News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: What Octavia Butler, John Wick, and Hermit Crabs Have in Common By Molly Templeton | Published on August 22, 2025 Media: Nikolas Coukouma/Wikimedia Commons, Lionsgate Films, Yulia Kolosova/Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Media: Nikolas Coukouma/Wikimedia Commons, Lionsgate Films, Yulia Kolosova/Wikimedia Commons There are only two weekends remaining before, somehow, September returns. Some people may feel this is an appropriate time to urge everyone to make the most of it! Get outside! Do things!—well, that feels bossy, and also tiring. If you wish to do things, by all means, please do them! If it is supposed to be one hundred degrees (or bothersomely weathery in some other way) where you live, then don’t do things. Perhaps settle in with some nice reading material or a violent film instead? And don’t forget to call your reps! Read Octavia Butler, and Read About Octavia Butler At the top of my book-shopping list this week is a title I only learned about a few weeks ago: Susana M. Morris’s Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. I love reading Butler (slowly, since there are a finite number of books) and I love reading about Butler, as I learned a few years ago when E. Alex Jung had a fantastic, in-depth piece in New York magazine. (That piece was one in a quartet, and you should read them all.) Morris’s biography comes with a pile of glowing quotes, including this great one from Kiese Laymon: “It’s not simply that Positive Obsession brilliantly explores the threads of the life of Octavia Butler; it’s the way Susana Morris artfully unwinds this life, creating a kind of almost gothic, futuristic mystery as much as it is biography. I thought I knew Butler and her work. Morris showed me, in the most profound ways, that I knew neither.” And yet this is no massive, all-encompassing tome, but clocks in at less than 300 pages. Morris told Bookpage she wanted to write “a kind of cultural, intellectual biography,” and notes that she hopes other writers pick up other threads from Butler’s life: “Her life was so interesting and rich that there is room for all.” A series of biographies? Please. Yes. Let us have this. For now, you can start small, with this excerpt from Morris’s book at LitHub. John Wick, But You Can Skip the Scene Where the Dog Dies Important news for me, personally, and possibly also for you: All the John Wick movies are now on Hulu. (No, not counting Ballerina, that’s a spinoff.) Speaking from experience, you can absolutely skip the scene where the bad thing happens to the perfect pup. (Reddit can help you do this pretty precisely.) Look, I know it’s not logical, but my brain insists that the humans are stunt people and know what they’re doing, but the animals should be left alone and not have to be involved even when nothing bad is going to happen to them, okay? (I blame elementary school showings of The Man from Snowy River for my weaknesses about animals in films.) The point is, if you would like to watch Keanu Reeves do a lot of very violent things, you can do that, thanks to Hulu. For hours. We Are Terribly Ignorant About Hermit Crabs “Virtually everything we know about the needs of captive hermit crabs has come from the efforts of passionate hobbyists,” writes Melissa Scott Sinclair at Slate. “Formal science is not invested in the inner life of the pet crab the way it is with dogs, or even hamsters.” Sinclair’s piece, “Consider the Hermit Crab,” is the kind of thing that I want to just throw at people, except that it’s very hard to throw a website. Sinclair writes with curiosity, kindness, and real respect for this misunderstood creature—and the people who are trying to change the way hermit crabs are sold and mistreated (if often out of ignorance more than anything else). The story is, I will warn you, somewhat upsetting, in that people really, truly don’t know that hermit crabs are not “easy” pets, and a lot of them meet premature fates. But this kind of work can help change that. And also, you’ve gotta watch them swap shells. The world is in a terrible state; may this video bring you a bright brief respite, as it did for me. Possession and Debates About Dark Academia Novels Charlie Jane Anders is often right about things (and I’m not just saying that as an obvious reference to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast she has with Annalee Newitz). This week, she’s specifically right about A.S. Byatt’s brilliant 1990 novel Possession. This book is a lot of things (including a book club selection that will guarantee arguments among book club members; ask me how I know). It’s a romance, it’s a literary history, it’s a mystery, it’s a gorgeous and sweeping work of literary fiction—and, yes, it is totally a core piece of the dark academia canon. It’s all about being obsessed with books and stories and their writers! And also class! There’s poetry! Anders writes, “I came to realize that Possession might not fit the strictest definition of the ultra-popular dark academic genre, because it’s missing key elements such as opulent secret societies and hidden violence. That said, Byatt does have a lot to say about privilege and money, and the lengths to which people will go to get ahead in academia. And maybe the fact that our dominant narrative about higher education has no room for a book like Possession says something pretty dark about our attitude to learning.” There are books that, while not technically science fiction or fantasy, somehow lean into the same spaces these genres occupy. I’ve never been able to put my finger on what makes a book one of these books. I don’t mean the novels published as literary fiction that have magic or are set in the “near future” where fascism rules and the planet is cooking. (Ha, the future. Right.) I mean something else, something nebulous, sometimes bookish, sometimes just about obsession and curiosity and the way people move through the world. Possession is one of those. Maybe it’s a perfect late summer read, too? [end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: What Octavia Butler, John Wick, and Hermit Crabs Have in Common appeared first on Reactor.