#but a good time and some funny moments and the occasional heartwarming or gut punching moments

[lovecolibri]

SaL anon here friend, hoping you had a long, relaxing, holiday weekend!! Not a big Thanksgiving person myself, but I do like sleeping in. So tell me, should i start watching The Rookie, since it's a long wait after the mid season finale. Speaking of which, I'm mentally preparing for tomorrow, by which I mean bracing myself for some nonsense cliffhanger since they've literally set nothing up for any of the characters. Maybe the previews will change my mind, at least there's an actual fire??

Hello friend! We still had some of my mom's family in town from the wedding so that made Thanksgiving nice. I'm a big fan of food (especially the kind that results in leftovers), and lazy days relaxing and being cozy so that's always nice. We had my niece again though for almost a week and whooo boy does she tire me out. I also cannot get rid of this cough so I tried to do as little as possible, and mostly binged tv while working on a new crochet craft my office mate requested for a Christmas gift for her daughter and watching my room fall even further into disarray and disaster. We also tore out our living room carpet. Needless to say I do not feel rested and ready to go back into the office tomorrow! But I did get to have several nights of staying up late and sleeping in so that's always a plus for my night person brain.

As for The Rookie, it's good! Being cop-centric it's naturally a lot of copaganda, and a lot more "finding bad people doing bad things and chasing them down" and less of the "helpful" side of first responding we see with 911, but it does have a more hopeful bent than I was expecting, and quite a few moments of "they're not bad people just regular people who made a bad choice/had bad options". I was also prepared for Owen Strand levels of "main character screentime/storylines in what should be an ensemble show" syndrome with Nathan Fillion's character but it hasn't been too bad so far. Lots of female characters and so far I've enjoyed all of them. I'm bored with Tim's current LI because I'm already on the Lucy/Tim bandwagon, but I like the character and think she's interesting and have enjoyed her scenes (QUITE refreshing), and Nolan's LI storylines are also boring to me personally like Owen's were because I just find his love life to be the least interesting thing about him and prefer his screentime when it's looped in with the police stuff because it includes more of the main characters that way. That being said, I did like his LI's so far (almost done with season 2) and they were both involved enough in the things close to his job that they were able to be involved in main storylines going on. It's been enjoyable so far! It definitely hasn't struck the same chord as early 911 did since it's naturally a little darker in nature just due to the focus of the job (being called for crimes/solving crimes vs being called for rescue), and I haven't bonded to any of the characters as much as I did with the firefam, but I do really like all of the ensemble characters. Also it's been nice seeing threads being teased and storylines leading places and trauma being addressed right away instead of being forgotten about immediately and *maybe* cropping up later if we're lucky.

Speaking of all that mess, it's interesting that from what I can see, most of the buzz around 911 right now is about what is coming in the spring. Since the show has close out Hen's arc, and we know Buck's is dragging out for awhile and Madney's stuff has happened mostly off screen or been cut entirely, what are we even looking forward to for the finale? I said in the tags on another post that at least with s5 we were hoping for a Chim and/or Maddie cameo or at least phone conversation we got to see one side of (robbed), the BT breakup (ROBBED), and Eddie's breakdown that had been teased all season (partially robbed but at least the cliffhanger didn't come out of nowhere). But this season? Pretty much ANYTHING is going to feel like it came out of nowhere unless it's the start of the Buck breakdown because nothing else has been happening consistently enough to make sense. And even a Buck breakdown is a little out of the blue since he's been excited about the sperm donor thing since his talk with Hen and the firefam finding out was treated as a joke and there was zero follow-up in 6x08, and zero follow up on the "couch" thing OR Lev's death since those happened at the start of the season. Finding an issue with his sperm or issues with the couple COULD be something but given that it looks like the spring will have an opening disaster it's likely there won't be tons of follow-up until 6x12 and if we're lucky and get hurt Buck in the spring opening, then things *should* be about that and not the follow-up on the sperm thing anyway soooo 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

There's just like....NO direction for this season. Things are happening but having no impact, even when the potential for impact is RIGHT THERE, and instead of things being sprinkled into every episode it's like, ONE episode about a thing and then nothing for weeks. Hen's arc this season has been good, but with SEVEN main characters, you can't have only ONE of them having a clear direction their story is moving across NINE episodes. I guess we'll see tomorrow but on the bright side, as you said at least there's an actual fire AND we get the firefam in yellow wildfire turnouts with the added bonus of no Lone Star filter! Silver lining.

