I very much enjoyed Ruth Ware's novel One Perfect Couple, the premise of which is basically that the filming of a Love Island-ish reality show is disrupted by a series of terrible events that eventually include deaths. (Dun!) It's a very clever thriller, and I genuinely didn't know where it was going. (Also from my recent reading list and not quite out yet: Liz Moore's God of the Woods, a fabulous sprawling mystery/thriller about a wicked wealthy family, a summer camp, and two disappearances years apart. It comes out in a couple of weeks, and if you preorder it now, you can gobble it up as soon as possible.) The Netflix documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution explores the history of queer comedy, and it's very, very good. Full of interviews with multiple generations of comics like Lily Tomlin, Scott Thompson, Marsha Warfield, Bob the Drag Queen, and Bruce Vilanch, it also happens to include several friends of PCHH, including Guy Branum, Dave Holmes, Joel Kim Booster and Shar Jossell. It is fascinating and joyful, as well as sometimes quite painful when it turns to the continuing popularity of transphobic jokes. Well worth your time, as is Elizabeth Blair's NPR story about it, featuring director Page Hurwitz. Do you like quizzes? How about music? NPR's Throughline has a quiz about the origins of house music that might tickle you on a Friday. NPR's Books We Love is always a highlight of the end of the year, but this year, we've got a mid-year peek at some of our staff and critics' favorite books of the year so far, in both fiction and nonfiction. (I contributed a few, as did PCHH producer Hafsa Fathima.) |