Happy Sunday from Valencia. With the end of the first quarter of 2025, I want to reflect on the best things I have read and watched. I will exclude the category titled “the worst” because the exclusions from this list are not necessarily bad, just mediocre.
What I’ve Been Reading
☆☆☆☆☆ Uzumaki – Junji Ito
I never read graphic novels anymore, so I lose out on some of the highest quality storytelling this side of the Cold War. I also don’t generally vibe with manga that much, but after my trip to Japan, I longed for the culture, and a friend recommended this 3 volume novel as “the best the genre has to offer”. I don’t have anything to benchmark it against, but it is a 5-star read right now.
By page 3, I was immersed in the Uzumaki universe; the author proposes a traditional haunted town story set in a coastal Japanese town and takes it to its maximum expression. The best compliment I can give is that it is not necessarily terrifying, as it is unsettling in a way that I find difficult to match. The storyline absorbs you like the town’s inhabitants, and I read the 650-page brick in 3 afternoons. Looking at the art and the story, you can see how influential Uzumaki has been on modern storytelling in things like Netflix’s Stranger Things.
☆☆☆☆ The Last Yakuza – Jake Adelstein
This is a biography of a Yakuza mob boss from the early 70s to the late 2000s. I also read it during my Japanese hangover. The image of Japanese culture through the eyes of its antisocial forces was fascinating, and the colourful Saigo is beautifully portrayed by Jake Adelstein (The guy from Tokyo Vice). The criminal honour code that Saigo has reminded me of a character from a Guy Ritchie movie.
☆☆☆☆☆ The Tsar’s Last Armada – Constantin Pleshakov
This book may be a little niche for the wider public, but it may be one of the best history books I have read. It explores the year-long voyage that the Russian North Sea fleet made around the world to fight and lose to the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean in 1904.
If you get over the author’s obvious Russian viewpoint of the story and his (comical) hatred of the English, the return is surreal. It is a tale of incompetent governance and one of the best examples of the shitshow that the last 60 years of Romanov rule were. It also tells the story of folk hero Admiral Rozhestvensky against the demands of a deluded autocrat, leading men to die from the safety of his palace.
☆☆☆☆☆ Montaigne + A Chess Story – Zweig
I read the Montaigne selected essays a couple of years ago and found them dense; they really required an effort to get something out of them, especially because of the lack of context. The introduction on the translation I read and the analysis the translator did were not very good, so I lacked the tools to really dive into the material. I enjoyed some of them, and others just became too much of a pain to read, with little reward for reading them. To some extent, this is the problem with anthologies. Around Christmas time, I was talking with a friend about wanting to read more in German, and he recommended I look up Stefan Zweig, who, at the time, was unknown to me. I was instantly drawn to his Montaigne biography, which I started to read in the original German and quickly abandoned for the English version.
The biography style is personal and unlike anything I have ever read. It gave me an appreciation of the subject through the eyes of Zweig that the Penguin Classics version couldn’t even dream of having. It is often used as an introduction to Montaigne in university courses because it is a blend of accessibility and insightfulness. The book is a masterpiece of introspection and exploration of what makes us human.
A month later, I came across the second Zweig book on this list, the Royal Game, which I stumbled upon while reading an article about Borges’s Ficciones. It described this Zweig novella as similar to Borges, and I was immediately sold. While I’m not a Borges fanboy, I find his fiction really entertaining and thought-provoking. However, I do believe he is slightly overrated in some internet circles. After reading the article, I downloaded the book and read it over the course of a rainy Sunday.
What I’ve Been Watching
☆☆☆☆ Kill Bill Vol 1 + Vol 2
This is one of those movies that sits on your to-watch lists forever, and everyone swears it’s a masterpiece, but you are sceptical for some arbitrary reason. I loved Vol. 1; Visually, it is something else. The lore is interesting and builds a deep universe, and the way the story moves makes it a truly unique film.
However, I wish I had skipped Vol. 2. It was a good sequel, but it doesn’t live up to the first movie and diminishes my memory of it.
I can’t wait for the 25th anniversary to watch the 4k remaster in the cinema.
☆☆☆☆ 1/2 The Covenant
The movie tells the story of a soldier and a translator trying to evade the Taliban and get back to base after an ambush wipes out their platoon. Character development is great, and the soundtrack is used masterfully. The panoramic shots are beautiful and showcase the nothingness of rural Afghanistan. It plays beautifully with the despair of returning to a safe place while running for your life.
☆☆☆ 1/2 The Gorge
This movie, released on Apple TV, proves that one can still make an original action blockbuster that is not a sequel or based on true events. The movie wants to be many things simultaneously, which actually plays in its favour because it appeals to a wider audience. It is neither action, sci-fi, terror or romance but all of the above. The movie is obviously star-driven, with Miles Teller and Anna Taylor-Joy carrying the movie. After watching the movie, I was very positively surprised and kept thinking it was sad that it was released to a streaming service with fewer subscribers because as many people would not watch it. However, I have randomly talked to some people who have watched the movie lately, and it is slowly gaining some traction and some viewers. It may be a slow-burning hit.
Great for a Friday night in.
☆☆☆☆ Nightcrawler
I watched this one on the plane back from Japan. The film follows a morally ambiguous loser played by a stellar Jake Gyllenhall. At points, the character made me feel truly uneasy. The character ruthlessly tries to pursue night news as a freelancer, and the movie explores media ethics. I don’t want to give much else away, but it is some of the best acting I have seen. At some points, the movie felt like Fight Club.
☆☆☆☆ 1/2 Dazed and Confused
This is another movie that had been recommended a lot, but I had discarded it as just another stoner comedy. At some point last year, I discovered it was written and directed by Richard Linklater, who also wrote and directed the Before trilogy, which are amongst my all-time favourite movies. Dazed might be the best coming-of-age movie I have watched, or a close second to Sing Street.
The movie focuses on a huge number of characters, focusing on the experience of high school in the 1970s USA instead of a concrete storyline. The soundtrack is sublime, playing all the hits of the 70s. The movie is over 30 years old and showcases young Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck or Mila Jovovich. It is a movie with infinite rewatchability potential.
☆☆☆☆ 1/2 A Real Pain
Through the personal touch, Kieran Culkin adds to his roles, and this movie is a way back to Roman Roy, the younger brother from Succession. The dark comedy revolves around two dysfunctional cousins dealing with the grief of a dead grandma by exploring their Jewish roots in Poland. The movie does a great job of giving a unique spin to the buddy road trip comedy.
End Note
Thank you for reading. Have a great week. Next week, I will do a link dump of the best things I have found online lately.
Picture: Port Saplaya on a Morning Run
Have a great week!
Ricard
P.S. Here is my Goodreads. If you are on there, add me as a friend