I’m back! And this week, I actually had time to get some reading and watching in, which means I have something to report.
First up: reading. I finished Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. Grossman wrote The Magicians trilogy, which I quite enjoyed a few years ago. (Sort of a modern, more pessimistic mash up of Harry Potter and Narnia.) The Bright Sword is his take on the King Arthur story, told primarily from the point of view of the less important knights. So you still get Lancelot and Guinevere and Merlin and Arthur and all that, but it’s all through a very different lens. I’m a sucker for King Arthur stories, and I quite enjoyed this one. (Even if, like The Magicians, I found it to be yet another more pessimistic version of the story than perhaps I would have liked. What can I say? I guess I like the romanticized takes more, where good can just be good and evil can just be evil and things aren’t quite so gray all the time. But then again, that’s likely because I see so much gray in the world around me, that I’d really like to escape it now and then.)
In the realm of moving pictures, I actually watched a film in the theaters(!) We took the fam to go see Spider-man: Brand New Day, which I overall enjoyed, even if I couldn’t remember the whole movie why, exactly, Spider-man’s friends had all forgotten all about him. The movie still suffered from some of the Marvel-itis symptoms that have turned me off of super hero flicks the past while. (There are just too many characters, and too many back stories, and I feel like I’m missing out by not having an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that came before.) Still, it went light on those details, so overall it was a fun time.
I started the fourth season of Ted Lasso, watching the first two episodes. And you know what? They’re fun, even if they feel like the show is kind of just doing its thing on tracks at this point. The first season was such a breath of fresh air. So different and optimistic, and I loved it. It feels kind of petty to critique the show for doing more of what I loved it for, though it also feels like a dodge not to point that out. In the end, it’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a favorite meal again. Are you really going to get upset when they deliver the thing you ordered? No. But you’re also not going to ever encounter new favorites that way. As long as you’re okay with that, keep ordering! I look forward to what they do with Ted and the women’s league.
I also watched the first two episodes of the new Interview with the Vampire series. I’d heard good things, and it’s definitely an intriguing show. (I got a free three months of AMC+ through my American Express card. So far, I haven’t seen anything on the platform that begs me to keep that subscription going once those free months are up.) Still, this show is well done so far, and I like the framing device of having a vampire look back on the things that brought him to where he ended up. I’ll stick with it for now, but we’ll see where it goes.
And finally, I watched season 4.8 of Community. The one where they hold competing dances in the cafeteria. It was fine, but not my favorite episode.