Half Stars are for Cowards

Recently, Goodreads announced that not only were they adding the much sought-after feature of half-stars, but also 0.25 stars, so you can effectively now rate all your books out of twenty. This seems like pure madness to me.

Great Comet of 1744, from A Popular Treatise on Comets (1861).

I have never had a problem with half-stars, in fact I've been happily using them on Letterboxd so that I almost never have to commit to the glorious shining endorsement of a full five star rating. I was not a star snob. But these events have changed me. I had heard, throughout the years, that the people craved these half-stars. That the Goodreads users clamoured for them. "Every other site implemented them years ago," cry the masses, teary-eyed. And I always thought, well, wouldn't that destroy all existing ratings? Wouldn't that actually, seriously, threaten the integrity of the site-wide rating system?

Announcement image from Goodreads' Instagram account.

If Goodreads makes the transition to half-stars, then doesn't that cast all existing ratings as not quite what they were? Isn't a four now a hideous eight? This is wrong, isn't it? This is sick.

I cast my eyes over the homepage. I see three 4.5 star ratings in a row. And I feel now that I have been wrong, all this time, to let the five star films elude my precious five star rating for so long. It is me who is broken. It is me who must change.

So I will be sticking to the five star system on Goodreads, as always. No book is a 3.5. But I will also be permanently adjusting to the strict five star system anywhere that I give ratings - most importantly, within my own mind.

My Letterboxd ratings, skewing alarmingly towards the negative.

There is a sense of sureness about this. No dilly-dallying, no weighing up whether a piece of media crosses the threshold of a complete number into the murky fragments of a fraction. A film is either a three or a four. A two or a satisfying one. I must choose.

★★★★★

It seems so obvious now that the half stars were holding me back, steering me away from more decisive assessment. Granted, star ratings are a simplistic and immediate measure of the quality of a thing, and so perhaps they don't need to be taken all that seriously - but if that's the case, if a star rating is only the most immediate and rudimentary representation of my assessment of a thing, then perhaps that's all the more reason to make myself choose between one, two, three, four, and five. The perfect amount of stars.

The Sheer Pleasure of Reading Insane Books

Usually, I try to stick to a 'currently reading' count of two or three books. One main book that might be challenging or beefy, and a second option for rebelling from the first. This will often be a dense read paired with a lighter one, but not always. Sometimes you just need a fresh book, and two books usually serves this purpose well. And then there's the third, which could be anything from chunky reference book to read in small bursts over a long time period, or some sort of big fart from a dog's ass that feels exhilarating to read despite, or because of, its dog's ass qualities.

Reading by Lamplight (1859) by James McNeill Whistler, via NGA.

I tend not to go beyond three simultaneous reads, if only for the reason that Goodreads stops displaying those suckers all at once on its main page when you go over that number. But sometimes, some crazy days, I am reading four books. Dear reader, let me explain to you: my current four.

 

THE CULPRITS

Here they are in all their glory, and you might already be saying, "oh no". Well... let's go over them.

 

World English Bible

You might know this one. It's the bible. This is a public domain translation from some guy who took it upon himself to make one for the world wide web - I'm reading this version because it's the most prominent version available in the Steam game called 'The Bible', which is where I'm reading that bible.

It was really Margery Kempe's doing - I read about her and wanted to understand more about what she's all about, to really get as far into dear Margery's head as possible. And the only way to do that is to read the bible.

It's fascinating. I keep opening up Wikipedia tabs and blog posts about different aspects as I read, and one of the things that's so striking is its incredible sense of place. The level of real history it conveys (if esoterically) is quite astonishing. So I've really been thrust into a great historical rabbit hole here through Margery Kempe and her medieval life, into the bible and its accounts of Babylonian, Judean, Egyptian society between 800BC and 5BC and beyond. To think of people making little golden calves 2800 years ago and beefing over whether to worship Asheroth or Yahweh is so moving.

 

Hunting Adeline by H. D. Carlton

This one is a TikTok notorious self-published rape fantasy book. It's the second in a duology, and it's gotten some attention recently after the author announced that she was making a movie adaptation of the first book - people are scandalised about the idea of translating this story into film, given the extreme nature of some scenes - and so I decided to read it myself and try to understand some of the appeal and fully experience the horrors.

It's a very weird, quite immature series (the sexy guy within has ONE WHITE EYE AND ONE BLACK EYE - whoa!), and it's interesting to parse its treatment of sexual assault. Essentially, the bad boy main character is given special licence to perform his own special rapes that are, ultimately, actually wanted. There's a fantasy reflected there of the "safe" rape, but there's also a lot of fantasy about recovering from/dealing with different sexual assaults that are positioned as unequivocally bad. It offers an intriguing, messy, bombastic, and on-its-face contradictory justification for itself. Very interesting to think about. And super nasty.

