22 thoughts on “Sunday!

  1. I finally read Shattered Won’t say anymore here because politics. (But I also don’t have much to add from the conversation a year ago, maybe just one more observation about money that didn’t seem to be commented on then)

    Also just finished John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. A podcast recomended (I think) by Don Zeko about A Song of Ice and Fire (i.e. book series game of thrones). One thing the podcasters comment on is how good Martin is at introducing world building elements without just blocks of chunky exposition, a usual weakness found in these sort of works.

    Well, now that those guys got my radar up for that sort of thing in genre fiction, I got to say Scalzi is definitely Mister Captain Exposition in this, his freshman book.

    I liked it, and it was a quick read, but there’s certainly stuff that an experienced writer (or a team like James S A Corey) would have probably held back on. Dropping hints, certainly, but cutting the bulk of some explanations and leaving them for another book.Report

          1. I wasn’t a huge comic book kid, wasn’t my thing, but one of the few characters I actually got into was Cable. So despite my general dislike of the Marvel movies I am interested to see what Brolin can do with it. Seems like the perfect fit of actor/subject so see where it goes.Report

  2. How many of the 158 Westerns were the most expensive, high-profile films made that year, and how many were the B parts of double features? Asking for a friend.

    Anyway, I highly recommend The Death of Stalin. (No politics). Steve Buscemi (Khrushchev) , Jeffrey Tambor (Malenkov), and Jason Isaacs* (Zhukov) were all amazing.

    * Best known as Lucius Malfoy.Report

        1. @mike-schilling Yes, that would be a good test. I think the real issue here is that Hollywood is putting their geeks into fewer and fewer baskets. Its not that there are too many superhero movies, its that there’s too few of anything else.Report

    1. I’ll second The Death of Stalin. Isaacs as Zhukov stole the show.

      If there was ever a musical comic book movie made it would signal the complete collapse of Hollywood’s imagination.Report

      1. Did you see Hail Caesar? It has one of the most over-the-top, flat-out ridiculous, and incredibly fun Western chase scenes I’ve ever seen. The cowboy was Alden Ehrenreich, who’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to Solo.Report

  3. I am reading a history of daily life in Ancient Rome and novels by Ceasare Pavese.

    I saw the Avengers: Infinity War. If you know anything about Marvel’s release schedule and/or corporate plans, you know the “shock” ending will be reversed. Also if you know anything about the comics from 1991.Report

  4. My two book items today were old paths for my reading habits: background material for my beloved Aubrey/Maturin series with Patrick O’brain: Making of a Novelist bt Nikolai Tolstoy and Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels by Dean King.Report

  5. I finally finished a quite charming book I’ve been grazing on since late February, All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours, by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins. It satisfied a niche that I’d hoped her previous book would. I was disappointed by the first one, as it turned out, so it was extra-pleasing how much I enjoyed this one. A fun and elegantly-designed miscellany.

    Watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones, I haven’t had the intestinal fortitude to binge watch it as yet.

    Mostly I’ve been checking out new podcasts, and listening to old ones. NYPL’s The Librarian is In is still my most favorite. A lot of the new ones I’ve been listening to are coming from one or another of the Upright Citizen’s Brigades’ members… of those, I hate about half and adore about half. Which puzzles me although it probably shouldn’t.

    Stephen Fry has a new podcast! Stephen Fry’s Great Leap Forward. I have yet to listen to it but suspect I will enjoy it very much. Also not listened to yet, but much looking forward to, is The Habitat – multi-episode documentary about volunteers living on fake-Mars in Hawaii so NASA can better speculate about how to make it possible for future astronauts to live on real Mars on day….Report

Comments are closed.