Week Forty Three: Girl Walks Into A Bar

OMG this is hilariously funny. It's the perfect set of celebrity insight, the behind the scenes "I wonder what it's like" and then BAM! A real life with dating and self image problems and exactly the right amount of (just my sense of) humour mixed in.

I've always found her funny on SNL, but then she dips away and her celebrity fades out of the limelight, yet underneath it all she's just as funny and so incredibly endearing.

I loved Bridget Jones (the first one anyway) yet if you took away the self-indulgence, ramp up the humour and made the protagonist 3x more likeable (that's how good I found this), you'd find Rachel Dratch.

Highly recommended to all my female friends single and the ones not so much...

Week Forty Two (B): The Big Sleep

I can't believe it's taken me this long to read Raymond Chandler, considering how much I liked the movies and Bogart in particular.

Witty, self-deprecating, intelligent and so far ahead of it's time. Chandler's writing is so often copied and imitated (badly compared to the whip smart writing in this).

The influence he laid down is wide and varied and so much sounds like a derivative of him. Now that I have read this, it's almost impossible to believe this was written in 1937.

Harry Dresden is a direct descendant of this, I thought it had a witty noir feel to it, but reading this takes the shine off Butcher's work a little, because this is sublime and perfect.

Whedon, Bucther, Eddings, Evanovich all take their queues from here and for good reason. It's like watching Fritz Lang's Epic "Spies" from 1927 and seeing every movie cliche laid bare as they are all used for the first and only original time in one go.

Recommended for all old movie and good book lovers.

Week Forty Two: The Walking Dead Vol 1

The Walking Dead Vol 1 is the collected first half dozen issues of the comics series as a seamless, one story graphic novel. I loved the TV show initially, but soon grew weary of it. I can see how they changed some characters and drew them in slower, more TV friendly arcs for the show, but as a comic book I think it works better.

The TV show felt taciturn and plodding at times, certainly repetitive. Can't say about the rest of the comics, but these first issues are tight, well drawn and dialogue heavy (for a comic). The opposite you would expect from a book to a video medium,

Week Forty One: In a House of Lies

Twenty Two novels on and each one is as easy and familiar as spending time with friends not seen in a while.

Rebus takes a back seat to Clarke and Fox, and with so many characters the story is starting to fracture a bit when trying to follow it, yet it still works and I'll happily read them until they stop.

Good story, well written. Always good value.

Week Forty: White Night

Surprisingly good read. I don't generally like long running series (ahem except for next weeks book) and generally find genre books tedious and repetetive with broad and often demeaning charcaterisations to move plot and stay the course.

But...

I actually really enjoyed this, self deprecating enough (instead of the omnipotent hero who always knows the exact everything), this one has enough self awareness to know and counter (most of the time) inherent social bias and occasional misogyny.

Charming, witty and irreverent in places, yet still true to it's roots and providing an exact delivery of 'what the reader wants' which is what these books are for.

I will probably read one or two more, though not the nearly twenty(?) or so that are in the series.

Harry Dresden has been on my 'must read' list for a while, and it doesn't matter that I dropped in on book 12(?) of the series. Only picked it up because the Library App featured it. Good call Auckland City's Libby...