Weekly Round Up: a Movie and a Lotta Books

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Things are slow here on the food and workout front, so just means we'll have to talk about movies and books this week.  Plus I tried something that I heard about on the internet IRL.

Since I'm skimping on food and workouts, let me give you a picture of a butterfly instead.  This guy just happened to pass by for a visit while I had the camera out.

Eats & Workouts

Eh, I haven't made anything terribly exciting recently so let's skip food.  And there's nothing new to say about workouts either.

Watches

You know how it is when "everybody" raves about a movie but you just don't have the warm fuzzies for it?  That was how I felt about a movie called The Uninvited prior to this week.  I'd seen it a long time ago and it didn't really do anything for me.  Its place in history is that it is considered to be the first true horror movie, and it gets a lot of buzz in old movie circles this time of year.  After seeing a few hype videos on Youtube, I decided to give it another chance, and I'm glad I did because this time it really clicked with me.

When you're hanging out on the coast in England and come across a lovely abandoned house that's move in ready and learn that the owner is willing to sell for C-H-E-A-P and so what if one of the rooms is really chilly and your dog refuses to come upstairs....

The reason this simple haunted house story is considered to be the first true horror film is that all other haunted house movies prior to this had "explanations"...a.k.a. all the heirs gather in the house at midnight to read the will and "ghosts" turn up.  This is about ghosts without the quotation marks.  You get swept up in the excitement of "ooh we found the perfect house and we can afford it!" to "hey this is a pretty cool village and we've fixed up the house nicely" to "wait, something's not right here" to "OK, OK, this is out of the ordinary but we're logical people and we can figure this out."  As they say in the video, it's zero scares and zero gore, but lots of riding along with the characters' emotions and lot of suspense trying to figure it out.

Reads

Sorry not sorry we have a lot to talk about!  Two misses, one mixed result, and one OMG please please please drop everything and read this now to report.

As a follow up to the last time we talked about books, ouch I went from not being that in to Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith to outright disliking it.  What I said before, it's just about poor people.  Ima put a pause on my grand plans to reread her other books.

I finally got around to trying A Court of Thorns and Roses, but I just couldn't get into it so it was a quick DNF.

For this weekend's road trip I put a dent into a Nora Ephron audio book.  Wallflower at the Orgy is a collection of essays from the late 60s.  This is the mixed result: when it was good it was VERY GOOD, but once we got to back-to-back Topics That No One Has Thought About Since the 1960s I found myself hitting fast forward and then finally giving up.  So my recommendation if you're an Ephron fan is to listen to the first two hours of the book.  You'll get the brilliant Wallflower at the Orgy essay (spoiler it's about journalism - didn't want to get anyone's hopes up), an inside look at Helen Gurley Brown, and a takedown of Ayn Rand.

And finally 🚨🚨🚨 GOOD BOOK ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 GOOD BOOK ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 GOOD BOOK ALERT 🚨🚨🚨.  Let me tell you about The Violin Conspiracy by  Brendan Slocumb.

I get a lot of reading ideas from the Sarah's Bookshelves podcast, but also a lot of DNFs so when I hear her really get into a book I tend to hold until I start hearing verification from other sources.  In this case it was Stephany who put this back on my radar when she talked about Slocumb's other book, Symphony of Secrets.  TBH I was more interested in Symphony than in Violin Conspiracy, but Violin Conspiracy was the one that was available for me to check out.

And all I can say is that for a second choice, this one hit a home run.  I didn't know anything about it besides the title and honestly that's enough of a background.  I got hooked from the first sentence and had a hard time putting down the Kindle each night.  I'm close to the top of the list for Symphony can can't wait to tear into it.

Stuff on the Internet that I Tried IRL

It's been a long time since we've had this section!  I just don't try that much stuff on the internet IRL. 

Last week one of our bed sheets developed a hole putting us in the market for new ones.  My go-to is Vera Wang sheets at Kohls which aren't too expensive but they are a bit of coin plus they require a trip to the store.  Wait a minute, didn't I just hear about a really awesome set of super cheap sheets recently?????

It turns out my source was The Hungry Runner Girl and these are the sheets that I dropped a whopping $37 on. There were a few negative reviews but I'm here to say what Janae said but in my own words - as long as these hold up then yes "the only sheets that I will ever buy again" is not an overstatement.

That's all for now!  I've got another road trip to tell you about and then things might possibly calm down and get back to normal.