Central to the plot is a Qanon-based scenario where senators partake in blood sacrifice within their paedophile rings, and our beefy male main character sadistically punishes them. There's a lot going on here. They are truly unpleasant, awful books, but nevertheless I find myself morbidly entertained.

 

The Most Dangerous Games by MrBeast and James Patterson

Okay, I just knew when this was announced that I had to read it. A 'MrBeast' novel? Say no more. I will read it. And it certainly meets my expectations.

There is an incredibly dull and bland feel to the writing which makes the book strangely hard to pay attention to. I find myself drifting away easily. It makes one yearn for the cheesy descriptive prose of H. D. Carlton. There are so many examples of extremely sloppy writing here. There's an insane overuse of "what feels like" and almost every sentence feels intensely clunky. The characters are all personality-less blobs, hard to keep track of. But it is, I have to admit, funny as hell.

My favourite thing so far is that Jimmy MrBeast is indeed a prominent character in the book. He's in his own book, and he's always dropping composed, confident, yet humble one liners. It's great. I hate it.

 

1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die by Tony Mott

Finally, this is my video game tome. I'm almost at the end of it now, but I've been reading it for most of the year, just a few games at a time, and I've found it so fun. Because it's a 2011 publication, it gives a great sense of what was going on in games at that time. It's like opening up a time capsule. There's a huge focus on iPhone and PSP games in this thing, and I love that. 

I bookmark games that particularly intrigue me, and I've liked sort of treating it like it's a newspaper. Every day this man can tell me about a few more games.

***

So those are my current four. I very much look forward to finishing them. And then I'll have to read another strange and frightening book. What will be next? Will MrBeast 'write' another book?

 

The Bride! (2026) Stinks

As you may remember if you are diligently following the personal promises I make to myself (and I know that you are), I said at least twice on this blog in the past that I would be diving into Jessie Buckley's filmography, cannonball style. Big splash. Well, I recently ticked off another Big Buckle (this is what I shall be calling all Buckley movies henceforth), and it has shaken me to my core.

Me in the club. They're playing Caramelldansen.

The Bride (2026) is a movie about the messed up, crazy, wacky bride of Frankenstein, and reader, I hated it with a passion.

Not ten seconds into this unsubtle assault on the senses, we hear from the wordsmith herself, Mary Shelley, played by Buckley in a dark room in a sort of ghostly drunken stupor. THIS Mary Shelley is nasty. This Mary Shelley says 'fuck' and 'cunt' and stuff like that. Whoa. This Mary Shelley cackles madly and speaks in a disoriented jumble like she's reading from randomised loose pages of a thesaurus. And all of this is performed with such a total lack of subtlety that I felt myself reach my maximum cringe level within about ten seconds of this movie's start.

From there, we meet the 1920s stinker also played by Buckley who will be simultaneously re-animated and half-possessed by the spirit of Shelley. I'm not totally sure what the throughline is on this - the movie concerns itself with a really on-the-nose and oddly empty feminist-ish commentary, and clearly has some interest in the warping of a woman's life (and work) post-death, when she can no longer speak or have any impact on her own image.

Mary Shelley is freakishly combined with a contemporaneous woman brought back to life in service of her own creative entity (the monster, played by Christian Bale), and so this body is inhabited in a dream-like, crazed oscillation between lucidity and anger and raving lunacy. Where does the original woman, and Mary Shelley, and the strange combined product made of their combination begin and end?

Within this story that seems on its face to want to cast a murky negative light on the use and reconstitution of women both in actual violent terms and in rhetorical and historical terms, we treat the monster himself as a sort of dim, kind soul. He has been created to need, and how cruel is that? And yet, he must replicate himself, and isn't that worse?

The movie seems to have one foot in the idea of characterising the monster as a continuation of a broad patriarchal reconstitution of women into whatever convenient form men see fit, and the other firmly planted in a freaky monster Bonny and Clyde fun romp.

Each undermines the other.

#CoupleGoals

To some extent I enjoyed the visuals. There's some cool shots, and I especially enjoyed the black and white scenes for the irritating interstitial moments where Mary Shelley speaks directly to the audience but has nothing of interest to say. I did, however, find the flashiness a bit grating.

Where Yorgos Lanthimos can really excel at the use of some quite jarring aspect ratio and colour grading changes (I'm thinking of Bugonia, where it was so perfectly done, very considered and unintrusive, extremely effective, and even shocking), the visual assault here felt fatiguing. I felt like I was the wall, and the movie's scenes were spaghetti being thrown at me.

