Category: Books

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Hopefully The Walking Dead Season 7 Will Be Known As The Lost Season!

Hey do you like shows where things happen, people grow, and mysteries form?  Well then you shouldn’t watch The Walking Dead Season 7.  It was sooo booooring.  We all knew the whole season that Rick’s gang would get all the settlements together to battle the Saviors, but they managed to do it in the slowest and least interesting way possible.

It starts out with Rick lost and unsure.  Only knowing that if he gets stuff for Negan that his people will live.  It turns out his people hate that idea, so they keep getting killed anyway, or at the very least talked to by Negan for long amounts of time.  Which is like getting killed.  We did loose a few people we didn’t care about.  This goes on for the first half of the season.  It is slow and dumb.  Then the second half is about Rick finding guns and people to fight Negan.  This is also slow and dumb.

Finally in the last episode they fight Negan, kind of, but of course Negan gets away, so I am guessing they are going to build up for a full season again until the ‘war’ happens.  Sure the last episode was fun because something actually happened, and it showed what this series is capable of, but it was terrible that we had to wait through the entire season to get there.

I am hopping that the producers are listening to their fans and their dwindling viewer numbers and start doing something interesting.  That way we can all just forget that season seven ever happened.  It was bad, and worse still, bad in the most boring way possible.  Please get interesting again The Walking Dead!

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My Evening With Neil Gaiman!

When I bought a ticket for “An Evening with Neil Gaiman” in Seattle, I was unsure as to what I was buying.  Was he just going to read his stuff? Was he going to answer questions?  Was he going to talk about his current projects?  It turns out the answer was yes to the first two questions and briefly mention the third.

It was different experience because it was just him, alone, on stage in a large hall standing in front of a lectern.  While he was introduced by a local radio host and an accordion player, this was all about Neil Gaiman talking to his fans.  It was wonderful.  He has a warm English accent, and he brought his work to life as he spoke.  He read a story from his current book, Norse Mythology, and then several of his different short works.  My only complaints about the evening were that some of the questions asked of him were on the generic side, and that I wished he would have gone longer.  Apparently I was not the only person who thought that way because we clapped until he came out for an encore.

I am not sure how many authors sell out symphony halls and then get cheered on for just one last story, but believe me when I tell you that it all felt perfectly natural, and I had thought that it would have worked I would have cheered him on for a second encore.  It made me wish that we treated more of our authors like rock stars.  They fill this world with their creativity, but then we generally ignore them, or tell them they should get back to work because they are not writing fast enough.

If Neil Gaiman should come traipsing around your town, you should go see him.  I believe his next stop is Dallas.  It was a fun night, and not one that I am going to forget.  Now if only he would stop touring around the world and get back to writing.  There are novels I need to read that haven’t been written yet.

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Legion Is My Favorite Show So Far This Year!

I am kind of mad.  Because besides Archer I never had a reason to watch FX, but now I can’t wait for the next season of Legion.  It was finally an X-Men show/movie about that wasn’t about superheroes.  It was just about mutants trying to figure out how to live in a hostile world.  Sure there was some hero-y stuff, but that is mostly because they have cool powers and they need to use them from time to time because bad people want to hurt them.

Another great part of the show is that because of David’s mutation and his disease Legion is unendingly weird and trippy.  It is like they let Stanley Kubrick take a crack that the superhero genre.  Every episode had something cool to show us, and because it was only eight episodes long it was relatively light on filler.

While this is definitely Dan Stevens’/David’s show, Aubrey Plaza as Lenny stole every episode she was in.  She was incredibly watchable.  The rest of the cast was delightful as well.  Though I did feel that Rachel Keller as David’s love interest Sydney could have used more to do.  However, she did serve as a good fill in for the audience taking in all the crazy things happening around her.  A non-comedic straight-man if you will.  Because things really did get super nuts.

We have twelve long months before Legion is back on the air, and now I have to figure out how to keep FX as part of my cable package.  Whereas before I could have lived without it, and they are making another X-Men show to compliment this one!  Curse you good TV!!!!!!!!  Oh well, I might as well enjoy it.  Queue the X-Men theme!

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Valerian Looks Freaking Amazing In Trailer #2!

With all the comic book adaptations hitting the big screen these days it is hard to get excited about all of them, but holy smokes Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets looks fantastic.  It is a like watching an ice cream sundae.  I just want to dive right in!  Now I am hungry and excited.  July can’t get here soon enough!  While the last trailer gave us a glimpse of all the crazy stuff we were going to see, this trailer gives us Valerian’s mission: to stop something… Oh well, it looks too good to get too concerned about a generic ominous plot.

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Get A Lesson In Norse Mythology From Neil Gaiman!

With Neil Gaiman coming to town in less than a month I had to read his latest book.  Though to be fair I would have read his book anyway, but his upcoming talk in Seattle was a kick in the pants to finish the book sooner rather than latter.  It would have been a shame for him to be discussing a volume on my Amazon wish list (very high on my wish list mind you) and not one I had just read.

Neil Gaiman’s latest work is a collection of Gaimanized Norse Myths creatively titled Norse Mythology.  I know that some people were a little disappointed that these stories weren’t about the characters from American Gods (though it is kind of about them), but instead tales about the occupants of the Nine Worlds.  They shouldn’t be though, they should be disappointed there aren’t more stories in the book.  My only complaint is that I wanted more.

Norse Mythology will take you from the birth of the Nine Worlds and the gods all the way through to Ragnarök one story at a time.  These stories are told very much like someone would vocally tell a story around a camp fire.  There is not of chit-chat or characterization, but a lot of Thor, Loki and Co. going out and doing stuff.  It just turns out that the story teller is very recognizably Neil Gaiman.

In the introduction Gaiman wishes that more of the Norse gods stories would have been preserved, so that we could have known more about the other god’s and their stories, and after reading this book I have to agree.  There is such a good cast of characters I would have loved to hear more about them.  Still, I am very happy with the book that Gaiman has produced, and now that he has given me the basics, there is nothing stopping me from telling my own Norse tales.