June reads

 Holy moly it's been so long since I read these books and then finally got around to posting about them that I have almost entirely forgotten what most of them are about.  Luckily there's the internet (and not, might I add, fucking AI which - has everyone forgotten about Terminator?).

• The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik.  #2 in the series (see A Deadly Education in my last post).  Loved it.
• The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik.  #3/last in the series (see above re same).  Also loved it.  Good fun.
• Buried Deep by Naomi Novik.  I'm on quite a NN tear, aren't I?  This is a collection of ghost stories.  Mixed bag.  Liked it, didn't love it.  Short stories are hard, y'all, but when they're good, they're great.
• Where I End by Sophie White.  Dark and disturbing, set on an isolated Irish island where Aoileann and her grandmother care for her disabled mother.  This one is brutal.  And the narrator, while deprived and abused, is unlikeable.  
• Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey.  After getting a call from her estranged mother, Vera Crowder comes home to care for her.  It's more complicated than that, though, because Vera's now-deceased father, whom she loved and who loved her, was a serial killer.  Her mother has been trading on that notoriety and all kinds of sketchy folks are attracted to it.  The characters are all interesting but unlikeable and things take a supernatural turn towards the end.  Meh.
• The Witch of Colchis by Rosie Hewlett.  There seems to be a recent surge of modern novelists taking a stab at ancient Greek mythology (just wait 'til the July reads).  I have a particular fondness for Medea, having done my senior Classics essay on her.
• Still Life by Sarah Winman.  I loved this one: set mostly in Florence, Italy, beginning at the end of WWII, this novel is about found family, art, luck, love and spies.
• The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny.  The nineteenth book in the Armand Gamache series, this one is a bit of a cliffhanger, to be finished with The Black Wolf.  Not necessary one of the strongest of Penny's mystery series but this one does bring back characters from previous books, for those who enjoy a callback.
• Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica.  Mystery thriller.  Eleven years after she and her mom and another, unrealted woman go missing, Delilah reappears in the town she used to live in with her family, after having been locked in a cellar since she was a little girl.  Her reappearance overjoys her grieving father, annoys her little brother (who had preferred being an only child) and calls into question everything about the missing women.  Twisty.  I really enjoyed it right up until the ending.

So what sort of summer reads are you enjoying?

May reads

 Only eight this month.

• 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill.  This volume of short stories is a re-read.  Hill is, I think, as good at spooky short stories as his dad is.
• The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.  And I think this one may be a re-read too, although I sure didn't think I had read it ... until I started it.  Brutal, heart-rending novel about a family on vacation and the dangerous home invaders who insist that one of them (the family) must choose to die in order to avoid the impending apocalypse.  Like, immediately.
• Sign Here by Claudia Lux (that must be a pen name, right?).  A mid-level desk jockey in Hell is on the verge of a promotion if he can just manage to get the right humans to sell their souls.  Uneven in tone, clever concept.
• Tin Man by Sarah Winman.  I really liked this one, character-driven and realistic, with nary a witch, warlock or dragon in sight.  Ellis and Michael meet as boys and grow up together.  Neither's life turns out quite as they thought but it turns out that chosen family is sometimes the very best family.
• Elemental Forces is another horror short story collection by various authors.  Mixed bag, much like the anthology movies I have such a weakness for.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.  The first book in the series, impoverished Feyre kills a wolf to help support her family.  The wolf is a faerie in disguise, however, and Feyre is whisked away to atone.  Her captor is, of course, tall and handsome and tormented.
• Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki.  Set in mystical California, this book has multiple generations, a women-centric cult and time travel of a sort.  Each section is from a different character's POV; I liked Opal's best.
• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik.  I may have read this one before - parts seemed awfully familiar - but this is great fun.  A boarding school for sorcerors where the school itself is actively trying to kill its students and the narrator is resisting turning into a world-destroying dark mage.  Funny, snarky, gory and immediately engaging.  The second in the series will be my first book ready in June.