Stop it. No more. Don't go to the club and dance crazy to the strobe light. I'm begging you.

For some reason there's an extremely thin and lightly explored detective story going on in this movie, too. Penélope Cruz is here, and she's trying to do detective stuff. But, oh my God, she's a woman. Women can't do detective type stuff, can they? This is just so tiresome. I don't know why it's here. It feels like something out of a cartoon.

The commentary on women and women's literature, and whatever analogues there are between the 1920s and now, and on the concept of stuffing a woman into a mould to serve as counterpart to a man, etc, just all felt so flat and nonsensical. I usually love to see a woman going apeshit and screaming and attacking men and spitting or whatever. I mean, I liked Men (2022). But this was painful. It was like if they took Joker 2 and hammered it down into a less incisive, less creatively bold movie.

At least there, even if the movie botched it in the last thirty minutes (do not get me started), the constant re-framing of Arthur Dent/Joker's image, the way he's seen by different people and different groups, the way he comes to represent certain agendas and fantasies and convenient images, and his own struggle to cope with, adhere to, and use those to his own advantage, is explored quite vigorously and profoundly.

Whatever. I'll stop glazing Joker 2 now. I hated this movie deeply. Thanks for hearing me out.

One Christian Bale head staple out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆

The Garfield Game That Never Was

There's a Garfield game for the Atari 2600. Or rather, there's a prototype. The game was never released, in the end. A sad fate for what amounts to quite a beautiful almost-game. I wish Garfield (the game) was real. But I will accept this gorgeous ghost. This pretty shadow.

Garfield himself is rendered and animated beautifully. You start out atop a garden fence, and may traverse in a sprightly way across its surface. Above float enticing burgers, which careen through the air towards Garfield's gaping maw. Yum.

Garfield under a beautiful starry sky.

Since this is a prototype, there is actually no way to avoid the burgers. Garfield doesn't need to do a thing - they'll always hit him and be absorbed. Wonderful. 

Other screens have Garfield avoiding projectiles, or weird enemies, or Odie, and then you'll see something out of a warped dream - several Odies in a row to hop over. Things like that. Fantastical, slightly wrong landscapes. Once you traverse enough screens, Garfield will soon perish. There are, indeed, ill-coded, unformed dangers he cannot really go past. 

But for a while, there is bliss. Garfield is in an endless zone of pleasure, consuming and continuing. As we all must. 

An Assortment of Books to Read

You may have noticed that my last post was a frightening TWO WEEKS ago - that's right, I took a big break. This was partly to give myself more time for writing my beautiful and lucrative YouTube videos, but also because I was getting a bit tired out by writing posts every day (or almost every day). A woman must rest, after all.

But now I must present you with my beautiful reading plans. I just reached the exciting milestone of 31 books read so far in 2026, which makes this year my second biggest reading year of all time (after 2016's incredible 53), and this only makes me more excited about all the books I'm going to read in the second half of the year.

A beautiful book stack by clumsy.words on Instagram.

I keep thinking about categories of books I want to read more of, topics I want to read about more extensively, and so here are some of the book groupings I've come up with for future reads. Each category contains four enticing books.

1. SEAFARING / NASTY AWFUL TERRIBLE SEA

Scary!

Right now I'm reading a non-fiction book about a crazy shipwreck called 'The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder' by David Grann. This is my second recent horrible 1700s sea type book, after the incredible 'The Zorg' by Siddarth Kara. I think I might be becoming a sea freak (or indeed, very interested in the worst and most perilous human nasties - The Zorg was a chilling slavery story).  

In any case, I'd like to read more sea-adjacent stories. In 'The Wager', David Grann offers lots of interesting linguistic connections - 'under the weather' came from the practice of putting sick sailors below deck. Literally under, and away from, the weather. Cool. Here are my coveted sea reads:

• Moby Dick - Hermann Melville
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Jules Verne
• The Odyssey - Homer
• Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard - Joseph Conrad
  
  

2. BLACK AUTHORS

I love this picture of Octavia Butler.

I've been really wanting to focus on black authors, but in particular there are a few notable black authors I'm really excited to read (or, in the case of James Baldwin, read more of). These are very famous picks, which goes to show that I'm not well-read when it comes to work from black writers. It'll be great to change that.

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
• Jazz - Toni Morrison
• Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 
• White Teeth - Zadie Smith
  
  

3. ROMANTASY

Oh God... oh fuck.

This crunchy new genre smash has intrigued me for a while. I've heard so much talk about it, so much weird and nasty dismissal of it as a low genre for idiot women, and indeed some sort of disgusting hideous perversion (always funny to hear this coming from men, the world's primo consumers of the seedy, violent productions of the global human trafficking industry). I suspect that romantasy books broadly won't be for me, but I'd like to gain a certain amount of familiarity with them.

