A bit of delightful news to start this post, and end the decade with – the really wonderful Across The Margin have selected a couple of my stories as their Best of The 2019 – love the venue and they’re two I’m really proud of. You can read them, and the rest of their picks, here.
I’ve been knee-deep in writing and the doing-up of my flat these past few weeks. And, as there has been a lot of tidying and shifting and the hanging of doors (and other delights) I’ve been trying to order my best of the decade for books and film. And I’ve struggled. There has been so much to love. In books I’ve been going back to the fifties for science fiction (Flowers for Algernon and The City and The Stars are classics), and even further back, I loved, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I loved The Life and Death of Harriet Frean and The Interpreter of The Maladies and a whole bunch of other stuff, but most of that was published way before 2010.
Jon Klassen’s hat books are wonderful stories told in pictures. Go and look at them.
I loved Aimee Bender’s short story, Tiger Mending.
So, to be efficient I’m going to stick with a couple that came back to me straight away, and wouldn’t go away.
I think my favourite book of the 2010s (and this might not be the best, or even the best written, but in art we deal with opinions and simply what we, as individuals, prefer – and I definitely adored this) is…
Films-wise it’s tricky too. I adored The Red Turtle and A Ghost Story. The Shape of Water is magnificent as was Tarantino’s output. The Green Book I loved as well.
But the one that kept coming back is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
I’ll not post the trailer here, on account of the content, click here to see.
And here’s the trailer for The Red Turtle. Just because it’s beautiful.
And that’s about it from me.