News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Bogs are Trending and the Trees are Calling Plus: Some good news about how your favorite art is keeping you alive By Molly Templeton | Published on May 15, 2026 Image: Pandora Film Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Pandora Film There’s a fork in the path ahead of you, and it goes two ways. No, three: Will you visit the realm of Dungeon Crawler Carl? Going to hang out with a tree? Or stop by a nice bog? Somehow, this week’s recommendations feel a little more choose-your-own-adventure than most. Perhaps it’s just the really specific locales: woods, bogs, dungeons. Personally, I lean woods (yes, I am giddily excited about Wildwood), but I do like a nice bog, provided I don’t have to step in it. Keep your toes dry this weekend, hug your friends, call your reps, and maybe talk to a tree? Or a friendly shrub? Your local foliage may vary. Books Are Big, Movies Are Weird, Everything is Scattered It’s May, and it feels like the movies should be bigger. Yeah, there’s a Star War next week, but … it kind of just feels like a long episode of television? I would love to feel differently! I would! And yet! On the other hand, the books are big. This week brought a new Ann Leckie novel set in the world of the Imperial Radch, and a new Dungeon Crawler Carl book, and a new series-starter from Veronica Roth, and a bunch of new literary books by kinda big names. Does everyone else’s attention span feel scattered, or is this just a me problem? (Or, you know, a the-state-of-the-world problem?) At any rate, I was looking through this week’s new releases for inspiration and stumbled on a book I knew nothing about but wanted to read immediately: Elaine Kraf’s posthumously published Memory House, in which an author fakes her own death and then gets mysteriously taken to a strange house full of other not-dead artists who “have all decided that fame in death is preferable to decline in real life.” This is a strange, tantalizing way of having it both ways, and I would like to know more.  Bog Life According to The New York Times, everyone is presently obsessed with bogs. Are you obsessed with bogs? Do you know anyone obsessed with bogs? Have I just been reading so much that I’ve missed the bog train? Well, not entirely missed it: Last year I read and can heartily recommend Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife, an eerie novel about a woman coming home to the house and land where she grew up, and where most of her family still lives. Long-standing tradition says that when a father dies, they bury him in the bog, which will then provide a bog wife for the eldest son. This is not quite what happens. Chronister’s novel is compelling, slow-moving, and unnerving, and has an ending that seems to divide readers. I loved it. The weirder, the better. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but if you would like to catch up with the current bog season, well: here you go. How to Feel Good About Your Reading and Watching Habits According to CNN, all that reading and watching will help keep you young. Which is to say: there’s a new study out that “found that both the frequency with which people engage with the arts, as well as the number of different ways in which they do so, can slow the aging process.” I am old enough to be lightly skeptical here; I remember when wine was good for you, and then coffee was good for you, but then drinking was all bad for you no matter what you drink or how often, but then coffee… I kind of lost track of where coffee is on the good/bad for you scale. A scientist who was not involved with the aforementioned study also made a good point: “This is a single snapshot in time, so we can’t yet say that visiting a museum causes you to age more slowly. It’s possible that people who are biologically younger for their chronological age are simply more likely to get out and do things.” Read books! Go to museums! Watch movies! Feel good about all of it! Tony Leung + A Nice Tree = Cinematic Promise It’s a minor travesty that we live in a world where, in order to get eyes on an interview with the astonishing actor Tony Leung, one has to throw a mention of his Marvel movie appearance into the headline. I get it! But I also think that we should all be watching all of Tony Leung’s movies. But also, yes, he was in Shang-Chi, and he was one of the best things about it. Because Tony Leung is one of the best things about any movie he’s in. He is also amazing in Wong Kar-wei movies and John Woo movies; these movies live in really different places on the movie-type spectrum. And now he’s in a movie where he acts with a tree. The first interview question is “So what was it like acting with a tree?” and Leung says, immediately, “It felt amazing.” This makes me a) want to watch Silent Friend; b) continue my tradition of always reading Leung interviews; and c) want to go hang out in the woods with the trees. But to the point, this interview is long and career-encompassing, and if you have ever found yourself mesmerized by Tony Leung’s face on screen, you ought to read it. If you have not found yourself in said situation, you ought to watch one of his films. There are so many to choose from.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: The Bogs are Trending and the Trees are Calling appeared first on Reactor.