive lion finally comes out of hiding to sing his song with the porcupine, Scarlet Johansson, and halfway into his first verse I was all, "HOLY SHIT WOW DID THEY ACTUALLY GET BONO?!?!?" 

Like, I'm not quick on the uptake, because they'd been doing U2 songs the whole movie and saying they belonged to the lion, but whatever. Now I'm listening to The Joshua Tree on constant rotation again and it is just as incredible as it was when I was fifteen:

We obviously couldn't have a sing marathon without also marathoning our other favorite jukebox musical series, Pitch Perfect! Will is even less into movies than I am, and I think Pitch Perfect is the very first live-action feature that she actually genuinely loved. It hasn't aged well, because we spent most of the first film marvelling over how just plain mean the main character is and why does everybody even like her at all oh it's because she's nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs right? BUT the first movie also has a beautiful scene in which Ben Platt (back when he was genuinely amazing and soulful and hadn't ruined his reputation by cramming himself into a movie in a role that should have been played by someone a decade younger, and also we've come to realize that character is actually a sociopath and we just didn't notice earlier because his songs are so great) achieves his dream and it's so sweet and well-acted. 

If, as soon as the credits to Pitch Perfect roll, you're not switching to YouTube to check out the actual competitors in the actual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, you're nerding incorrectly and you should let me help you. Just... the music! The choreography! The punny names of every single group!

Here's Pitches and Notes:

The Nor'easters have the best outfits, though:

And just like that, we're somehow practically halfway through January! I'm currently still binging The Joshua Tree, I finished a new Miss Marple while subbing yesterday, I can hardly stand to put down Will's latest fantasy rec, and speaking of Will... well. I left a big part of my heart in Ohio this week and now I'm watching Moana and crying.