Jul. 1st, 2017 05:39 pm
June Media
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chicafrom3While I'm waiting for BBCA to air the Doctor Who finale (don't leave me Peter)...
According to Goodreads, I read 36 books in June. Also according to Goodreads, I currently stand at 276 books for 2017. According to my own record keeping, of those 36 books, 19 were books I was reading for the first time. My ratio remains pretty stable at roughly half new. Of those 19 first-reads, 4 were comic books; 7 were Doctor Who related.
Of the 17 rereads, 1 was a graphic novel; 4 were Animorphs; 5 were The Baby-Sitters Club; 5 were The Saddle Club.
According to my records, I watched only 92 episodes of television; my monthly count continues to drop (118 in May). (Which is fine, honestly, but I don't really know why that is.) 75 of those episodes were new to me. There were three new-to-me series, consisting of 16 episodes, a slight jump from May's 9. More than 80% of my TV consumption was new material, but only about 17% was completely new.
I watched four new-to-me movies and rewatched three.
According to last.fm's 30-day tracker, I listened to 543 tracks in June, an average of 18 tracks per day. The top artist was Flogging Molly with 77 scrobbles, followed by Chess* (60), The Pogues (39), Taylor Swift (28), and newcomer to the list Lorde (22). A total of 99 artists and 44 albums, with Flogging Molly's new release Life Is Good being the most-played album (74 scrobbles) and the most-played track being Crushed (Hostile Nations) from the same album. Away from thigns that last.fm tracks, thanks to a couple large but not single-focus trades I've been listening to a lot of different musicals in June.
Individual thoughts:
Books:
My Prime First pick this month was Wives Of War by Soraya M. Lane, which turned out to be a good but not great wartime romance novel. The friendship between the three main characters (nurses in WWII) was the best part, even though it basically skipped over all development (they essentially meet each other and immediately become lifeling best friends sharing intimate secrets, but it's okay because once they're friends their relationship is a lot of fun to read about).
I really enjoyed The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. It's been on my reading list for a while; I probably knew what it was actually about when I first picked it up but had since forgotten and somehow formed the impression that it was a cyberpunk novel. It is not a cyberpunk novel, it's a work of metafiction about...um....social media? the nature of fame? obscure branches of philosophy? (The particular obscure branch of philosophy it deals with is made up but I still feel it should count.) It's one of those novels where I skimmed through the Goodreads reviews after reading it going "yes your criticism is completely accurate but I still liked it enough to make up for that".
The last of the three On Ordeal short stories in the Young Wizards series was released this month, this one dealing with Ronan. Ronan is quite possibly my favorite character in the Young Wizards series so I was really looking for to it, and it didn't disappoint; the chance to explore Ronan's home life was a lot of fun and his actual Ordeal was intense despite knowing the broad strokes of it beforehand.
My Doctor Who Target readthrough has brought me to Victoria Waterfield's departure, which seems a strange kind of symmetry -- her arrival was the last Target book I read in May. Her relationship with Jamie is lovely, but to be honest, I've spent the past couple books counting down to Zoe's arrival.
Also in Doctor Who news I picked up Whographica by Steve O'Brien, a collection of pictographs illustrating various facts and statistics about Doctor Who over the years, and it's delightful. There's a couple factual erros that had me raising an eyebrow, which knocked it down a star (most memorably, at one point it lists River Song's real name as Melanie Pond), but it's absolutely worth the price and the read. 9/10, would recommend.
TV:
I still have no idea what the root cause of my dropping TV numbers are.
American Gods wrapped up its first season. What a spectacular show. "A Prayer For Mad Sweeney" has supplanted "Git Gone" as my favorite episode, but seriously, there's not a dud in the bunch. And the Sweeney/Laura/Salim road trip is everything I never knew I wanted from an American Gods adaptation. Who came up with that idea? Because that was BRILLIANT.
I watched all of the first season of Anne (or Anne With An E? What's the actual title of this show?) on Netflix. Holy depressing Green Gables adaptation, Batman. I was not sufficiently prewarned for how depressing this particular adaptation is. It's fairly good and the kid who plays Anne is dead-on, just . . . wow, depressing.
I also finished watching Bill Nye Saves The World, also on Netflix. Seriously, everyone should watch this show.
A one-week free trial of the STARZ app got me to start watching Black Sails. This wasn't very well-planned because the trial ended before I could get very far at all in the show. Oops. I liked what I saw of it and will be making an effort to get the opportunity to watch the whole thing when I can.