February reads

 Hahahaha best intentions and all that: the second book I read in February was an accidental re-read but all the rest of them were new-to-me:

• Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth - I don't remember much about this one now but I liked it well-enough.
• The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher - I liked it the first time I read it (whenever that was) and I liked it this time too.  Scary portals to other worlds and rampaging taxidermy.
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman - You know how if there's a book and a movie, it's usually the book that is better?  The movie is better, for me anyway.  It may have been the edition I read.  And the movie is so well-cast, so iconic, that it kept getting in the way of what I was reading.
• Loot by Tania James - Historical fiction set in India and England.  Didn't love it, found it a little tedious.
• Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.  Pretty good, seemed a little lightweight.
• How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelman.  Really liked this one: a retelling of classic fairytales via a support group for traumatized women.
• Into the Mist by PC Cast.  Post-apocalyptic, women-focused, mystical.  Characters seemed a little thinly drawn.
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo.  Power, privilege and dark magics on the Yale University campus.  Really liked this one, as well as the second one in the not-yet-complete trilogy.
• Hellbent by Leigh Bardugo.  Continuing the story from Ninth House.
• The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli Clark.  This one is a novella and seemed lighweight.  Didn't love it but it was okay.

Hooray for libraries!

January reads

 It's 2025 and the country is on fire, literally and figuratively; my dog has now decided to be afraid of the fridge; and it has been cold and dark but without the snow our mountains desperately need.  So what's to do?  Slightly resurrect this little blog to report on the books I've read each month.  I just got a new library card - my second: one for the SLC library system I've had for years and the new one for the county system - in an attempt to support local.  I've always liked libraries as I read so quickly as to bankrupt myself were I to purchase all the books I read.  And I've always got at least one book going at any given time, re-reading old favorites if I'm in between library visits. 

That's what prompted this second library card, when I realized I'd re-read three books in one month (as outlined below), despite the lengthy to-be-read list I have.  So here's January's list and I'm planning for February's to have no re-reads:

• Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie - the final volume in the First Law trilogy.  I love Joe Abercrombie's stuff (re-read)
• Off Course by Erin Beresini - I stole this one from Mr. Mouse's library haul.  It's about obstacle course racing (non-fiction omg)
• Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman - Horror fiction looking closely at hauntings and addiction
• The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller - Gothic resurrection horror and ooh I liked this one a lot
• The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean - Kind of weird, literally about people who eat books, like vampires but words and paper instead of blood
• Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy - menopause horror!  I liked this one a lot too
• Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie - The first of three standalone books in between his two trilogies, set in the same universe, using some of the same characters.  Swords and sandals and bloody, bloody treachery (re-read)
• The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie - The second of three standalone books in between his two trilogies, set in the same universe, using some of the same characters.  Swords and sandals battle fantasy, frigging amazing (re-read)

What are you reading?  What's on your to-be-read list?

Dumplin'

Y'all, I know I've been incommunicado (persona non grata?) around here lately.  There's been holiday stuff to get done and I have been in a Jessica Jones / The Punisher re-watch mood lately.  I've also watched S1 of 3% (Netflix, in Portuguese with English subtitles), a vaguely Hunger Games-ish dystopian science fiction show about poor Brazilians competing against one another to win a spot in a Utopian-community on an island off-shore.  I devoured the first season but have stalled out on S2 for the moment.  I also read and very much enjoyed The Library at Mount Char (recommended by a work friend who said, "It's weird.  I thought of you."): a violent fantasy pitting very special orphans against each other (and their adoptive father, who may be God) for control of the world.

But the real reason I'm making sure to post tonight is this.  Do yourself a favor.  Watch this video - which has glamorous drag queens (including one of my favorites, BenDeLaCreme) lip-sync to a remix of Dolly Parton's "Jolene," to advertise Netflix's Dumplin' - and then get over to Netflix and watch Dumplin'.  The chunky daughter of a former beauty queen enters a local pageant with several friends and misfits, first intending on taking it down/making a point, but instead embracing a Dolly-ism: "Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose."  Touching on (but not belaboring) friendship, loyalty, healthy body image and confidence, this little movie is very funny, real, honest and touching.  Plus drag queens!