So these are a few to read:

• A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas
• Bride - Ali Hazelwood
• Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros 
• The Knight and the Moth - Rachel Gillig 
   

4. POETRY

Whitman, looking sexy.

Finally, I'd like to expand my knowledge of some classic poets, so:

• Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
• The Waste Land and other Poems - T.S. Eliot
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience - William Blake
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

***

Please wish me great luck and pleasure. Perhaps I shall, one day, rank the books on this list. 

Cannonballs, Crucifixes, and Medieval Women

15 Oes of St. Bridget, 15th Century, Netherlands.

I saw some BOULETS ANGLAIS (English cannonballs) in a heap underneath a church this week and I thought, of course, "lovely balls". Something about them displayed sort of chaotically alongside architectural bits and pieces spoke to me - did these particular balls kill people? Did they knock down any parts of this building? There's something very modern-feeling about this display. I like it.

The balls.

Also, in the back (this is Boulogne-sur-mer's crypt, under its Notre Dame), there is this powerful, desolate display of the three crosses of Golgotha. It really evokes an empty battlefield, and has quite a resonant appearance because it comes at the end point of an ornately decorated and structured crypt, emptying out into buried rubble. The emotional reality of three simple crosses on the little hill of rubble is beautifully staged, The emptiness evokes the severity of the torture of those three crucified men.

While Christianity necessarily has made an icon of Christ on the cross, it's really arresting to look at crucifixion at large, to think about crucifixion as it was more broadly, a common punishment employed by the Romans. Including the two men crucified either side of Jesus here takes that iconography, the crucified Jesus, and sort of brings it back into the realm of the simple reality of extreme cruelty. Those other men can never merge with their crosses the way Jesus does. He is a symbol, they are men.

Today I started reading the Penguin Little Black Classic How to be a Medieval Woman by Margery Kempe - this is a sequence of extracts from the larger book of her life - The Book of Margery Kempe - an early example of an autobiography (perhaps the first in English), although it was transcribed by a clergyman because Margery herself couldn't write. Her religious world is very interesting, especially concerning her view of her existence as a wife and mother (she appears to, possibly, experience post-partum psychosis, and begs her husband to stop having sex with her - providing this request with a godly motivation, although it obviously comes from both the deep anguish of constant pregnancy AND a lack of desire for her husband). It's very interesting reading about the religious justifications she has for her own wishes and desires. Jesus Christ becomes a sort of figure of leverage for her, her only real recourse, only her vibrant religiosity also really irritates everyone around her and causes a lot of problems for her (they get upset with her for loudly crying, which she does constantly).

It's pretty amazing (and very sad, but also at times quite funny) to read this memoir of a fourteenth century woman, and I might have to break out the full text. She's an icon.

No dogs may worship in this church.

It's interesting, but also curiously impenetrable, to learn about history prior to a certain point. The inextricable presence of religion in shaping people's lives in the medieval period is pretty alien from a modern perspective. It's hard to imagine being around in the fourteenth century. It's hard to grasp what people are talking about when they refer to all the devils they've been seeing. Their ways of seeing the world are often pretty challenging to parse. And yet, when Margery Kempe tells her husband that she'd rather "have eaten and drunk the ooze and muck in the gutter than consent to intercourse", she's as vibrant and present as any person from any time ever could be.

Love her. 

Cute Little Elephants

Beautiful Thai elephant lamp, 15th-16th century, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This afternoon I saw a post by John McCafferty - a simple, beautiful sculpture of an elephant from 10th century Iran:

The elephant in question, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Something about those perfect hollow circles for eyes captivated me, and I thought - today is an elephant day. So here are some elephants. Please enjoy them. Happy elephant day. 

You have been noticed by the ceramic elephant.

I'm always so delighted by sculpture across the ages. You'll see some meticulously crafted, impeccable form and it'll be a thousand years old and from India or China or Wigan or Kuwait or Romania, and you'll think - these people were all just like me. They thought elephants looked cool. That's so real and true.

Elephant and its mahout, 11th century, via Louvre.

I really like the elephant lamp at the top of this post, with a blissful baldie perched atop the elephant's neck. Look how utterly satisfied he is. That's the right way to be if you are a little bald man. Fully nude, smiling with simple pleasure on top of an elephant. Isn't this every bald man's dream?

Get me on the elephant.

There are countless carved elephants to enjoy. Many come from Northern Thailand, something of a feature of Sawankhalok pottery and earthenware. They had an elephant boon. Good for them.

White elephant of Denmark (1822), Jacques-Evrard Bapst, via Louvre.

Very good elephants.