The third season of Dark Matter started, and yesterday so did the third season of Killjoys! I can't separate these two shows in my head. I enjoy them both enormously but I need Six to rejoin the Raza and I need Dutch and Johnny to join up with each other again, please and thank you.
The final season of Orphan Black has started and things are getting intense.
Still Star-Crossed is still not very good, and ABC has already announced that it's been canceled and they're just going to burn off the already-completed episodes whenever they feel like it. I will probably watch these episodes! But. Yeah. No surprise there.
The third season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was released and I watched. The best part was Daveed Diggs as Kimmy's college classmate. Daveeeeed.
And I start watching Vikings on Amazon Prime. I'm still at the point of having trouble keeping various characters straight, but it's getting easier and I like it enough so far to keep going.
(Oh, and season ten of Doctor Who, which ends tonight. I've been posting episode reactions (um, except for Eaters Of Light, because RL intervened, so suffice to say that Eaters Of Light was basically written for me personally), so I'm just going to reiterate the point I made at the top of this post: I'm not ready for Peter to go.)
And in not-exactly-relevant news, Netflix has announced that Sense8 will be getting a two-hour finale to wrap things up and I'm DELIGHTED.
Movies:
Four new-to-me movies in June: the proshot of Oh, Hello; The Lego Batman Movie; the Ghostbusters remake; Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. Ghostbusters was the best of the four, followed by Lego Batman, but I hope Oh, Hello does well enough to encourage Netflix to help finance more Broadway proshots and put them on their service.
Music:
The big release of the month was Flogging Molly's Life Is Good which I've been eagerly anticipating, and I'm kind of obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with Crushed (Hostile Nations), but the whole album is spectacular. Other favorites: The Bride Wore Black, There's Nothing Left Pt. 1, and, of course, Reptiles (We Woke Up). Excellent album.
Other significant acquistions this month: the cast recordings of Amelie and Anastasia (both very good), Lorde's new album Melodrama (I'm kind of obsessed with Writer In The Dark), and Sam Cieri's EP Acoustic In Dublin (Ghosts is spectacular).
And of course the Tony Awards were in June! For the first time they compiled an album featuring songs from each of the shows that opened in the Broadway season (except for Hello Dolly! because for some reason the Dolly producers hate the Tonys?) and I picked up a copy. I have most of the cast recordings for the shows I'm interested in but it's still great to have this little highlights-reel of the season.
June was a good month for music.
According to Goodreads, I read 36 books in June. Also according to Goodreads, I currently stand at 276 books for 2017. According to my own record keeping, of those 36 books, 19 were books I was reading for the first time. My ratio remains pretty stable at roughly half new. Of those 19 first-reads, 4 were comic books; 7 were Doctor Who related.
Of the 17 rereads, 1 was a graphic novel; 4 were Animorphs; 5 were The Baby-Sitters Club; 5 were The Saddle Club.
According to my records, I watched only 92 episodes of television; my monthly count continues to drop (118 in May). (Which is fine, honestly, but I don't really know why that is.) 75 of those episodes were new to me. There were three new-to-me series, consisting of 16 episodes, a slight jump from May's 9. More than 80% of my TV consumption was new material, but only about 17% was completely new.
I watched four new-to-me movies and rewatched three.
According to last.fm's 30-day tracker, I listened to 543 tracks in June, an average of 18 tracks per day. The top artist was Flogging Molly with 77 scrobbles, followed by Chess* (60), The Pogues (39), Taylor Swift (28), and newcomer to the list Lorde (22). A total of 99 artists and 44 albums, with Flogging Molly's new release Life Is Good being the most-played album (74 scrobbles) and the most-played track being Crushed (Hostile Nations) from the same album. Away from thigns that last.fm tracks, thanks to a couple large but not single-focus trades I've been listening to a lot of different musicals in June.
Individual thoughts:
Books:
My Prime First pick this month was Wives Of War by Soraya M. Lane, which turned out to be a good but not great wartime romance novel. The friendship between the three main characters (nurses in WWII) was the best part, even though it basically skipped over all development (they essentially meet each other and immediately become lifeling best friends sharing intimate secrets, but it's okay because once they're friends their relationship is a lot of fun to read about).
I really enjoyed The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato. It's been on my reading list for a while; I probably knew what it was actually about when I first picked it up but had since forgotten and somehow formed the impression that it was a cyberpunk novel. It is not a cyberpunk novel, it's a work of metafiction about...um....social media? the nature of fame? obscure branches of philosophy? (The particular obscure branch of philosophy it deals with is made up but I still feel it should count.) It's one of those novels where I skimmed through the Goodreads reviews after reading it going "yes your criticism is completely accurate but I still liked it enough to make up for that".