Mini book review: Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three by Clive Barker

I thought I was a Clive Barker fan but as it turns out, I haven't consumed enough of his output to count.  Sure, I've seen and quite liked Hellraiser (and Nightbreed is on my list of to-sees).  But I also thought I'd read some of his books and, scanning his bibliography, I guess I was wrong about that.  Because I thought I was a fan, I was surprised whenI didn't like his short story collection, Books of Blood, better.  I do like horror shorts a lot and thankfully, this collection has a lot to indulge in.  I found a few stories that I did like: the battle of wills in "The Yattering and Jack," the theatre's immortality in "Sex, Death and Starshine,"  "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," when movies take form in "Son of Celluloid," the worst island in the world in "Scape-Goats."  Again, however, many of the characters felt thin and I had difficulty connecting with the little worlds created in each story - which, again, I don't have any trouble with in the short stories of King, Hill and Gaiman.

Mini book review: The Outsider by Stephen King

When well-liked youth coach Terry Maitland is arrested for a sadistic and gruesome murder, his community is shaken to its foundation.  When Maitland's family and friends prove that he was literally in two places at the exact time of the murder, lead Detective Ralph Anderson doesn't know what to think.  And when things get weirder - like supernaturally so - Anderson has to put his faith in evidence and police procedure aside and put his faith in things he cannot see. 


The Outsider by Stephen King is a middling King novel, not his best but not his worst.  The crimes committed are terrible but the villain himself is not super-scary.  It has the return of Holly Gibney, a main character from the Bill Hodges trilogy of Mr. Mercedes / Finders Keepers / End of Watch, who uses her expertise in the world of the weird to help Ralph Anderson, while Anderson helps her re-engage with the world after Bill Hodges's death. The Outsider doesn't have the depth of characterization of those Bill Hodges books, though - for the first part of the book, I assumed Terry Maitland was going to be main character, not Detective Anderson, and I was a little surprise when the focus switched.  This novel does have some nice call-backs to the Hodges books, however, and it was nice to see Holly again.  Maybe I should re-read that trilogy.

Mini book review: We Are Where the Nightmares Go and other stories by C. Robert Cargill

It's not even September yet so it's far too soon for horror movies.  I have, however, been in the mood for some horror books, inspired by NPR's recent article.  I am particularly fond of horror short stories (Stephen King, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman when he's feeling especially macabre) and thus first pounced upon C. Robert Cargill's We Are Where the Nightmares Go and other stories when it became available at the library.  To be honest, I didn't love it.  I thought the stories were pretty uneven and the prose didn't readily pull me in (as does the prose of Messrs. King, Hill and Gaiman).  I did enjoy several individual stories:  the title story, "We Are Where the Nightmares Go," which has doors to other worlds, bad clowns and lost children; "The Town That Wasn't Anymore," about an Appalachian town that is dying away, not just because the mining is tapped out but because the town's dead just won't stay dead; and, most wonderfully, "Hell Creek" which is about ZOMBIE DINOSAURS.  I mean, who doesn't love zombie dinosaurs?  Bad people, that's who.

A couple of itty-bitty book reviews

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman.  I usually LOVE Neil Gaiman.  I love his world-building and the intelligence of the language he uses.  I also love mythology.  When I was a kid, I would take out all the mythology books in my grade school library; I especially liked Greek, Egyptian and Norse, reading the myths and stories over and over again.  Perhaps that's why I didn't love Gaiman's 2017 Norse Mythology: I already knew all the stories he told, so none of it was new.  I also didn't feel like his voice came through at all, which would have freshened the myths up a bit.  For people who don't know the old stories about Thor, Loki, Odin, Baldur, Freya and the rest, this is a nice, accessible introduction.  But for me, it was a bit of a waste of time.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove  by Karen Russell.  This one, a short story collection by the author of Swamplandia (which I know I've read but apparently didn't review here), was not a waste of time.  Each story is touched with a bit of fantasy - vampires, human silkworms, American presidents reincarnated as horses - and each is very different from the other.  Some agreed with me more than others but all were very original, building specific, interesting worlds in just a few pages.  Lots of fun, that one.

Niblets

There's been a smattering of media consumed in the Mouse house lately, although nothing earth-shaking:

The Shallows - A decent, short, survival horror flick of the hot chick vs. man-eating shark variety, starring the gorgeous Blake Lively.  Her surfer girl is catching some waves on a secluded Mexico beach when she is attacked by a shark and must fight for survival, clinging to a rock and a buoy with only a wounded seagull for moral support.  There was a squirm-inducing self-surgery scene and I jumped a couple times.  I do question how much a person could actually have their eyes open underwater in the ocean, but that's a minor quibble, really, for an inoffensive B-movie.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams's book is in fact nothing like the television series, other than there's a character with the name of Dirk Gently and he's British.  Everything else is different.  Everything.  In the book, there's ghosts and robots and ... I liked the show much, much better, actually.

