Weekly Roundup

Two reviews! Two books started, one finished and one continued! A new short story review section! Four movie thoughts! I’ve also rearranged things in the post to hopefully flow better, given the new features recently added. Read on to find out more.

This Week’s Posts:

Tuesday: Book Review: The Once and Future Witches – Such a great book, highly recommend.

Thursday: Book Review: The Second Rebel – A step down from The First Sister, but worth reading for that final act.

This Week’s Reading:

This week I’ve continued reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. As predicted, this book is taking me quite some time to read. It’s a lot more satirical than I was expecting, which saves it from being overly dry. Overall I’m enjoying it, or else I wouldn’t have read over 500 pages of it so far!

I picked up The Bone Ship’s Wake by R.J. Barker. I love the way he writes this series, but I’m gearing myself up for some emotional devastation. I’ll dive into this one more deeply once I’ve finished Cryptonomicon.

Finally I picked up and finished Level Up Or Die by Apollos Thorne. It’s a litrpg where the protagonist gets kidnapped to a hidden underworld and shown how to level up and use magic. It’s daft, and not amazingly written, but it does the litrpg feedback reward cycle pretty well, so I burned through it quite fast.

I may or may not be doing some SPFBO reading also.

The Slow Read Through The Big Book Of Modern Fantasy

This is a new feature! I was recently gifted The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VamderMeer. It is very long, so I’m going to attempt to read and review at least a short story a week, in the hopes of finishing it by the end of next year!

Ten Rounds With Grandfather Clock by Maurice Richardson: An absurdist tale about a dwarf ‘surrealist boxer’ called Engelbrect who enters a boxing match with a grandfather clock, this was pretty short and kind of amusing. The prose is whip sharp, but I didn’t get all that much from the story. 3.5/5

Movie Thoughts:

The Paw Patrol Movie (cinema): Saw this one with the kids, both 5yo and 2yo were captivated for the entire runtime. The big screen and higher production values makes certain perilous scenes more intense, which might be a consideration for some kids. There’s a few bits in there that adults might get a kick out of, but it pretty much just feels like an extra long episode of Paw Patrol.

Free Guy (cinema): Ryan Reynolds plays lovable moron Guy, an ai character in a GTA style video game who starts straying from his prescribed path. It’s a ridiculous premise that does best when it’s being leant into, tongue in cheek. Honestly though, I laughed a lot more at The Suicide Squad than I did this movie. There are some action scenes that are pretty entertaining, but the lack of stakes in most of them can be a little undermining. I think they did about as well as could be expected with a concept that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which makes for a fine movie to turn your brain off for.

Fear Street 1994 (at home, several sittings): Question – how do you know a film is set in the 90s? Answer – Put on a different 90s song every few minutes for the first half of the film. Teens disturb witch corpse, witch corpse animates dead murderers to kill them. I was interested in the fact that this movie was the first in a trilogy that goes backwards through time (Fear Street 1978 and Fear Street 1666 being the next two movies) but this movie meanders around too much after an explosive start. There’s some interesting ideas, but the meta parts felt hackneyed and the characters are mostly kind of terrible (two of the teenagers are drug dealers blase about the survived OD of a brother). I’m not a big horror fan, so maybe it’s just me. It was fine though, and if I get bored enough I might check out the sequel.

Boss Level (at home, a couple of sittings): Boss Level is a time loop movie that starts in media res, with Frank? (I honestly can’t remember his name, and I’m too lazy to look it up) getting attacked by a man with a machete, then a helicopter mounted minigun, then a red haired car riding woman he disaffectionately calls ‘Pam’ in short order. His day is spent dodging various nutty hitpeople, until he is inevitably killed. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be the whole movie, so everything slows down hugely when we get some backstory and as introduction to the boring villain, Mel Gibson trying his hardest to be menacing in a role that puts him mostly in the dark. There’s some fun action, some really dumb stuff, and a noirish voice-over that I found a bit much. If you liked the beach scenes from Live Die Repeat this might work for you.

Next Week’s Posts:

I have an Iron Widow review ready to go, but I need to see if I’m allowed to post it yet! I’ll try and get a long gestating Litrpg roundup done with a new mini Review of the Level Up Or Die added. Expect reviews to be sparser here as I read some longer books.

Next Week’s TBR Shortlist (Not including SPFBO books):

This week I picked up The Bone Ship’s Wake from the top row of my TBR shortlist. The format below might look different to regular readers – I recently acquired a new Kindle, my previous being several years older. Because I’m lazy, I’ve been taking photos of my TBR folder on the Kindle for this feature, but the app was slightly different on the old machine. I debated whether or not to stick with 9 books or show the full visible 12 – and then I remembered the only reason I went with 9 in the first place was because that was all that would appear on the previous Kindle screen as once!

Here’s a link to my last Weekly Roundup, if you wish to compare the two. I’m not sure if I’ll get to any of these books this week. I still have over 300 pages of Cryptonomicon and most of The Bone Ship’s Wake left to read, and I’ll need to keep on top of my SPFBO reading too. And to be honest it’s hard to tell what I’ll feel like reading after all that.

As usual, let me know if there’s anything there you’d recommend!