The last of the three On Ordeal short stories in the Young Wizards series was released this month, this one dealing with Ronan. Ronan is quite possibly my favorite character in the Young Wizards series so I was really looking for to it, and it didn't disappoint; the chance to explore Ronan's home life was a lot of fun and his actual Ordeal was intense despite knowing the broad strokes of it beforehand.
My Doctor Who Target readthrough has brought me to Victoria Waterfield's departure, which seems a strange kind of symmetry -- her arrival was the last Target book I read in May. Her relationship with Jamie is lovely, but to be honest, I've spent the past couple books counting down to Zoe's arrival.
Also in Doctor Who news I picked up Whographica by Steve O'Brien, a collection of pictographs illustrating various facts and statistics about Doctor Who over the years, and it's delightful. There's a couple factual erros that had me raising an eyebrow, which knocked it down a star (most memorably, at one point it lists River Song's real name as Melanie Pond), but it's absolutely worth the price and the read. 9/10, would recommend.
TV:
I still have no idea what the root cause of my dropping TV numbers are.
American Gods wrapped up its first season. What a spectacular show. "A Prayer For Mad Sweeney" has supplanted "Git Gone" as my favorite episode, but seriously, there's not a dud in the bunch. And the Sweeney/Laura/Salim road trip is everything I never knew I wanted from an American Gods adaptation. Who came up with that idea? Because that was BRILLIANT.
I watched all of the first season of Anne (or Anne With An E? What's the actual title of this show?) on Netflix. Holy depressing Green Gables adaptation, Batman. I was not sufficiently prewarned for how depressing this particular adaptation is. It's fairly good and the kid who plays Anne is dead-on, just . . . wow, depressing.
I also finished watching Bill Nye Saves The World, also on Netflix. Seriously, everyone should watch this show.
A one-week free trial of the STARZ app got me to start watching Black Sails. This wasn't very well-planned because the trial ended before I could get very far at all in the show. Oops. I liked what I saw of it and will be making an effort to get the opportunity to watch the whole thing when I can.
The third season of Dark Matter started, and yesterday so did the third season of Killjoys! I can't separate these two shows in my head. I enjoy them both enormously but I need Six to rejoin the Raza and I need Dutch and Johnny to join up with each other again, please and thank you.
The final season of Orphan Black has started and things are getting intense.
Still Star-Crossed is still not very good, and ABC has already announced that it's been canceled and they're just going to burn off the already-completed episodes whenever they feel like it. I will probably watch these episodes! But. Yeah. No surprise there.
The third season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was released and I watched. The best part was Daveed Diggs as Kimmy's college classmate. Daveeeeed.
And I start watching Vikings on Amazon Prime. I'm still at the point of having trouble keeping various characters straight, but it's getting easier and I like it enough so far to keep going.
(Oh, and season ten of Doctor Who, which ends tonight. I've been posting episode reactions (um, except for Eaters Of Light, because RL intervened, so suffice to say that Eaters Of Light was basically written for me personally), so I'm just going to reiterate the point I made at the top of this post: I'm not ready for Peter to go.)
And in not-exactly-relevant news, Netflix has announced that Sense8 will be getting a two-hour finale to wrap things up and I'm DELIGHTED.
Movies:
Four new-to-me movies in June: the proshot of Oh, Hello; The Lego Batman Movie; the Ghostbusters remake; Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. Ghostbusters was the best of the four, followed by Lego Batman, but I hope Oh, Hello does well enough to encourage Netflix to help finance more Broadway proshots and put them on their service.
Music:
The big release of the month was Flogging Molly's Life Is Good which I've been eagerly anticipating, and I'm kind of obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with Crushed (Hostile Nations), but the whole album is spectacular. Other favorites: The Bride Wore Black, There's Nothing Left Pt. 1, and, of course, Reptiles (We Woke Up). Excellent album.
Other significant acquistions this month: the cast recordings of Amelie and Anastasia (both very good), Lorde's new album Melodrama (I'm kind of obsessed with Writer In The Dark), and Sam Cieri's EP Acoustic In Dublin (Ghosts is spectacular).
And of course the Tony Awards were in June! For the first time they compiled an album featuring songs from each of the shows that opened in the Broadway season (except for Hello Dolly! because for some reason the Dolly producers hate the Tonys?) and I picked up a copy. I have most of the cast recordings for the shows I'm interested in but it's still great to have this little highlights-reel of the season.
June was a good month for music.
