2023 Year-in-Review

Welcome to 2024! Before we all dive into the new year, let’s turn our gaze back to the prior one.

Other than spending the last week and a half with a miserably persistent, hacking cough, 2023 was a good year for me. The day job goes well, and the side job is picking up. The kiddos continue to get taller, faster, and stronger. 2024 is a big year for me, workwise, but I do want to focus on personal wellness this year. Jobs and kids can’t take all my time.

What didn’t happen was very much blogging or reading. Every blog post across both blogs in 2023 is listed below. It’s a short list. I also read by far the fewest books since I started using Goodreads to track my reading in 2011. I read nine fewer books in 2023 than I did in 2022 (itself a puny year for reading). I did read almost as many pages in 2023 as in 2022.

I set various general reading goals each year. Or at least I used to. Along the lines of, “I will read one book on x topic and one book on y topic” and so on. Only reading 29 books, that mostly fell by the wayside. I did continue my yearly march through the U.S. presidents in order by reading a biography of Millard Fillmore. I continue plugging away with my Foundations reading project, if not at the pace I would like.

Book Reader Wheel of Time Recap and Reaction: Season Two, Episodes 7-8

Episodes 7 and 8 of season 1 sharply turned me against the show. The good news is that is not the case with episodes 7 and 8 of season 2. Part of that is my dim view of the show is already baked in, but in all fairness the show managed to avoid ending another season on a sour note. The bad news is that the show once again failed to end with a real pop. This stands in sharp contrast with both HBO’s Game of Thrones and the books themselves (and those are two comparisons the show cannot escape from).

SPOILERS abound below.  Mostly for the show, but there will be book spoilers sprinkled in as well.

Recap

Episode 7

Moiraine and Suian’s plans for their future are derailed when they witness Gitara’s Foretelling from the books. This is an economical approach, if over-focused on the odd decision to foreground Moiraine and Suian’s romantic relationship, but the performance of the actress playing Gitara is . . . not good.

We move from there back 20 years into the future. Lan fessed up to everything, because, wow, Rafe does really not like that character. Suian is angry Moiraine hid she had been stilled, but mostly she wants to meet Rand. Lan and Rand have a long chat ending in him teaching Rand Cat Crossing the Courtyard. Rand then walks in completely normally to see the Amyrlin. Suian telling him he is the water that drives the Wheel gets a fundamental thematic element of the story badly wrong. Suian imprisons Rand, because, seriously, Rafe hate every single character in this story.

Mat gets captured (who does he think he is, a Supergirl?). Lanfear wakes him up in Falme, but Ishamael is the next Forsaken who will talk to. Ishamael offers him a tea from the Age of Legends that will give him access to his prior lives. (I have thoughts.)

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs
Copyright: © 2023 Amazon Content Services LLC and Sony Pictures Television Inc.

Book Reader Wheel of Time Recap and Reaction: First Six Episodes of Season Two

I’m trying not to hate-watch the Amazon Wheel of Time show. I really am. And succeeding! I don’t hate it. But then I don’t exactly love it either.

SPOILERS abound below.  Mostly for the show, but there will be book spoilers sprinkled in as well.

Recap

Season 2 opens with the Darkfriend Social, a classic, fan-favorite scene from the books. So obviously Ishmael escorts us out of it as quickly as we enter it.

Moiraine is next. Joined by Verin and Bayle Domon (efficiency, efficiency). Moiraine kills a Fade with a dagger, because why not undermine a key early book-show antagonist? On the other hand, seeing the Fades shadow-walk is cool. Next episode, Moiraine is a jerk to Lan for no discernable reason (other than that she can kill Fades single handedly, so what does she need him for?). Moiraine has apparently been gone from Carhien for six decades, which screws up some timelines.

Meanwhile at the Tower, Egwene and Nynaeve are not in white. But at least the show does a much better job of demonstrating the scale of the White Tower this time. No Laras? I say we revolt. Alanna comes off as a sexual predator.[1] Elayne arrives and takes advantage of liberal novice rules (or not). Nynaeve gets summoned to the arches. Nynaeve (never-nude) takes the test to be Accepted. A rather nifty bait-and-switch is followed by a rather less nifty bait-and-switch.

Photo Credit: Jan Thijs
Copyright: © 2023 Amazon Content Services LLC and Sony Pictures Television Inc.

