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Jan 13, 2025 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
A lot of things about The Book of Love seem primed to make a casual reader put it firmly back on the shelf without another thought. The title seems more akin to a self-help book you’d buy after a rocky break-up. It is a debut novel, albeit one by a Pulitzer finalist and acclaimed short story writer.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
Something I’ve learned by working in theatre is the importance of a resilient text. A resilient text is one that can withstand artistic and audience interpretation and still maintain its meaning, and integrity. These texts should be able to fundamentally “work” regardless of who is in them.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
As ever, if reviews of fairly niche musicals and semi-obscure games from long-running Japanese franchises don’t interest you, there are still recommendations and reads further down. When I went to Tokyo eight years ago, me and my best friend ended up in a strange bar in a part of town. It was all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink, and you got to watch a show.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
The thing I made sure to do before I cracked open The Chthonic Cycle was look up what the hell “chthonic” actually means. It means “relating to or of the underworld”, and I’d actually encountered it before, while playing Supergiant Games’ viral hit Hades. It had me worried to crack open the book, thinking it’d be a bunch of heady scientific essays that locked me out of understanding rather than invited me in. I needn’t have been concerned.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
nowtolove.co.nz | Sam Brooks
Chris Parker and Tom Sainsbury knew they were destined to be friends the first time they ran into each other. How? They were both wearing the same shoes. “Asics basketball sneakers – ugly, white, with a gold trim,” recalls Tom. “High school athletics shoes that would’ve been four years out of season,” adds Chris. Since that chance meeting over a decade ago, they’ve worked on plenty of things together. There’ve been web series, plays and dance shows.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
Most people don’t come to this newsletter, if they come at all, for game reviews. But I have some scant thoughts about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which had me hunkered down in my apartment for a full four days, that I would rather not have in my brain. So here they are, along with some recommendations. Things I LIked About The GameIt feels like a Mass Effect game. Two of my favourite games are Mass Effect 2 and 3, for different reasons.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
There are two signs of a great novel, for me. One is that I can’t stop reading it, and absolutely must blast through it in one sitting. Those are the kinds of novels that envelop you in a voice, in a world, in the vision of the author, and to break free of that space feels like a violation of the reader’s contract. For a few blessed hours, I am under an author’s spell and there’s nowhere I’d rather be. The other sign is a novel that earns taking space away from it.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
I never thought I’d ever attend the Fawlty Towers Dining Experience, but sometimes you get an email in your inbox that changes the entire trajectory of your life, and you end up at Mt. Albert’s Irish Club on a Saturday afternoon surrounded by Pākehā boomers with buckets of beer and wine, waiting to be seated. There are several reasons why I never thought I would attend the Fawlty Towers Dining Experience. Firstly, I didn’t know it existed.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
There are few cultural icons in New Zealand who are more ubiquitous than Billy T. James. There’s a very good reason why our most famous comedy award is named after him. That ubiquity does not come without baggage, however. There are serious, vital, conversations about what his legacy means not just for Māori, but popular representations of Māori in culture.
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Sep 22, 2024 | 
dramatic-pause.ghost.io | Sam Brooks
It is almost cruel that one of the first short stories that a New Zealand student might get introduced to through the education system is Janet Frame’s “The Bath”. We’re lucky to get exposed to one of New Zealand greatest writer’s greatest stories at such a young age, but how many generations of children have the image of being stuck in the bath as their primary reference point for being old? It took me years to get back in the bath after reading that story.
