I got knocked out this week by illness, which you’d think would mean I’d have had a ton of time to watch movies. Sadly, it wasn’t that kind of sickness. It was more along the lines of “I can’t really focus on anything too much so I don’t do much of anything.” Not fun.
So I watched a bit of fairly mindless television. (A few episodes of Physical 100: Italy, the first episode of Great British Baking Show’s latest season, and the first episode of Survivor 51. All of them were fine, though they’re also all pretty much exactly what you’d expect. I’ll say this for all reality shows in general at this point: they 100% select people based on types, not purely on skill, and that bugs me. More with GBBS than with Survivor, because at least on Survivor, you can have people with very bizarre approaches end up actually succeeding. But on GBBS, it ultimately comes down to skill to win, and every time I see the contestants early on who are on the show clearly because they’re just kind of zany, I think of the actually skilled contestants who got passed by to allow those zany contestants on. This season is no different.)
On the plus side, I was able to finish a book despite being sick! (So maybe I was just having trouble concentrating on visual things? No idea.) I blazed through Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The premise is straightforward: take The Suicide Squad or the Dirty Dozen, and move it over to an alternate historical version of Earth, where necromancy, vampires, magic, and elves are real. Then have an alternate version of the Catholic Church force a crew of ne’er-do-wells to complete tasks for them. This time, they’re tasked with helping a street waif who turns out to be the long lost empress of Troy to travel to the city and ascend the throne. Many (many) people want to stop that from happening, and so there are a series of really well written action scenes along the way.
I had a lot of fun with it and gave it a 9.5/10. What kept it from a perfect 10? Honestly, it’s the grim-darkness of it all. I get that a lot of readers love the grittiness of much of modern fantasy, but personally, I prefer the books without the profanity and sex. Not that this one had a ton of actual in-scene sex scenes, but it’s certainly brought up enough to just constantly annoy me. So even though I recognize the stuff is part of the genre I’m reading, it’s still enough to keep me from just loving the book completely, if that makes sense.