Honor Among Thieves is a Dungeons and Dragons Movie that Remembers Fantasy is Supposed to be Fun

The worst consequence of Game of Thrones’ success is that it wrongly taught movie and TV writers and execs that fantasy should be dour. If that wasn’t your bag, or if you just got worn out on all the doom and gloom and gore masquerading as “prestige” TV, then you didn’t have a lot of options other than going back to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the (very underrated) The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe movie from 2005 or sidestepping from fantasy to the MCU superhero movie assembly line. It is the MCU that Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves resembles more than Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. It takes joy in the telling, never misses a good joke, and balances accessibility to the masses with plentiful Easter eggs for the hardcore.

Fourth Quarter 2022 Quarter-and-Year-in-Review

I will say this about 2022: it was a great year for everything but reading and blogging. The dominant event there was the birth of our son, but otherwise it was a very busy, very fulfilling year filled with work and family.

I didn’t even catch up on reading during the holidays, so my beginning of the year reading plans will look a lot like my end of the year reading plans. I finished my annual presidential biography on the last possible day and finally finished The Odyssey, but I still need to read the second Mistborn series (with one reread and two first reads to go), reread Lord of the Rings, restart and finally finish the Silmarillion, finish my reread of The Wheel of Time (stalled deep in the second-to-last book because I didn’t want to haul that massive hardcover across the country), read the Michael Livingstone book on The Wheel of Time, and read The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. For my Foundations project, I’m not 100% sure where I will go next beyond finishing The Federalist Papers and the new David Hackett Fischer book and reading some Aristotle (recommendations welcome).

I don’t really regret how little I read and blogged in 2022, because for the most part I was doing more important things, but I do want to figure out how to squeeze in more reading time in 2023. I am particularly irked I let Mount TBR grow by three books in 2022.

300 and Its Sequel Rise of an Empire Reflect the Respective Virtues of Sparta and Athens

The best thing about finally watching 300: Rise of an Empire after noticing it on HBO Max was that it spurred me to rewatch 300. That sounds like damning with faint praise and it kind of is. Rise of an Empire lacks the style and verve and punch of 300. But it is a fine movie in its own right, and it is interesting to compare the two movies about two very different Greek city-states fighting two very different battles during the same invasion.

Rings of Power Redux

I finished season one of Amazon’s The Rings of Power show adapting material from the appendices to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.[1] I also did two other things since my last post on the show that affect how I view it: I rewatched the Peter Jackson LotR movies and I read (reread) academic historian Bret Devereaux’s posts dissecting the battle of Helm’s Deep and the siege of Gondor. The rewatch raised things a bit, with the show holding up well and benefiting from the careful touches of foreshadowing that are including. Revisiting Jackson’s LotR adaptation lowered things a bit.

My final estimation stayed where my initial estimation landed. Rings of Power is good, not great. It didn’t fall off a cliff like The Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones adaptations. It isn’t remotely as atrocious as Jackson’s Hobbit . . . thing (do not attempt to defend those movies or compare them with the show, as I do not suffer fools). But nor does it rise to the heights of Jackson’s LotR movies or, especially, the source material.

Revisiting Jackson’s LotR adaptation did solidify something that had been oozing around the dark corners of my mind. The basic problem with the show is that Jackson’s movies are its urtext.

All images courtesy of Amazon Prime Video

Third Quarter 2022 Quarter-in-Review

The summer’s swelter retreats as cool fog and brisk mornings creep in.  Soon the leaves will begin to change and yards fill with skeletons.  Weekends have come to be dominated by football.  It is fall, the very best season of the year.

Review of Against All Gods by Miles Cameron

Miles Cameron’s epic fantasy is an auto-buy for me at this point (I am still working my way around to his historical fiction and science fiction).  His Traitor Son Cycle and Masters & Mages series are two of my favorite series of this century, if not of all time.  Against All Gods is the first book in his latest epic fantasy series.  I will continue on with The Age of Bronze series, but its opening volume is the weakest yet from a Miles Cameron series.

Recap and Review of the First Two Episodes of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Did I watch the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime (Rings of Power from here on out) on Thursday evening as soon as they dropped?  Well, I tried.  I didn’t quite finish the second episode, or even really make it quite halfway.  I can’t blame Amazon for that one so much as a schedule that has me up and moving early every morning.  I was intrigued enough to finish episode two while I ate lunch at work on Friday.  But when Jim Cornelius from Frontier Partisans asked my opinion on the show, I couldn’t muster much passion in response.  I’m just not that invested, and the first two episodes didn’t change that.

SPOILERS for the first two episodes below the fold.

Pic courtesy of Amazon Studios