The World's Common Tater

I did my last weekly recap before Christmas so today I will cover the highlights of what I have watched and read since then.

Movies

I don’t think I have watched a movie since mid-December that was not a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. I miss having cheesy Christmas movies running in the background while I write. I’m struggling with non-stress programming for my background noise.

TV

While I have not watched a lot of movies, I have watched a lot of TV.

I finished season one of The Sex Lives of College Girls while my family played cards with my mother-in-law. I thought season one was very good. I’m glad there will be a season two.

We finished Hawkeye last night. I think it is my favorite of the Disney Plus Marvel shows so far. A good mix of action and humor. I need a team-up movie or TV show with Kate Bishop and Yelena.

We subscribed to Paramount Plus and started watching Australian Survivor. They only have seasons 4-6, so we are watching season 4. I like it. It is more of what the original show used to be before they felt the need to add too many twists and idols.

Amazing Race started back this week. I thought we would never see this season. I’m happy they were able to finish it. The first episode was filmed before the Covid shutdown. Next week is when they tell them they are pausing the show and then we move on to the post-Covid episodes.

We have watched three episodes of Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman on the History Channel. It is interesting. I love a good prison escape story.

Books

I have finished four books since I last updated.

The Poacher’s Son by Paul Doiron – The first in a series about Game Warden Mike Bowditch. Mike arrives home one day to a cryptic message from his estranged dad. Soon after, he discovers that his dad is on the run and wanted for the murder of two people, including a local cop. Mike tried to find his dad and the real killer before it is too late.

This was a good start to a series. I liked the main character. The writing is good. I enjoyed the sense of place. I will likely read the next in the series.

Billy Summers by Stephen King – One of the rare King books with nothing horror or supernatural at all. Billy Summers is a hitman. He only takes a job if the target is a bad person. He plans to do one last job and then retire. The new job is unusual. He is hired to kill someone who is in police custody when they are extradited. He is embedded in the town where the prisoner is expected to be transferred lives there for months. He soon realizes something is very wrong with the job and he may not make it out alive.

King is my favorite author and this one did not disappoint. Billy is an interesting character and the story takes an interesting turn in the middle. It’s nice to get a different type of King story.

Later by Stephen King – I always get the new Stephen King books for Christmas so I always end the year with a King book. I finished this one on New Year’s Eve. Jamie Conklin is not a normal kid. He discovers at a young age that he can see and talk to the dead. A combination of an evil ghost that stalks him and an NYPD detective who wants to use him for her own purposes makes life complicated and dangerous.

I liked this one, but not as much as other King books. It was an interesting concept but wasn’t long enough to really pay off. I also found the last-minute reveal of who his father was to be weird and unnecessary.

Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight – Told in various viewpoints and bouncing back and forth in time we get the story of a group of friends who met in college. They have come together at one’s summer house to hold an intervention and convince another to go to rehab. Later in the weekend, a car is found. One of the group is dead, another is missing. Is it connected to an incident from their college years?

It took me longer to read this one than I expected. I didn’t like any of the characters. I don’t think I was supposed to. You don’t know who is dead and who is missing until the very end of the book. The ending connects to another part of the story interestingly, but it took a long time to get there and then the book ends. It could have been much better.

On Deck

I have the Nicolas Cage movie, Pig, on DVD.

Euphoria and Righteous Gemstones both return on HBO this week.

I am about to start reading All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M Morris.