Reading, Listening, Watching 22

The worse weather is arriving and the darker nights are rolling, and with the kids being back into a good routine at school, there's plenty of time for reading, listening, and watching. Over the last few weeks I've gone through a book or two, watched plenty of movies and TV series, and even listened to some stuff. Read on to find out this month's recommendations.

Reading

I finished reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir not long after I wrote my last one of these. I moved on to more John Locke books with the first in the Donavon Creed series, Lethal People. I am just about to finish (I'm on 94%) and have enjoyed the quick read. It's a very different story to Project Hail Mary and it's easy to read, which makes Lethal People a good book to get back into reading.

Listening

As usual I've been continuing with my favourite podcast They Walk Among Us and listening to the various true-crime stories. I've also had the occasional day where I listened to pop music, not something I do often because it can be distracting, but it's fun too. 

Watching

My watching list is always going to be longer than any other because it's what the Hubby and I do to chill out at the end of the day. 

Movies

If you're a regular reader you'll know we have a movie night with the kids most weekends so we get through some good movies. Recently we've watched Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me and Austin Powers in Goldmember. It was so funny to watch our youngest realise that Mike Myers plays a few different characters.

When we were finished with the Austin Powers trilogy we moved on to Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve and we have Ocean's Thirteen on the list for weekends soon. The Ocean's series of movies is interesting because the boys usually enjoy the more action-packed movies but this series is less like that and they seemed to enjoy it just as much. I'm hoping we can add more movies like this to our list, they're definitely more enjoyable than the action-packed ones - for me, anyway.

Following watching movies with the kids the Hubby and I watched A Perfect Murder, a movie starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow. Entertaining, intriguing, and amusing in places (although I don't think it's supposed to be!) I'd recommend A Perfect Murder if you like murder-type movies. The movie was released in 1998 and it's a remake of the Hitchcock movie Dial M for Murder, although all the characters names are changed and half the plot was rewritten and altered. 

TV Series

Since last time we've been through a few TV series including the Netflix show Sex Education seasons 1, 2, and three. We finished 13 Reasons Why and Silicon Valley. We started watching Friends again and have realised it's not really for us anymore. I think Friends appeals to teens and young adults but as you get older and watch the earlier seasons you see that the characters are quite annoying and fickle. As the characters get older through the seasons they're more tolerable and now we're watching season 8 it's much better. The characters are getting married, thinking about having children, it's all a lot more adult and tolerable. What this has taught me though is that Friends is probably not a series we will watch again after we're done.

On a more positive note we've enjoyed watching a Netflix show called Explained. It's a series where each episode covers a different topic and they try to explain some things about the topic in a 30 minute episode. There have been episodes on topics like hurricanes, sex, politics, even plastic surgery. It's been good to watch something factual and we're going to take a look at the more focused seasons where there are 5 episodes about one topic, like money. I'll let you know what we think about that next time.

Finally we started watching The Wire again. This series is brilliant, and while it can be tough to get your head around what they're talking about at the start of the series you soon get used to it. We enjoy watching the efforts of the Baltimore Police department as they try to tackle the city's drug problems. It's an old series but I think it ages well and I'd recommend it if you like watching US crime shows.

Well that's it for this time. Do let me know if you see anything good!