I’m pretty far behind getting this posted, as it’s now late August. I finished it in July but just sort of forgot about it, apparently. It’s going on the blog on August 19th. I’ll try to do better at the end of the third quarter…
It was another quarter in which I didn’t finish very many books. There’s no great mystery where my reading time went, though. I have done quite a bit of writing this quarter, and completed a podcast episode almost every week. It seems like we’ve raised the difficulty level on our everyday life, too.
Books Completed
- The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee et al.
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
- Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin
- The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher
- The Wonderful O by James Thurber
- The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
- City of Glass by Paul Auster
- Unspeakable by Chris Hedges with David Talbot
- Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
That’s nine books, which is still under my book-a-week target. I almost finished Butcher Bird by Richard Kadrey (I finished it on July 4th, so it’s technically a 3rd-quarter book).
Books in Progress
- Ghosts by Paul Auster (in The New York Trilogy)
- The Ill-Made Knight (book 3 of The Once and Future King) by T. H. White
- Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
I’ve been reading these books to the kids at bedtime:
- D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire
- Peter Pan and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie (2019 Arcturus paperback edition)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
The kids haven’t really been enjoying Order of the Phoenix as it is extremely long and wordy, so we will likely abandon that book. They also didn’t love Peter Pan, so we may give up on that one as well. They do enjoy Norse Myths but we are making slow progress, as we only read one of the chapters occasionally.
Films Watched
- The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 film)
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017 film)
- Ant-Man (2015 film)
- The Martian (2015 film) (Extended Edition on Blu-ray)
- Thor (2011 film)
- The Last Starfighter (1984 film)
TV Shows Watched
We watched the following Doctor Who serials:
- Earthshock (1982 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
- The Five Doctors (1983 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
- Full Circle (1980 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
- Logopolis (1981 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
- State of Decay (1980 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
- Warriors’ Gate (1981 Doctor Who serial fan edit)
We watched the following episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- Season 5, Episode 5: “Disaster”
- Season 5, Episode 6: “The Game”
- Season 5: Episode 18: “Cause and Effect”
- Season 5, Episode 19: “The First Duty”
We watched the following episodes of Babylon 5:
- Season 1, Episode 1: “Midnight on the Firing Line”
- Season 1, Episode 2: “Soul Hunter”
- Season 1, Episode 3: “Born to the Purple”
- Season 1, Episode 4: “Infection”
- Season 1, Episode 5: “The Parliament of Dreams”
- Season 1, Episode 6: “Mind War”
- Season 1, Episode 7: “The War Prayer”
We also watched:
- Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998 TV movie)
- Lindsay Ellis’s trilogy of videos about The Hobbit movie trilogy (available on YouTube)
- Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu Season 1, Episode 1: “Way of the Ninja”
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 1, Episode 1: “Ambush”
On to the third quarter! If all goes well, I will keep up with the weekly posting, and at the end of 2018 I’ll have a post for each week, and a wordy, strange, and wildly uneven journal of the year. I have no idea yet whether I’ll want to try to continue the weekly journal into 2019. It seems like good practice or a good source of raw material for something, even if I don’t know what that thing will be.
Ypsilanti, Michigan
July 13th, 2018
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