So, what did April have in store for me?
Books
Not a lot of reading through April. I’ve been reading a lot of Tansy Rayner Roberts work lately (see recent reviews of Musketeer Space and Sheep Might Fly), and decided to have another crack at her crime series (writing as Livia Day). I didn’t love the first book in the series (see my review of A Trifle Dead) but recent reading/listening has reminded me how much I enjoy Roberts prose, so I decided to give the series another chance with Drowned Vanilla.
I enjoyed the book more than I did the first one. The characters felt more grounded this time around, and when combined with Roberts/Day’s delivery, I found myself more attached to the story.
I don’t think I read much more than that through April, it was a very slow reading month.
TV
The Flash is starting to annoy me a bit. There was a recent episode where the Flash gave up his powers to save someone, only to put millions of people under the sway of a psychopathic superpowered mad-man. It was silly, and clearly done only to further an increasingly unrealistic plot. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’ll watch pretty much any superhero show and sheer bloody mindedness will probably keep me going with the series. But if it doesn’t improve soon, The Flash might have the distinction of being the first superhero show that I’ve given up on.
My daughter and I have been watching the Clone Wars cartoon series and the Rebels cartoon series, both set in the Star Wars universe. It has been fun to watch something with my daughter, and we’re both really into both shows. We’re getting towards the end of the Clone Wars, so soon we’ll only have Rebels to keep us going. I’ve found that watching Clone Wars has made watching Episodes I – III a lot easier. Having a lot more story time with Annikan Skywalker when he is an actual hero makes his fall from grace more moving. There was an episode of Rebels recently where Annikan’s former apprentice comes face to face with Darth Vadar and realises who he is, and that was a lot more emotional than anything the movies have managed to produce. Lots of fun.
I watched the first episode of the US TV series House of Cards and I think I’m going to be hooked. More on that later.
And season 5 of Teen Wolf has come back onto Foxtel, which is excellent. I’ve rabbited on about Teen Wolf in other posts, so I won’t continue that here, but as a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the 21st century” type show, it has a lot going for it.
And finally, I can’t not mention Game of Thrones. We’re only a couple of episodes in, and I still find it compelling watching. I can’t believe how fast the hour goes by! I’ve read a lot of critiques, and I intellectually agree with a lot of it, but I can’t deny the fact that I love watching the show.
Movies
Captain America: Civil War was a great movie – lots of fun, and with very interesting fights. The last couple of Avenger movies have suffered from having bad guys who are very “same same”, robots, generic aliens etc. The fights got a little repetitive after a while. But in this movie, by pitting superheroes up against each other you got much more variety. Hero A uses Power X against Hero B, which gets trumped by Hero C and Power Y. The combinations and permutations were very entertaining.
The plot was intelligent enough, and they avoided enough cliches to make it hard to guess where they were going.
And of course Spiderman (my favourite superhero of all time) was a lot of fun to watch.
Coming Up
Looking forward to some XMen action at the movies in a couple of weeks. Also, trying to pick my next Australian Women Writers Reading Challenge book.
What about you? Anything juicy that you’ve been consuming?
