I had to kind of drag Gail into this, but she got hooked big time. After watching the conclusion last night she proclaimed, “That was so much better than season one!” I can’t disagree. It will be hard waiting for season three to hit iTunes without getting spoilers.
I love Len Deighton, but I’m taking a break from him for a while. I probably won’t read him again until 2015. This book kind of didn’t meet expectations and I need to burn through my backlog of other authors. My expectations are so high because of the Bernard Samson series, which was really difficult to match in terms of action and characters.
Why am I watching this? I’ve read all the books, so there are no surprises. I know that Ned Stark gets his head chopped off and that Danerys hops into a fire and climbs out with three dragons. What’s the point? Did the books leave me wanting so much that I need to witness the violence and sex in color?
Gillian Anderson is a trustworthy artist I think. And my wife is a trustworthy chooser of British dramas. These things came together when Gail suggested we make The Fall our next TV show, and it didn’t disappoint. I mean, wow! It actually blew my expectations out of the water.
I consumed two items simultaneously, one book and one TV series, with the word “Fall” in the title. That’s weird. This book, Jericho’s Fall, was written by Stephen Carter. I grabbed it at Open Books because I loved his first book, The Emperor of Ocean Park, from a few years back. They are two slightly different books, Jericho’s Fall is classic thriller and Emperor is a drama/mystery. I liked the drama/mystery much better, this was only so-so.
I haven’t met an Elmore Leonard character I don’t love. Within my reading purview, no other author creates fun and interesting characters in the quantity that Leonard does. I’m not just talking about the main characters either. I’m talking about secondary characters, bad guys, and bit players. This western novel carried the burden of my expectations well with a stable of awesome humans.
It’s dangerous flipping channels during boring sporting events. Clayton Kershaw seemed to have the Braves under control on this Thursday night so I made a trip around TV land and found Milla Javovich killing zombies on SyFy.
Gail is a British TV junkie. I can’t blame her, there is some compelling stuff on TV over there. But I’ve seen The Wire so I know American TV is the best. That being said, she dug up this Broadchurch show (not sure how) and it turned out to be quite captivating. We haven’t watched a TV show together in a long time so the time was ripe.
I’m intrigued by the so-called “fall” of the music industry because it coincided with a distinct rise in my interest in music. Maybe I’m a contrarian, but I re-started listening to music and purchasing albums after a long, post-college layoff that ended with my first digital music player. I now listen with a relatively selective ear and buy considerable amounts of music because of digital. But if you listen to the record executives, they blame digital for the precipitous decline in album sales over the last 20 years.
This is some classic literature, man. I need to read it every so often just to keep me grounded. It’s been a slow reading year and I really got bogged down on this. Not because of the content or anything, just because I’m kind of busy and distracted.