[thisblogisalsoboundforglory]

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY

Kage Baker’s Company Series

In the Garden of Iden

Sky Coyote

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Machine's Child

The Sons of Heaven

The Empress of Mars

Not Less than Gods

Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

Gods and Pawns

In the Company of Thieves

Ø  Science Fiction written by a woman with Asperger’s. Wildly uneven. Main protagonist is female, but there are lots of POV characters, male and female.

Ø  Big ideas.

Ø  Lots of adventure, some action.

Ø   Small doses of humor.

 Neil Gaiman

Good Omens (with Sir Terry Pratchett)

Neverwhere

Stardust

American Gods

Anansi Boys

The Graveyard Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Ø  Neil’s books are a road trip with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a baggie full of sativa.

Ø  Ideas are incidental. The Milieu’s in charge.

Ø  Adventure happens whether you like it or not.

Ø   Cosmic humor. The joke’s on us.

 Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel Series

Firewatch

Doomsday Book

To Say Nothing of the Dog (and the novel that inspired it – Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat)

Blackout/All Clear

Assorted:

The Last of the Winnebagos

Ø  Connie loves her historical research. Blackout/All Clear actually lasts as long as the Blitz, but anything in the Oxford Time Travel series is worth reading. Doomsday Book reads like prophecy in retrospect.

Ø  One idea: Hi! This is the human condition! How fucking amazing is that?!?

Ø  Gut-punch adventure with extra consequences. Background action.

Ø   I’d have to say that Doomsday Book is the funniest book about the black death I’ve ever read, which isn’t saying much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is classic farce, though. Girl’s got range.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash (After the apocalypse, the world will be ruled by Home-Owners Associations. Be afraid.)

Cryptonomicon

Anathem

Seveneves

Ø  Neal writes big, undisciplined, unfocused books that keep unfolding in your mind for months after you’ve read them. He’s a very guy-type writer, in spite of a female protagonist or two. Seveneves, be warned, starts out brilliant and devolves into extreme meh.

Ø  Big. Fucking. Ideas.

Ø  Battles, crashes, fistfights, parachute jumps, nuclear powered motorcycles and extreme gardening action. Is there an MPAA acronym for that?

Ø   Humor dry enough to be garnished with two green olives on a stick.

  Christopher Moore

Pine Cove Series:

Practical Demonkeeping

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Okay, yeah, Christmas. But Christmas with zombies, so that’s all right.)

Fluke (Not strictly Pine Cove, but in the same universe. Ever wonder why whales sing? They’re ordering Pastrami sandwiches. I’m not kidding.)

Death Merchant Chronicles:

A Dirty Job

Secondhand Souls (Best literary dogs this side of Jack London)

Coyote Blue (Kind of an outlier. Overlapping characters)

Shakespeare Series:

Fool

The Serpent of Venice

Shakespeare for Squirrels

Assorted:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Cargo cults with Pine Cove crossovers. I have a theory that the characters in this book are direct descendants of certain characters in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (So I have a favorite first-century wonder rabbi. Who doesn’t?)

Sacre Bleu

Noir

Ø  Not for the squeamish, the easily offended, or those who can’t lovingly embrace the fact that the human species is pretty much a bunch of idiots snatching at moments of grace.

Ø  No big ideas whatever. Barely any half-baked notions.

Ø  Enthusiastic geek adventure. Action as a last resort.

Ø   Nonstop funny from beginning to end.

 Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London Series

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

Broken Homes

Foxglove Summer

The Hanging Tree

The Furthest Station

Lies Sleeping

The October Man

False Value

Tales From the Folly

Ø  Lean, self-deprecating police procedurals disguised as fantasy novels. Excellent writing.

Ø  These will not expand your mind. They might expand your Latin vocabulary.

Ø  Crisply described action, judiciously used. Whodunnit adventure. It’s all about good storytelling.

Ø  Generous servings of sly humor. Aaronovitch is a geek culture blueblood who drops so many inside jokes, there are websites devoted to indexing them.

  John Scalzi

Old Man’s War Series:

Old Man’s War

Questions for a Soldier

The Ghost Brigades

The Sagan Diary

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

After the Coup

The Human Division

The End of All Things

Ø  Star Trek with realpolitik instead of optimism.

Ø  The Big Idea is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor over it.

Ø  Action-adventure final frontier saga with high stakes.

Ø  It’s funny when the characters are being funny, and precisely to the same degree that the character is funny.

Assorted:

The Dispatcher

Murder by Other Means

Redshirts (Star Trek, sideways, with occasional optimism)

Ø  Scalzi abandons (or skewers) his space-opera tendencies with these three little gems of speculative fiction. Scalzi’s gift is patience. He lets the scenario unfold like a striptease.