All You Need Is Kill - This novel, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is the source material for the Emily Blunt/Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow, recently seen and enjoyed.  The movie does differ from the book in some respects, although it is fairly faithful.

I've tried a couple of episodes each from a couple of Netflix originals, Trollhunters and Crazyhead, but was not impressed enough to explore further.  There is so much out there that if I am not immediately drawn in, a la Stranger Things or Jessica Jones, I lose patience.  The next one I'm going to try is The OA, which has gotten good reviews so I'm hopeful.

Finally, Mr. Mouse and I are doing a New Year decluttering around the house and I've been going through all our books.  We have a lot and we're trying to only keep the ones to which we have a personal connection.  While I was going through the stacks, I found the first three books of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.  I plowed through the first one and am on the second already.  But I don't think I've ever read the last two books so now I'm thrilled to be able to finish the series.

Here's what I read recently

Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese - Christine, an end-times reporter for a religious news publication, has nearly had enough of doomsday cults and their always-wrong predictions about Armageddon.  But while on a legitimate assignment in the Middle East, she is given a locked briefcase and told to "take it to Mercury."  Mercury happens to be a sassy angel, happily practicing his ping-pong serve in California and trying not to take anything too seriously.  Both Heaven and Hell are moving their players into position for the Apocalypse - it's actually going to happen this time - and Christine and Mercury have to kidnap the Antichrist (a total dickweed named Karl who lives in his mother's attic) to keep the world from ending.

I liked Mercury Falling but didn't love it.  I wasn't able to make much of a connection with any of the characters and, as such, didn't really care about any of them.  There is a definite Douglas Adams/Tim Robbins/Terry Pratchett tone to the novel as the ridiculous situations keep piling up and Christine keeps trying to deal with them as a rational human being.  If you like your apocalypses on the lighter side, this one's for you.  (And as a bonus, it is just the first in a series of Mercury novels.)

The Fireman by Joe Hill - A plague has swept the country (and possibly the world), brought about by a highly contagious spore - apparently released as the polar ice has melted - that marks its victims' skin with gorgeous gold and black tattoos ... and then causes them to spontaneously combust and burn alive.  There is no cure.  Harper Grayson is a nurse who at first tries to care for those sickened by Dragonscale and then she catches a dose of it herself.  Her horrible husband has a nervous breakdown and abandons her, just as she learns that she is pregnant with their first child.  An enigmatic stranger that she meets in the hospital - the Fireman - helps her find her way to a community of infected who support one another while they try to learn to live with their infection.  But around them civilization has fallen apart: no power, no government, no medicine and roving bands of Cremation Squads who put down any infected they can find.  Harper discovers that the Fireman has learned how to control the Dragonscale - and that is her only hope for her unborn child, and perhaps the human race.

Look, I really like Joe Hill.  But The Fireman was as uninteresting and unoriginal as a novel about people bursting into flame can be.  At the start of the book, Hill's dedication includes those who inspired him with this book:  including, "Ray Bradbury, from whom I stole my title, [and] my father, from whom I stole all the rest."  Everyone now knows that Hill's father is Stephen King and The Fireman sure felt like a SK ripoff: including bits from The Stand (the plague, pregnant heroine, collapse of civilization) and Firestarter (um, the fire) and Cell (another collapse of civilization, moving through Maine to a rumored safe haven), to name just a couple.  The characters felt a little thin and the build-up to the confrontation between Harper and her crazed ex-husband just fizzled out like pfftttt.  I would like to see Joe Hill get back to form - this one was just too derivative for me.

