Good book, good film.
Not a direct copy, and I preferred the book (much better title, for one), but it’s well worth watching.
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I watched it when it was on HBO because I saw a bit of the promotional stuff when TC and Emily Blunt were on Graham Norton. I liked it. I’m neutral with TC (don’t hate him or love him) and I find that I can take most of his later movies better than most of his earlier stuff, with a couple of exceptions.
I really liked the time-loop concept. It reminded me of both Groundhog Day and that one episode of ST:TNG in which the crew keeps making the incorrect decision and then the ship explodes. (Data programs himself and the computer to repeat the same number so he can learn from the previous mistakes.)
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At some point somebody recommended The Library at Mount Char. Stumbled across it day before yesterday, read it, enjoyed it. Very inventive!
Now back to trying to finish up Ivory Vikings before starting The Accursed Kings…
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I liked it, a good effort at making a version for western tastes though the hollywood happy ending left me feeling kinda blah about that part.
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I just devoured That Crooked Mirror by Rob E. Boley-- I finished it in one day. Imagine, if you will, a blend of fairy tales and monster movies crossed with The Walking Dead and you won’t be too far off. When the Prince kissed Snow White, she came back to life-- but she came back wrong… very wrong. Yup, she’s a zombie, twisted by a curse gone haywire. I think what keeps me coming back is how developed the characters are. The author has given each and every person involved a rich backstory, with histories and motivations that bring them to life… though many of them don’t stay alive. There’s plenty of death and gritty, gruesome mayhem to go around. The one thing that strains credulity for me, just a little, is how the fairy tale roles and monsters get mixed and mashed together. It seems that Little Red Riding Hood is actually a werewolf, Dim the dwarf (you’d recognize him as Dopey) was the Phantom of the Opera, the Mummy turns out to be a cursed Dwarven ancestor, the Invisible Man is a page the King scientifically experimented on… and so on. In this latest installment (the sixth in the Scary Tales series) several of cinema’s most brutal slashers come into the story. (Yes, Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. Really.) However, Boley tends to work the movie characters into the story with such care that it usually works pretty well. It’s probably best to start with the first book, That Risen Snow, which is free on Amazon right now. I’ll warn you, it’s an addictive series. I’ve purchased every book since reading the first, and I don’t often continue e-book series after the first installment. And now I have to wait for the next book… grrrrr. 
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My copy of Michael Swanwick’s Chasing the Phoenix arrived Thursday night and I inhaled it in a single evening. I think that’s a good indicator that I liked it. 
It had me willingly hooked from the first paragraph.
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To wit:
Surplus came down out of the north dressed in a Mongolian shaman’s robes covered with multicolored ribbons and hammered copper disks. He was leading a yak adorned with red tassels and tiny silver bells. The yak carried a bundle swaddled in cloth and carefully tied up with ropes.
In the bundle was the corpse of his friend Aubrey Darger.
(OK, that’s the first two paragraphs, but don’t they let you know you’re in good hands? For those who are not yet acquainted with Surplus, by the way, he is a bipedal and highly intelligent genetically engineered dog.)
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Me, all I’ve got is book 5 of the Long Earth series. Which as attested above has some issues, but I’ve read 4/5 of it already, DAMMIT.
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Just starting the 2nd of a YA series that was a stumbled upon find at the library.
The Jupiter Pirates… silly space opera fun that I am enjoying simply because SPACE PIRATES!
And I read the reviewed here Battling Boy and working through the related 2 Aurora West books and some other stuff from Paul Pope that just arrived at the hold shelf today.
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Finally finished Blue Mars. Wasn’t really worth it, to be honest. That was a long-ass trilogy.
Going to start Jon Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy next. I read a couple of his earlier novels years ago and enjoyed them but never got around to these.
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Carmilla is a nice novella length read.
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I read Connie Willis’ newest novel, Crosstalk. It’s not her best work. I don’t mind some deus ex machina in my books but this one was over the top silly. And I usually don’t have a problem with her slapstick “everyone’s talking over everyone else and we’re running out of time” style, but this time I just wanted to slap the heroine and have her say “SHUT UP I’M NOT DONE TALKING!”
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Oh dear. I have Crosstalk on hold at my library. Have you any thoughts on Willis’ novella All About Emily? I almost borrowed that one a few days ago.
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I actually haven’t read that one, but I’ve been meaning to. I’ve been feeling like her earlier works were better, I guess. The slapstick didn’t bother me in Passage because it felt like just part of the layers of metaphor. And it didn’t really happen in Doomsday Book at all.
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I keep hoping that I’ll read a novella of hers that’s as great as Bellwether or To Say Nothing Of the Dog. Inside Job was fun, but not great.
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Just started unabridged Count of Monte Cristo. Good gourd. 1200p of small print on 8".5 x 5" pages.
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Dumas was fond of his word count I guess.
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#YOU TAKE THAT BACK!
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New books arrived!
Godel, Escher and Bach, as recommended by @miasm and others (where is @miasm, anyway?)
Bone, as recommended here by a few people…
And Molly Crabapple’s Drawing Blood.
Plus, as mentioned elsewhere, I have The Stars My Destination to read too.
And I’m still slowly working my way through Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, but that’s really just something to pick up and read a handful of pages at a time.
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Hopefully learning how to properly structure my time to allow for the sweet, sweet red berries of the boing! NOM!
ETA: Did you read ‘I am a strange loop’ first or are you diving right into the tricksiness of GEB?
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