I think it was fall for a day or two, then it felt like summer again. Sigh. Just come on already!
Movies:
I made it to four movies in September. The first one was Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. I had the book on my Kindle, but decided to wait to read it until I had the characters in my head from the movie stars playing them. It was a good choice. The movie was quite entertaining...Jonathan Rhys Meyers is always a good choice for a villain (which is why I'm really looking forward to NBC's Dracula that starts this month!). I didn't find it to be as angsty as it could've been, which is a plus...but I was more than a little disturbed by one of the storylines. It was fun overall.
The Family is about a mob family that have to go into witness protection for turning against the mob. Only they're really bad at not being a mob family and keep getting moved around. The movie takes place in a small town in France, their latest relocation. It's not just the dad who does bad deeds, it's the mom, the son, and the daughter. How do you respond to criticism in the grocery store? Blow up the store of course. How do politely tell a boy you're not interested in them? Beat him to a pulp with a tennis racket? Sure. It was really funny and good to see Michelle Pfieffer in something again.
I saw Despicable Me 2 again. It was still hilarious. Can't wait to own it.
Last movie of September was Rush. Not Rush the band. Not Rush the movie from the early 90s. This one was about the Formula 1 driver rivalry in the mid-70s between James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. It was fantastic! The guys playing the main characters even looked like the real drivers. I used to watch Formula 1, but it was about 10 years after this...although one of the names I recognized showed up on the leader boards at some point. I just found this to be a great story and all of the high speeds and occasional crashes made it really exciting. The only down side was that the traffic leaving the theater was very slow and I wanted to go fast like the movie drivers.
Books:
This month I read all of the currently published Mortal Instruments books: City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels, and City of Lost Souls, all by Cassandra Clare, Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt, The Life of Cesare Borgia by Rafael Sabatini, and Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (technically finished in October).
The Mortal Instruments series is pretty good. A girl, Clary, wakes up one birthday and finds that she can see people who aren't appearing to others, leading her to see a murder in a club. But it's not what it seems. She, and the killers, are really Shadowhunters: Half-angels who protect humanity from all sorts of demon-types. Clary's mother left that world behind to escape her late husband and had a magician alter Clary's memories so she'd never know about it. At 16, it's too late and it all comes crashing in...she sees the murder, meets the Shadowhunters, her mom is kidnapped, she learns her father is still very much alive and very evil, and she falls in love with a Shadowhunter that turns out to be her brother. As the books progress, her best friend becomes something else (since the movie didn't cover it specifically, I'm not spoiling it), her family issues get both better and worse, her mom's longtime friend turns out to be a werewolf, she meets the Faerie Queen...and so much more. The first three books are very strong (book 1 and book 3 being the best...book 2 is just a plot movers with some revelations). Book 3 could've ended differently and made this collection only a trilogy, but it didn't...which made me sad because book 4 was really tedious. Book 5 was much better. Book 6 comes out in May. Sigh. I hate when I get sucked into these sets of things, but this was good enough to keep my attention for a good solid couple of weeks.
Lookaway, Lookaway was read in the middle of Mortal Instruments book 4 to alleviate all that teen overload I was feeling. This one is the story of a generational southern family. It was interesting, but the mom was so manipulative that it was shocking to see her survive the whole story...especially with how unhinged everyone was with that many civil war reenactment firearms around the house. It was sometimes funny. Everyone had lots of demons. But in the end, they were still family. I don't know...I wouldn't read it again, but it definitely helped get me out of the Shadowhunter world for a bit.
The Life of Cesare Borgia has been something I've read in the background for a couple of months. After watching Borgias (Canal+ on Netflix) and The Borgias (Showtime), I found myself wanting more, so I turned to actual history as opposed to filmed fiction based on history. Cesare was the second son of the Pope. His life ended early, but it was pretty amazing. Not as sensational as filmed by either series, but really not that far off. The author tried to be fair, reporting facts alongside rumor and debunking myth where he could. It was a very interesting read. He was a cardinal in the church (in the Vatican, really) but his soul was that of a warrior. He could plan battles and win with minimal to no bloodshed. He had a sharp mind and was essentially fearless. He also killed many who opposed him (although not as many as rumor supposed). The family as a whole has been put up as the most dysfunctional family in history, but after reading some of the rumors and the facts, I'm not so sure. They were powerful and influential, but I don't know that they were so many of the terrible things that have been reported. I might try to find more and continue reading. That family is just fascinating in both fact and fiction.
Finally, I read Doctor Sleep. This is King's long-awaited sequel to The Shining. I read The Shining in high school or college, so it's been a while. Of course, I remember the movie and the TV version, but the book itself was something that never was fully captured on film. I opened this new one and was immediately back with Danny (Doc), only now he's a grown up with a lot of problems (duh). Being an alcoholic just seems par for the course for him. He moves around trying to settle down and ends up in a small town with people who can help him...and, people he can help with his shine. He meets a girl who has even more of a gift than he does and the two pair up to destroy the True Knot - a group of what were once people who travel in RVs and kill children who have the shine (they call it steam) to survive. Some of them are hundreds of years old and they. are. evil. I didn't want to put this book down. If you read (or saw) The Shining and liked it at all, this book is worth reading. The things he tied together stunned me. It was definitely my favorite read of the month.
I've already read the first book of October...I hope I remember enough to write about it next month! Happy October...let's cross our fingers that the weather turns to autumn for real!
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