Stuff I’ve Watched, Read, Done – April 2026 – Blue Towel Productions

Not a lot to report about last month. Most of my viewing / reading time was spent on things I blog about already–Doctor Who, old science fiction movies, and a Japanese time-travel film that I plan on writing a post about soon.

I did end up wearing this funny thing inside my glasses as part of an indicator that I had lost a recent round of a game of Herd Mentality (where you try to come up the most common answer to various questions), something I was playing with a group of work colleagues. Good fun.

And I also went to an Escape Room (a very late Christmas present for my friend Rod) called The Dunny, which simulated the experience of being stuck in an Australian outback drop toilet. It lacked the disgusting smell that you’d expect for something like that but otherwise was a pretty immersive experience, which we won although with more hints than Rod prefers (ie, more than zero).

Aside from that, I’m happy to report that after falling off the wagon as far as reading was concerned when my back injury flared up again (it’s much better now, thanks for asking) I managed to get back into it and finally finished the last book I had started a while ago…

Artemis by Andy Weir

I actually got bizarrely self-conscious about this book. I was worried that people would see me reading it and say, “Oh you’re reading Artemis, that’s just because of the Artemis II space mission,” or “That’s just because Project Hail Mary just came out,” or something like that.

I may be overestimating how much anyone cares about what I’m reading.

In reality, it was a book I’d pulled off my shelf (as I have been doing recently), chosen in this case because I’ve been reading mostly mysteries recently and I wanted to try something different. Unfortunately in this case this bold step away from my standard go-to didn’t pay off for me, because I didn’t like it.

Artemis is about life on a moon base in the semi-near future, and some hot water that our protagonist, low-level criminal Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara gets involved with something more serious than usual and winds up in hot water as a result.

But I kind of regret bothering with Artemis because I didn’t like it. It had all the right parts–an interesting world, fairly compelling characters and a plot that certainly had some intrigue and exciting bits, but I can’t say I liked the actual writing. The biggest issue for me is the frustrating amount of scientific exposition that is threaded through everywhere. The book is first person, and Jazz is constantly explaining to us how everything at Artemis works. At times it seems to take her forever to walk from one location to another because she has to tell us how everything works as she goes along.

Now of course we in the audience need to have some understanding of the speculative world that Andy Weir has envisaged–clearly that’s necessary. And I suppose it’s to the book’s credit that it doesn’t move into long passages unpacking the mechanics of the station’s geography, economics, engineering, politics and the rest of it. But instead we get a boatload of tiny little passages detailing all of these things. At least if it was all packed into one section you could just skim over it, but this way I found it completely disruptive to any sort of narrative rhythm, and it just made me eager to finish the book. The fact that Jazz is also non-stop snarky didn’t really help things either.

So it wasn’t that I hated it or anything, and certainly at certain points it got pretty gripping, but when it comes to books I’ve picked up just for pleasure in the last number of months, it’s pretty close to the bottom of my list.

Monk

Aside from Artemis, Doctor Who, and some old science fiction movies, the main thing I spent time with this month was Monk, a show which I started quite some time ago, but picked up again in recent months and got first my daughter into, and then most of the rest of my family. Monk is one of those network shows from the period when the American networks had cracked onto the idea of the long-form series with standalone episodes but which slowly developed some overall story threads. This is maybe my favorite approach to episodic storytelling, and is something which seems to be a bit of a lost art in today’s streaming landscape.

Anyway, Monk stars Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk, a brilliant detective who is saddled with a myriad of fears, phobias and hang-ups. Though the character has spent lifetime dealing with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he was able to have a successful career as a police detective until his wife was killed by a car bomb for reasons that the show has not yet revealed at the point that I am up to–almost to the end of the 4th season (out of 8). He manages his life with the aid of his personal nurse, Sharona Fleming (at least as the series begins) and makes a living serving as a consultant for the police, and particular his old friend Captain Leland Stottlemeyer.

Monk is as much of a comedy as it is a drama, with each episode dealign some infuriating / hilarious way that Adrian behaves because of his issues (ie taking forever to sign his name, constantly straightening things, refusing to touch anyone unless he can use a disinfectant wipe immediately afterwards, etc). It can be incredibly cringy but Tony Shalhoub is so funny that it’s still really enjoyable. Plus what makes the show work is that the mysteries are excellent–maybe the best I’ve ever seen on American television. Each episode features some sort of bewildering murder, but they come in a variety of flavors–frequently Monk (and we in the audience) know who the murderer is, but not how it was done. But sometimes it’s a more traditional whodunnit? And other times the audience knows what has happened but we have no idea how Monk will solve it.

The thing they have in common (at least so far) is that they are almost always satisfying.

