Shooflypie

DECEMBER WORLDS The second book I read this year was In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood, a collection of essays about SF and more. I've never read any of Atwood's famous novels; I always intended to but after reading this collection, I think I need to try and get to one this year. In these essays she makes the case for a breadth of reading - highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow - and the joys that can be found in all sorts of books. Sure, it may be preaching to the choir in my case but she makes some lovely points. Even more, she made me interested in some of the books she repeatedly mentioned, such as H. Rider Haggard's She (I read this book for Bookrageous's book club and they were intrigued by She too, so much so that it's their next book club pick). A smart collection by a smart writer that I will become better acquainted with. The fourth book I read (we'll get to #3 in a moment) was the new story collection by George Saunders, Tenth of December . I'v...

A few weeks back I talked about some summer projects that I would like to do on the blog. You may have noticed that there have been no Fringe Fridays posts, no talk about Unwritten Month, and no entries for Film School. That's because I haven't watched an episode of Fringe , have only read 3 issues of The Unwritten in 8 days, and have not watched a movie. Why? Game of Thrones and Catching Fire , the 2nd book of The Hunger Games trilogy. I watched Game of Thrones as it aired last year and thought they did a great job adapting the book, which I read right before the series started. I told my wife she should watch it but she didn't. When Season 1 came out on Blu-Ray a couple months back, our friend picked up the series and over the last couple weeks we've convinced my wife to watch it. Of course, she loves it. It's been interesting to watch it again and see how much they foreshadowed where the story was going to go. My favorite characters remain the same this seco...

I have a few ideas for consistent content this summer... Fringe Fridays - I started watching Fringe this past season, its 4th, and have since acquired the first 3 seasons. Since the show airs on Fridays, I thought I would post about the episodes I managed to watch in a given week on that day. I hope to have a true introductory post up this coming Friday. Unwritten Month - When I decided this spring that I was going back to consuming my comics in collections, I went back and bought all 5 trades of The Unwritten . I read the contents of the first 4 volumes as they were coming out monthly but the 5th volume is all new to me. As the story is fairly complex, I thought I would read each trade again and write about it. The 5 volumes collect 30 issues, so I thought I would write about an issue a day in June. Could be an interesting experiment. Film School - This list of movies I haven't seen is quite long, longer than one might expect from a pop-culture nerd, but I've al...