Mini book review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

In Depression Era Chicago, a not very nice man named Harper Curtis stumbles into a derelict-seeming house.  The House (for it is a House, not just a house) is different on the inside: in a room upstairs, there are trophies taken from women that Harper will kill.  The House has a listing of these "shining girls," and whenever Harper opens the front door, the House delivers him to a different time between 1929 and 1993 so he can locate these girls and snuff out their light.  Although he starts awkwardly, he quickly becomes quite good at these vicious, seemingly untraceable murders as he bounces back and forth through time.  But in 1989, Kirby Mizrachi manages to escape Harper's knife, despite her belly and throat being slashed.  And because she manages to escape, she systematically begins to track down her would-be murderer.

Time travel stories are always tough but despite a couple of passages that I had to read and re-read to figure out who was sticking what knife into whom, The Shining Girls is pretty successful.  It's very violent - the descriptions of Harper's attacks are detailed and extremely bloody - but also very convincing.  The amount of research Lauren Beukes did to create the Chicagos of the various times must have been staggering.  The characters, including all of the victims, are fleshed out and real, interesting, sympathetic; the only one who gets short shrift is Harper but he's such a horrible person that I really didn't want to get to know him better.  I recently had a rare rainy Sunday when I didn't have to do anything, so I sat down and read The Shining Girls all in one go.  If that's not a recommendation for a book, I don't know what is.

PS - I have also read Beukes's Broken Monsters and liked that too, but it's a weirder book and didn't connect with me quite so well.  Don't know why I didn't review that here.

Here:  link to links to buy the book.

Bits and pieces

Things do fall off around here when I don't have a regular recapping gig, don't they?  Plus schedules tend to get out of whack around the holidays and everyone is flitting about, hither and thither.  Mr. Mouse and I haven't done too much hither and thither-ing, luckily, and our holiday plans are contentedly at-home.  We just finished watching the second season of Fargo, which is the one of the few scripted shows we watch together (Better Call Saul will be the next, when it returns in February).  If you haven't been watching Fargo (or Better Call Saul, or Justified, for that matter), you really should.  This second season had a much higher body count than the also-excellent S1; it was also funnier and just full to bursting with a talented cast.

I also recently watched Jessica Jones which I absolutely loved.  I had thought to say something profound about it, but sites like the A.V. Club and The Mary Sue are full of well-written recaps and articles; just google it and you'll find oceans of discussion.  It isn't easy to watch with its discussion of sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, but it is an important discussion.  Krysten Ritter is phenomenal in the title role, ably portraying the complex, damaged Jessica.  If the only thing you've seen David Tennant in is Doctor Who, you're in for a shock:  he is charming, yes, but also terrifying as the sociopathic, abusive victim.  The rest of the cast is really good too and it's refreshing to have most of the major players be women.

In stark (pun intended) contrast to Marvel's strong, grounded Netflix offerings is Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron.  I watched it last night and, as much as I love Joss Whedon's work, this one left me underwhelmed.  And exhausted, frankly, from all the CGI battles.  After watching the more realistic fights and stuntwork in both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, the AoU CGI just left me cold.  I appreciated the small character moments and humor - Natasha and Bruce; Hawkeye getting some actual lines; everyone giving Captain America a hard time for being an old fogy - but it all just seemed overstuffed and a bit frantic.  I will say that James Spader knocked it out of the park with his Ultron voice work.

What's next around here?  I'm watching S2 of Sherlock and also the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who, and next up in my DVD queue is the remainder of S4 of Game of Thrones (so far behind!).  I just finished S2 of Penny Dreadful which I ADORE and am anxious to continue on with S3.  There's always something - and I'm always up for suggestions.

Mini book review: The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman, is historical fiction taking place in New York City in the early 1900s.  It is told from a couple points of view: Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant making his living as a photographer in Brooklyn; and Coralie Sardie, who performs as the Mermaid in her father's "museum" / freak show, which competes with the other, larger attractions in Coney Island.  When Eddie, a witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, is hired to find out what happened to a lost young woman who had escaped the fire, his life becomes intertwined with Coralie's, as she tries to extricate from her father's clutches.