Bitty Schram plays Sharona–I didn’t like her at first but grew attached to her eventually. But midway through the third season she left the show and Monk found a new assistant in the form of Natalie Teeger, played by Traylor Howard. I missed Sharona at first, but Natalie quickly endeared herself and my enjoyment of the show has remained high.

I also like the other supporting characters–Monk’s gruff but loyal friend on the police force, Captain Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine) and his assistant Lt. Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford). Disher is interesting in that he can always be counted on to act like a buffoon for the purposes of laughs, but he really shapes up into a solid cop whenever there is an actual criminal to be taken down. Stanley Kamel makes recurring appearances as Monk’s psychiatrist, and John Turturro has guest-starred twice (so far) as Monk’s agoraphobic brother.

And Adrian Monk himself is fascinating as a lead character: someone completely terrified of just about everything, but who is still kind of heroic in the way that works so hard to capture criminals who otherwise would have been smart enough to get away with it.

Anyway, we really love this series. It’s nice to have such an enjoyable go-to whenever we are looking for something easy and fun to watch.

Oh, I also read some comics!

Animal Crackers – A Gene Luen Yang Collection

I’ve actually read (and written about) this book before, but back then it was because I’d borrowed it from the library and now it’s because I own it.

Gene Luen Yang is one of my favorite comic writers–he’s done so many works that I have found engaging and thought-provoking. The stories inside of Animal Crackers are some of his earliest. There are three interconnected stories–Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order (both multi-chapter) and Sammy the Baker and the M.A.C. (a short little bonus), all written and drawn by Yang.

I just looked at what I wrote about the collection over ten years ago and it still reflects my thoughts today:

I am sort of in awe of these stories.  They contain a beautiful mix of adolescent angst and light trauma, mixed in with a healthy dose of the fantastic and the absurd, and sprinkled on top with a breezy sense of humor.  And its fitting that I talk about it as a recipe, because all of the stories talk a lot about food.  In the first one, recovering bully Gordon Yamamoto finds that his animal crackers have come to life and have become avatars, of a sort, to the hatred of one of his former victims.  In the second, a baker foolishly creates a new recipe for a cupcake that turns into malevolent rhinoceros.  And in the third, Loyola Chin discovers that she can dream herself into different fantasy worlds by eating particular odd combinations of food before sleeping.

And that’s not even gotten to the strangest stuff yet!  The stuff that’s about the robots that live inside people’s noses or the unexplained creature who plans to wipe out 10% of humanity so that we’ll be ready for the prophesied alien invasion!

Yet, in spite of how out there the story’s get, they aren’t just absurdist comedies.  They are compelling character studies about young people whose sense of confusion and alienation is very down-to-earth and very human.

And their also stories that feature a tremendous themes of redemption.  Gordon Yamamoto deals strongly with forgiveness, and Loyola Chin must confront the bitterness in her heart toward Jesus for allowing the death of her mother to cancer.  It’s powerful stuff, and it’s moving, all wrapped up in a package full of appealing art and quirky unexpected humor.

In rereading them all last month, I find I love them as much as I did before.

The Flash – The Death of Iris West

This hardcover collection gathers the lead stories in about 15 issues of The Flash published from 1978-1980, covering the time period promised by the title. At a costume party where everyone is dressed up as superheroes and supervillains, someone murders Barry Allen’s beloved wife Iris. Written by the long-term Flash-scribe of the era, Cary Bates, and drawn by mostly Alex Saviuk and Don Heck, the issues covered in trade aren’t a singular story like we might expect these days–rather they are a series of short adventures linked together by recurring storylines.

Iris doesn’t die until about halfway through the collection, and when she does it’s not actually clear that this is what has happened until well into the following issue. Barry spends most of the time thinking the culprit is a guy named Clive Yorkin–a criminal went through A Clockwork Orange-like aversion therapy to deal with his violent tendencies, but for whom the process backfired because of his rare form of dyslexia! Unfortunately, the process also amped up his system and gave him super-powers.

Anyway, it’s not until Barry puts this guy away before he realizes that Yorkin was innocent, and then must spend several issues trying to figure out who really killed Iris. An appearance by Professor Zoom (the Reverse Flash) inspire him to go to the future and look up the answer, but this turns out to be a trap because the real killer is indeed Zoom himself. The story ends with Zoom being lost in time while Barry must return home and choose to continue to be the Flash and to live his life to the fullest.

It’s interesting to see this period of comics where longer form plot lines were becoming a thing, but there was still a clunky feel to them, and they are mixed in with lots of unrelated adventures to keep the individual issues exciting. It feels dated and the characterisation isn’t as deep as you might want, but it was a breezy read where there was always something new happening to keep it interesting. I’d be down to read more Bronze-Age Flash stories if they were easily available, but unfortunately I’m not expecting there to be.