Weekly reading/watching meme

[petronia]

Not much this week since I'm mostly writing stuff and/or sick. :P Theme: concerted strategic attempt to clear the shelves results in exposure to girlfriend near-fridging.

What are you reading/watching now?

Previously in-progress stuff plus John Sundman's Cheap Complex Devices (one of two metafictionally linked books I bought from the author at SXSW '11 -- and I've read the first, so I want to strike it from my list XD)

What did you just finish reading/watching?

Books/comics:
Jo Nesbø, The Snowman (lent by a workmate, needs to be returned)
Winter Soldier #10-14 (finishing the Brubaker run so I can archive it)

Movies/TV:
Finished the LotR extended DVD featurettes. I know, right?

What will you read/watch next?

Will see once I finish the in-progress stuff...

BONUS QUESTION: what books/movies did you acquire?

None! Wow!

Comments

[ephemerides]

Amazon only seems to have Cheap Complex Devices available (and the Kindle edition is cheap I see!). Would you recommend?

(Of course, I have Gun Machine waiting for me at the library, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet on my Kindle to finish, despite the fact that the first chapter made me want to hunt down and shake the author while screaming about 18th-century Chinese and Japanese medicine, so it's not like I'm wanting for fiction at the moment. XD)

[perevision]

Ooh, feel better! :(

[marej.livejournal.com]

Near-fridging?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

All the joys of girlfriend-fridging except she doesn't actually die (is saved in a super-cheesy manner).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, I should probably expand on that a bit. XD Nesbø is the sort of depressing potboiler thriller writer whose books contain lots of women being tortured to death in awfully inventive ways, leading into a final confrontation in which the girlfriend of the alcoholic detective etc. etc. Brubaker is unfortunately also fairly prone to storylines in which gfs/wives die or are put in peril in order to create backstory for man-angst, and that is essentially what happens here, although part of the rationale (I strongly suspect) was to free up Black Widow for further non-gf-ish in-canon adventures so she never seemed truly endangered (and I mean, also, Black Widow, geez). Sundman in his previous book was pretty good at creating female characters but not very good at handling them (in the "many sexy women fall in love with the everyman hero" vein), and really, incredibly egregious about race (not even going to get into it), but this book calls out the previous book meta-fictionally for being a bad book in a complicated way so... not sure how serious he is? Have not actually finished the second one? I do not think he wrote the first book as a joke, though, for what it's worth. XD

[marej.livejournal.com]

thank you for expanding ;) I like how one word turned into entire paragraph. possibly requiring footnotes. *mwah*