I actually found the romance between Coralie and Eddie to be the least interesting part of this book, instead finding the details of the two terrible fires - the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Dreamland Fire - much more compelling.  I had never heard of either of these two disasters before this book.  The Triangle fire was particularly sad, the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City, in which 146 immigrant garment workers died, either burned to death, because their bosses locked them in the work rooms, or killed when they jumped from the building's eighth, ninth and tenth floors to escape the flames.  The Dreamland fire happened just months later, when exploding light bulbs at the amusement park ignited tar that was being used to patch a roof leak.  Over sixty exhibition animals died and the once-elegant park was destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

Mini book review The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I think the most important question is: how has it taken me this long to read The Golden Compass, the first book in His Dark Materials, a beloved YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman.  I suppose it's because it came out in 1995 and I was just a few years out of college at that point, not spending much of my time reading YA fantasy.  But now that I am much, much older, I am happy to have discovered the series.

The Golden Compass follows young Lyra Belacqua and her shape-shifting daemon Pantalaimon as they discover that the world is much bigger and more complicated than they were led to believe.  At first ensconced among the aged academics at Jordan College, Lyra has run wild for the first twelve years of her life.  But children have started disappearing in the town and strange deals are being struck behind the College's closed doors, and Lyra soon finds herself at the center of it.

There is a lot of world-building on which to come up to speed quickly here, daemons (an animal familiar, bonded to every person at birth, which can shapeshift until its human partner reaches puberty at which point the daemon settles into its truest form) and armored polar bears and canal-dwelling gypsies and hot air balloons and treacherous relatives and dead children and the Northern Lights.  I got sucked in quickly, my interest only fading slightly towards the very end when it was apparent that things were winding towards the next book in the series.  Lyra is an interesting, imperfect protagonist - I am looking forward to seeing what she gets up to next.

Mini book review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

It must say something about my current opinion about the state of the world that I seem to only read fantasy and dystopian fiction anymore: I'm either looking for an escape or am trying to plan ahead to face what's coming.  Case in point: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, a bleak and yet somehow lyrical novel about what happens when 99% of the world population is brought down by the flu.

It's grim - although it isn't supernatural a la The Stand - as the few remaining people try to survive and rebuild their lives.  This flu (no reason for it given) was particularly fast-acting, decimating the planet in about two weeks.  The survivors, who never learned why they were immune when so many weren't, were scattered far and wide.  Some simply hunkered down where they were, like the passengers stranded in airport, and rebuilt from there, hunting deer, planting crops, establishing museums of what once was.  Some wandered for the first year before settling down in small settlement; those settlements were often vulnerable and people came and went.  Others banded together and kept wandering, like the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group of actors and musicians who caravan along, stopping at various settlements to bring a little bit of art and beauty to whomever is living there.

Station Eleven does not have a straight shot narrative (which is not my favorite).  The main character is presumably Kirsten, a member of the Traveling Symphony, and the book follows what happens to her and her friends.  But Mandel bounces around in time, visiting Arthur Leander, an actor who meets Kirsten when she is a child, and then continuing with Arthur's life with his many wives, even though he doesn't survive the flu-pocalypse.  Arthur's life intersected with many other lives, and those intersections are touched upon, interweaving as the book shows life both before and after the flu pandemic.  Some parts are brutal and violent, some are gentle, wistful, hopeful, beautiful.  Although Station Eleven is about an apocalypse, it is ultimately hopeful.

So busy

I don't mean to derail the True Blood momentum - and, in fact, I have watched the next two episodes and will get to recapping them soonish - but there's some other stuff I've read and watched recently that is pretty damn good.  (And, frankly, when compared to True Blood, very damn good.)  Take a gander and let me know if you've partaken of any of these.

