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-Young James' Covid hair game is on point!
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Here are five books I enjoyed last year...
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by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lamepedusa I spent the fall 2019 and spring 2020 semesters teaching Italian cinema at SUNY New Paltz. To me, Visconti's The Leopard was among the best of all the movies we studied the academic year (even though it bored my class to tears). During the lockdown I finally got around to reading the original novel. I loved this tale of the fading Sicilian aristocracy from start to finish even though historical fiction is not my favorite genre. To me, this is the ideal book-movie adaptation combo.
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Not as scary as the Netflix series it inspired, but this eerie classic leaves an unsettling impression that lasts longer.
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by Brandon Taylor I've been following Brandon Taylor's snarky and insightful literary commentary on Twitter for years. I was so excited for his debut novel that I was the first person in MHLS to put it on hold. Real Life is a beautifully written campus novel about a gay Black man in the majority white STEM program of a Midwestern university. I'm looking forward to the collection of Taylor's short fiction due to be published later this year.
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by Julie Maroh I hadn't read a graphic novel in years until I picked this one up a few months ago. I read it in one transfixed sitting. Heartbreaking.
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by Cao Xueqin Confession time: I have not quite finished this one yet (library workers are human too!). That said this 18th century Chinese classic is still one of my best reading experiences of 2020. This exquisite, episodic family saga gave me a story to get lost in during the spring lockdown. The full English translation runs to five volumes, but there's also an abridged translation available in MHLS.
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Equal parts life-affirming and devastating, Taste of Cherry is a movie I loved as much as Roger Ebert hated it (I often agree with him, but he was way off on this one). I'm happy Elting has the out-of-print Criterion Collection DVD of Abbas Kiarostami’s movie in our collection as none of the other MHLS libraries has a copy.
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I still have not seen most of the classic silent movies, but I finally checked this off my to-watch list in 2020 and I don't know why I waited so long. I can see why some have called Falconetti's performance as Joan among the best performances in movie history, if not the best.
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I'm an admirer of director Peter Watkins, a movie industry outsider and creator of some really radical movies. This amazing documentary/docudrama is the best movie I've seen about an artist since Crumb. You know it's a good movie when 210 minutes just fly by.
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The Watermelon Woman (1996) Cheryl Dunye's stunning debut is the first feature film by a Black lesbian director. I love how 90s this queer touchstone is (the main character works in a video store!) and its lasting freshness shows how badly we lack for marginalized perspectives in the moviemaking industry. Sadly, the library system doesn't have a DVD of this one, but you can enjoy it through Kanopy!
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The best kids’ movie I saw in 2020 and probably the funniest Hugh Grant performance ever. The movie also has agreeable pro-immigrant and anti-prison messages. Trivia: this is the highest rated movie in the history of Rotten Tomatoes and honestly it's a good choice for that.
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I'm old enough to remember watching the premier episode on Nickelodeon, but I only sat down to watch the whole series this summer. Since then I evangelize to patrons about the best show ever made. Notice I didn’t say best animated series.
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by Fiona Apple To me, this has been THE quarantine soundtrack since it was first released in April.
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Elting Memorial Library 93 Main St. New Paltz, New York 12561-1593 845.255.5030eltinglibrary.org |
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