News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Details, Details, Details (and an Intriguing Hamlet) Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. By Molly Templeton | Published on April 17, 2026 Screenshot: Vertical Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Vertical Tax day has come and gone, and I am the poorer (and grumpier) for it. It will be a weekend of not doing things—but perhaps, instead, reading things, or watching things on streaming platforms for which I have already paid, wisely or unwisely. Thankfully, there are piles and piles of things with which to keep myself more than occupied. New books! New movies! Little pieces of books! Little tidbits about video games! What does that mean? You’ll see. As ever, hug your friends, call your reps, and for those of you enduring allergy season, always buy the good tissues. It’s worth it.  This Is What the Internet Is For: The Fountain Pens of Video Games Even now, when the internet is full of fakery and nonsense, violence, monetized spam, and horrors, sometimes it’s still good. Case in point: This brief and perfect Aftermath piece, “The Fountain Pens of Video Games.” It does exactly what it says on the tin: There is a drawing of some of said pens, and a brief write-up explaining how writer/illustrator Nicole Carpenter began to notice the pens everywhere from Red Dead Redemption to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s lovely. It’s perfect. Everyone should write little pieces about the things they notice and appreciate. That’s the good stuff. In This House, It Is James S.A. Corey Week It’s not like James S.A. Corey is a small-time newbie writer who needs a ton of attention in order to get eyes on his—their—new book. But all the same, I need to yell for two minutes about The Faith of Beasts, the second book in Corey’s Captive’s War series, which came out on Tuesday, and which I genuinely did not want to put down. It delivers on the promise of the first book, The Mercy of Gods, and then some. If you liked The Expanse; if you like to think about how people survive in impossible situations; if you like pragmatic characters who sometimes make terrible choices because there are no good ones; if you like characters, period, and also some really, really alien aliens: This series might be for you. Now I just have to wait, ever so patiently, for the third one. (And for Daniel Abraham’s third Kithamar book. It’s honestly a toss-up which of those I’m more excited about. Both? It can be both.) To See or Not To See: Hamlet A while ago, I groused about celebrity Hamlets. There have been so many. So very, very many. I saw Oscar Isaac do Hamlet in his tighty-whities; I saw the incredible Ruth Negga as Hamlet at the very beginning of March in 2020 (eep) and I felt like I was done. But I was wrong. I had not counted on Riz Ahmed doing Hamlet. This, I will watch. This version, directed by Oscar winner Aneil Karia and written by Michael Lesslie (Now You See Me: Now You Don’t), is set in modern-day London and co-stars Morfydd Clark (TV’s Galadriel) as Ophelia. According to IndieWire, the reason to see it is Ahmed, who “pours everything he has into his shot at the foundational role of Western drama, and both Shakespeare and Ahmed acolytes will want to experience his stellar delivery of the play’s most iconic monologue while speeding down a highway with his hands removed from the steering wheel.” That’s reason enough for me. Hamlet is now in theaters. Reading All of the Book Has Its Perks I am one of those folks who reads everything in the book: prologue, endnotes, foreword, acknowledgements, author’s note, dedication. I love a good dedication! I wish I could remember which book it was where the author dedicated her work to spite. That’s beautiful. If you also enjoy dedications, the critic Molly Young has rounded up quite a collection of them, in two parts, at her newsletter. There are a few SFF folks in the mix, including Julia Armfield, Gene Wolfe, and Joe Abercrombie, but to be honest it kind of doesn’t matter whether you know the composers of the dedications or not. Reading them is like peering in the windows of the houses of strangers: a quick glimpse of something personal, rendered oddly public. And sometimes funny. My favorite in the latest group might be Diane Wakoski’s dedication in her book The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems: “This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.” Clear! Biting! Unyielding! On theme! But really they’re all so good. [end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Details, Details, Details (and an Intriguing Hamlet) appeared first on Reactor.