• Black Mirror - A satirical British science fiction anthology series from the mind of Charlie Booker, Black Mirror is a dark and twisted treat.  Each episode - and there are only a few - has a different story and a different cast, and all of them involve technology that is not that far away from us right now.  As an X-Files, Fringe and Twilight Zone fan, as well as a fan of dystopian fiction, it's like this show was made for me.  It's got a great cast too, which made it great fun to recognize people (from Sense8, Agent Carter and the U.K. version of Skins, among others).  
• Howl's Moving Castle - I read the book.  I don't think I even realized there was a book and thought it was just the acclaimed Miyazaki animated movie.  But no, it was a book first, by British author Diana Wynne Jones.  It's a lightweight YA fantasy novel about Sophie, the eldest of three sisters and, in the world of fairy tales, thus doomed to a boring and unfulfilled life.  When Sophie inadvertently pisses off the Witch of the Waste, the Witch turns her into an old woman.  Her only chance at breaking the spell is the Wizard Howl, he of the titular moving castle.  Sophie insinuates herself into Howl's household and then the adventures begin.  Howl's Moving Castle is stuffed full of fire demons, jilted lovers, fancy outfits, animated scarecrows and plain old magic.  I got sucked in against my will and now I'm just going to have to move the movie up to the top of my Netflix queue.
• Doctor Who - It wasn't as though I was actively resisting Doctor Who, I just figured that I needed a chunk of time to watch a bunch of episodes in a row to really gain appreciation for it.  Everything I have read said that the 2005 revival, with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, is a good place to start - that those of us new Whovians don't really need to delve into the classic episodes.  I'm almost all the way through the series (I understand that Eccleston only played the Doctor for the one series) and I'm really quite liking it.  It has some fairly scary monsters for such a silly show (the Dalek, the Empty Child zombies, the Autons).  I have a big ol' girl crush on Bille Piper, who plays the Doctor's companion, Rose.  And Eccleston does a very nice job with the Doctor: he's got some darkness to him, this incarnation.  Good fun.  I'm anxious to finish out this series and see what fan-favorite David Tennant does with it.
• The Revolution was Televised  - This non-fiction book by Alan Sepinwall covers the shows that changed television into the amazing landscape that we now know it to be.  Sepinwall discusses in detail the following shows, which include several of my all-time favorites:  Oz (which I now have to watch), The Sopranos, The Wire (which I definitely have to watch), Deadwood (love love love), The Shield, LOST, Buffy the Vampire Slayers (!!!!!!!!!), 24, Battlestar Galactica (love love love), Friday Night Lights (love), Mad Men (it's on my list) and Breaking Bad (love love love).  Those are some seriously excellent shows right there.  The Revolution was Televised is easy to read, packed with information and interview tidbits and just fascinating to any of us who love good television.  Highly recommended.
• Mr. Robot - I also watched USA's Mr. Robot which is just great.  Rami Malek, as main guy Elliott Alderson, is phenomenal as the brilliant, damaged untrustworthy narrator.  The plot moves along quickly - a hacker group, fSociety, is looking to take down the largest corporation (Evil Corp) in the world, thus fomenting chaos - but it's the character beats that are the most compelling.  Great stuff and a wonderful change of pace from USA's usual blue sky programming.

Strange and unReal, really

In this installment of not-a-True-Blood-recap, I can at least report that I have watch the first two episodes of S6.  And they're pretty much as terrible as expected.  The first episode, in particular, is a mess; the second is a little better.  There are still way too many characters (seriously, are Alcide and his merry band of redneck werewolves even connected to the rest of the characters at all?) but it appears that there may be some focus coming in this season's major storyline - vamps vs. humans - but DEAR GOD do I not care about the faeries.

I have been catching on on S3 of Orange is the New Black (wherein so far Alex is the Alcide of the prison in that her character is so isolated from what is going on with the rest of them that I just don't care).  I've also plowed through unReal and enjoyed it immensely.  Yes, I love a scripted show on Lifetime.  Judging from the online buzz, unReal is the summer's sleeper breakout show, something that no one expected.  It follows the production of a The Bachelor-type show, called "Everlasting," and the main characters are the producer and executive producer of the show.  They can't even be labeled anti-heroes because both of them are horrible, manipulative bitches (the show's words, not mine).  Rachel, the producer (Shiri Appleby - fantastic), is pretty damaged, with some depression and sociopathic issues; she is extremely good at her job - manipulating the show's contestants to get good t.v. - but at least she feels a little bad about it sometimes.  Her boss, Quinn, Everlasting's EP, is scarcely likable as she too manipulates everyone around her, including Rachel.  I rather wish they had gone a little deeper into the show-within-the-show (for instance, it's not really clear why most of the female contestants were even willing to sign up for such a degrading reality show in the first place).  But unReal is super-fun for the most part, even as it goes terribly dark.

