October in Review

Books Acquired:
Jingo by Terry Pratchett

Books Read:
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
More Fool Me by Stephen Fry
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

I read more than I bought, so I consider that a good month. I also really enjoyed the books I finished, so that’s an even better month. There are quite a few unread Pratchett novels on my shelf already, but I like to read them in the order they were published for the most part, so I thought I’d pick up Jingo to unblock my Discworld progress. I then immediately got distracted by other books and didn’t get to it, but it’s good to have anyway.

Movies watched:
Fury (2014) – An unrelentingly bleak look at a tank squad’s life at the end of WWII. Great acting all around, but it was a little hard to connect to the characters without knowing them before this period in their lives. It would have been an amazing episode of a Band of Brothers type series, but as a singular story it was a bit rough to take. My girlfriend broke down midway through and started giggling at people dying. She may be forever changed from this experience.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) – Wes Anderson’s films are just fun to watch. This is what you’d expect, to be honest, but in a good way I think.

Zombieland (2009) – We re-watched this on Halloween, and I’d forgotten how good it is. The acting is great, the action is fun, and it hits both the funny and heartwarming notes perfectly.

TV watched:
Sherlock, Season 2 and 3 – I watched the first Sherlock series ages ago and forgot that they carried on with it, so we watched the next two this last month. It got better and better as it went on. I’ll be waiting eagerly for the next series to come out, which according to IMBD is in December 2015. Quite a long wait, sadly.

Arrested Development, Season 1 – I’ve heard for years how great this show is, but it never really grabbed me. We’ve been slowly watching it over the last few months when we are looking for something short during dinner. I’m liking it more now that we’ve hit the second season, but the first season was a bit mediocre.

Games played:
Shadow of Mordor (PC) – I loved this game. The story wasn’t bad, it started out strong actually, but the highlight was the gameplay. It was just a blast to play and offered a lot of freedom for the player. A lot of games present themselves as an open-world where you can decide what to do, but once a mission is started you’re guided by hand. This game felt open in a way that I hadn’t experienced (in an albeit limited capacity).