I’ll admit it: I’m struggling right now. Not really in my personal life, but on the blog side of things? Most definitely. I have a slew of thoughts, but I have a hard time convincing myself to write them out for others to read. It just feels like an exercise in futility, and so I end up saying nothing. I know this isn’t the best solution to things, but it’s where I’m stuck for now.
So in an effort to spark something that will help me get over that, I’m going to try to institute a bit of a new approach. At the beginning of the week, I’m going to go over everything I watched or read in the previous week. If I have nothing nice to say about a book, I will mention that I read it, and then move on, but for everything else, I’ll give my full thoughts. (Well, at least some of them. It depends on how much time I’ve got.) So if you’re looking for things to watch or read, these posts might interest you. Ready?
Reading is simple. I’ve been going through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series for the second time, mainly because the new book came out, and I wanted a refresher on what exactly had happened in the series before I tackled it. I really enjoy the books, but they’re most definitely not for everyone. They’re pretty much the epitome of popcorn reading. One battle after another, with the main characters getting progressively more powerful as the series goes on. They’re very adult, as well, which eliminates even more of the potential audience. But in a world where everything else seems to be set to self destruct, this series is a great form of escapism. Things are bad in the real world, sure, but they’re not “aliens destroyed almost the entire global population and forced the remaining few people to battle to the death in an intergalactic game show” bad.
I’m currently almost through with Book 6: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.
For watching, things have been a bit more diverse.
Daniela and I rewatched Charade yesterday. Carey Grant, Audrey Hepburn, and a soundtrack by Henry Mancini? This is about as ideal of a movie as you can create. I always assume it’s such a classic that everyone in the world has already seen it, but if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to watch it. A woman finds her husband has been involved in far more than she knew, and she’s thrown into the middle of it all when he turns up dead. So so good.
Michaela, Denisa, and I watched The Sheep Detectives, and I’m afraid the hype I’d heard around it made it ultimately a disappointment. I enjoyed it fine, but it was just a generally okay sort of movie, and I’d heard such great things. Sheep solving crime? That should have been awesome. Instead, it was just . . . there.
The family has been making our way through Spider-Noir on Prime Video, and we just finished the fourth episode. A noir reimagining of Spider-man, starring Nicolas Cage in the lead role. You can watch it in color or black and white, and we all agree B&W is the way to go. It’s good stuff.
Every now and then when we’re short on time, we watch an episode of Community. This week, we watched 4.5, where they make a mockumentary about Changnesia. We all enjoyed it. I don’t watch a ton of just pure genre media (without some sort of continuing plot or storyline), but Community is inventive and often surprising. I never watched it when it was first coming out.
Denisa and I finished the fifth season of Welcome to Wrexham, which we both still really love. I’m such a fan of the Ryan Reynolds soccer team that I’ve even started following their games throughout the season. That does take away some of the surprise of the documentary when the season’s finally made, but it was still a lot of fun to watch.
We also watched the first episode of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. I don’t want to get into details about it, because some of the enjoyment came from not knowing what was going to happen, but it was just riveting, and I’m very much planning on seeing it through. I hope the rest of the season lives up to the intensity of that first episode.
And . . . that’s what I’ve been up to. Anyone have any other shows or movies they want to recommend?