The other thing I've been doing is reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  I had tried watching the BBC's miniseries adaptation earlier this summer but kept falling asleep, so I decided to go right to the source and read it instead.  It won all sorts of awards when it came out - winner of the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award, NYT Notable Book of the Year, Best of 2004 lists for Salon, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, etc. - and the pull quote on the cover is from Neil Gaiman: "Unquestionably, the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years."  DAMN.  It is also a monster of a book, the paperback clocking in at 1,006 pages.  It follows two English magicians, the titular Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, as they each attempt, in their very different ways, to bring magic back to England from whence it has largely disappeared.  There are capricious faeries, enchanted ballrooms, tattooed beggars, Jane Austen-ish manners, the Napoleanic War, missing persons and pernicious plans to replace the King of England.  JS&MN starts off fairly slowly, then manages to suck you in so much that when the book finally ends, a thousand pages later, it seems abrupt.  I could have read more.

Going to camp, reading a book

I am inching closer to the True Blood recaps, I promise.  In the meantime, I just couldn't help myself and have fully embraced Wet Hot American Summer.  (I know I should be catching up with Hannibal but WHAS is so much funner.)  When I thought about it, I couldn't recall actually watching the whole of the original movie so I started with that.  Which I loved.  So much fun to see all these now-familiar people, many of whom were just getting going in 2001 when the movie came out:  Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Michael Ian Black, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Christopher Meloni, Molly Shannon, Ken Marino, Elizabeth Banks, Judah Friedlander.  And then to see the new Netflix series, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp!  For those not in on the joke, the 2001 movie was set in 1981 about the last day of a Waterville, Maine, summer camp.  The new series, just now out in 2015, set in 1981 about the first day of that summer camp.  Same cast, fourteen years older, playing the same characters.  It was funny when they were all in their early thirties and playing teenagers ... now that they're in their mid-40s?  Awesome.  I do think that Paul Rudd may have sold his soul, however: he does not seem to have aged a day (from 32 in 2001 to 46 now).  I've only just seen the first episode but I so approve.

In media I have to read as opposed to watch, I recently finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.  Mitchell is the same guy who wrote Cloud Atlas, which I haven't read but which is apparently similarly constructed to TBC which all these disparate characters and storylines that are somehow connected.  In a nutshell:  a teenage runaway is connected to psychic phenonmena that follow her throughout her lifetime, drawing in many peripheral people in her life and involving her in a supernatural conspiracy that spans generations across the globe.  I really do prefer linear plots and when I got to the fourth section of TBC I was starting to get annoyed - just when each story got going, it ended and another one started.  Thankfully, Mitchell does tie it all together at the end but I did find the novel frustrating.  I wanted to finish out the characters' stories rather than cutting short and skipping way ahead to the end.  I did like the very last section quite a lot, however, as it was a sobering look at a possible future for our planet as we humans continue to devour resources without thought for the consequences.  The Bone Clocks was ultimately, for me, a frustrating but intriguing read.

Mini book review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

I like big books with intricate plots. Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay has 567 pages (hardcover) and a fairly large cast of characters involved in court intrigue, power struggles, rebellion, honor and poetry.  I do sort of wish I had liked Under Heaven more.

Second son Shen Tai has gone beyond the borders of the empire of Kitai, living in solitude as he works to bury tens of thousands of dead soldiers and lay their ghosts to rest.  He does this to honor his own deceased father.  At first it was terrifying, bleak and alone, ghosts howling and crying at night and no one but bones for company during the day.  But he keeps at his unending, impossible job and, by bringing peace to a few souls, begins to gain some for himself.  This solitary existence is rocked, however, when a messenger brings word that he is being gifted with two hundred and fifty Sardian horses - the most valuable and incredible horses in the world, a gift of inconceivable wealth.  This gift, ostensibly to honor Tai for the work he is doing, thrusts him back into court life as the emperor takes notice of him and lesser mandarins seethe with resentment.  As power players jostle for position around him, and assassins circle, trying to gain control of the horses, Tai must learn who his friends are and how to move in society again.

Set in a slightly fantastical version of China's Tang Dynasty, Under Heaven has hand-to-hand combat, concubines, evil shamans, sexy lychee nut eating and drunken poets.  Kay writes at a remove, however, so that I never felt a connection with any of the characters.  Perhaps part of it is that honor and decorum played such a large part in the characters' lives and the prose is designed to reflect those qualities.  Still, I had been hoping to be drawn in more than I was and, as such, Under Heaven left me a little cold.