January in Review

Books Acquired:
The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
Richard Stark’s Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke
Espedair Street by Iain Banks
Smut: Stories by Alan Bennett
Funny Girl by Nick Hornby
Letters of Note by Shaun Usher
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony Holden, Ben Holden

Books Read:
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
She by H. Rider Haggard
Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

I was a naughty boy this month. I had an order from Amazon, so I thought I’d throw in a couple graphic novels, which on its own is fine. Unfortunately, yesterday I also accidentally found myself in a bookstore (by driving downtown and walking four blocks directly to it) and left with five more books. Four from that first store, and an additional one from another store.

(Not pictured is Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, because it was already on the bedside table and I forgot about it.)

I’m not on a book-buying ban at the moment, and I do have space on the shelf, but I am unofficially on a books-I-don’t-plan-to-immediately-read-buying ban. My physical shelves may have room, but my mental to-read pile is starting to teeter.

List of justifications/excuses:

• I’ve listened to a few of Iain Banks’ novels these past couple of years, but still haven’t read a physical copy of his novels yet.
• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett was a lot of fun, and I’m not familiar with anything else by him, so I thought Smut looked like a good next step.
• I read everything by Nick Hornby, so a used copy of his latest was a no-brainer.
• The Letters of Note weblog is fantastic, and this hardcover was 65% off, so I mean come on.
• The terribly named Poems That Make Grown Men Cry seems like a great way to expose myself to more poetry, which is something I’ve been meaning to do. I think this’ll be a great jumping off point.

It will be a bit quiet here for the next couple of weeks, as we’re heading to Hawaii for a little holiday, but in the meantime I will probably be posting photos of spam and Mai Tais to Instagram and Twitter.

Movies watched:
Misery Loves Comedy (2015) – I love comedians, and interviews with them, so I did enjoy this. It was pretty disjointed, though, and probably not that interesting if you aren’t into listening to comedians not make jokes.

TV watched:
House of Cards: Season 1 & 2 (2013 – 2014) – We finally decided to watch this, since Netflix originals have been so great lately and this is the one that really started it. We love it and can’t stop binging on it. Kevin Spacey is amazing in this, but the writing and the rest of the cast are all brilliant too.

Games played:
Guild of Dungeoneering (2015) (PC) – I really wanted to love this. Check out the trailer below – fun sketchbook art style, fantastic sea shanty-ish music, puns! Unfortunately, after a few hours it really felt like I experienced pretty much everything, and luck was just too much of a factor, which just made it frustrating. I might come back to this, but it was a bit disappointing.

Tales from the Borderlands (2014 – 2015) (PC) – Finally finished the last episode. This was a great series. If you have any interest in Telltale games, it’s worth picking up.

Tabletop Simulator (2015) (PC) – I just played around with this for a couple of hours, but it looks really promising. It’s a board game simulator, and it comes with the standards – chess, backgammon, etc – but there’s also a huge amount of user content. We played the XCOM board game, and it was a perfect reproduction. A friend of mine is a board game nut, but he lives out of town, so this will give us a chance to try a bunch of games in the future.

What have you been reading/watching/playing this month?