Ø  What-if thought experiments that jolt the brain like espresso shots.

Ø  Action/misadventure as necessary to accomplish the psychological special effects.

Ø  Redshirts is satire, so the humor is built-in, but it’s buried in the mix.

  David Wong/Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

Ø  Pargin clearly starts his novels with a handful of arresting scenes and images, then looses the characters on an unsuspecting world to wander wither they will.

Ø  Ideas aren’t as big or obvious as Heinlein, but they are there to challenge all your assumptions in the same way that Heinlein’s were.

Ø  Classic action/adventure for anyone raised on Scooby-Doo.

Ø  Occasional gusts of humor in a climate that’s predominantly tongue-in-cheek.

 Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s Series

Just One Damned Thing After Another

The Very First Damned Thing

A Symphony of Echoes

When a Child is Born*

A Second Chance

Roman Holiday*

A Trail Through Time

Christmas Present*

No Time Like the Past

What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings*

Lies, Damned Lies and History

The Great St Mary’s Day Out*

My Name is Markham*

And the Rest is History

A Perfect Storm*

Christmas Past*

An Argumentation of Historians

The Battersea Barricades*

The Steam Pump Jump*

And Now for Something Completely Different*

Hope for the Best

When Did You Last See Your Father?*

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple*

Plan For The Worst

The Ordeal of the Haunted Room

Ø  The * denotes a short story or novella. Okay, try to imagine Indiana Jones as a smartassed redheaded woman with a time machine and a merry band of full contact historians. I love history, and I especially love history narrated by a woman who can kick T. Rex ass.

Ø  The ideas are toys, not themes. Soapy in spots.

Ø  Action! Adventure! More action! More adventure! Tea break. Action again!

Ø  Big, squishy dollops of snort-worthy stuff.

 Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

Beekeeping for Beginners

Pirate King

Garment of Shadows

Dreaming Spies

The Marriage of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense

Island of the Mad

Riviera Gold

The Art of Detection (Strictly speaking, this is in the action!lesbian Detective Kate Martinelli series, but it crosses over to the Sherlock Holmes genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Holmes would deal with the transgendered, this is the book.)

Ø  Sherlock Holmes retires to Sussex, keeps bees, marries a nice Jewish girl who is smarter than he is and less than half his age and he’s mentored since she was fifteen in an extremely problematic power dynamic relationship that should repulse me but doesn’t, somehow, because this is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche out there. Mary should have been a rabbi, but it is 1920, so she learns martial arts and becomes an international detective instead. Guest appearances by Conan Doyle, Kimball O’Hara, T.E. Lawrence, Cole Porter, and the Oxford Comma.

Ø  Nothing mind-expanding here, unless the levels of meta present in a fictional world that is about how the fictional world might not be as fictional as you thought come as a surprise to anyone in the era of tie-in books, films, tv, interactive social media and RPGs.

Ø  If these two geniuses can’t catch the bad guys with their dazzling brilliance, they will happily kick some ass. Adventure takes center stage and the action sequences are especially creative.

Ø  Amusement is afoot.

 Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

Ø  In a world where Librarians are revered and Shakespeare is more popular than the Beatles, someone has to facilitate the weekly anger-management sessions for the characters of Wuthering Heights, if only to keep them from killing each other before the novel actually ends. That someone is Thursday Next – Literature Cop.

Ø  Mind-bending enough to give Noam Chomsky material for another hundred years.

Ø  Adventure aplenty. Action? Even the punctuation will try to kill you.

Ø  This is a frolicsome look at humorous situations filled with funny people. Pretty much a full house in the laugh department.

 Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series/City Watch Arc

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

Raising Steam

Ø  If this were a game of CLUE, the answer would be Niccolo Machiavelli in Narnia with a Monty Python. Everything you think you know about books with dragons and trolls and dwarves and wizards is expertly ripped to shreds and reassembled as social satire that can save your soul, even if it turns out you don’t really have one. Do not be fooled by the Tolkien chassis – there’s a Vonnegut-class engine at work.

Ø  Caution: Ideas in the Mirror Universe May be Larger Than They Appear

Ø  The City Watch arc has plenty of thrilling action sequences. Some other of the fifty-million Discworld novels have less. Every one of them is nonstop adventure. Most of the adventure, however, takes the form of characters desperately trying to avoid thrilling action sequences.

Ø  Funny? Even though I’ve read every book in the series at least ten times, I still have to make sure I have cold packs on hand in case I laugh so hard I rupture something.