No more looking back…..

I think that I may be coming out of my reading slump but I’m still a little wary of declaring victory just yet. I’ve also made decisions on my backlog of reviews and I’ve decided to dump the lot – the long list is making me anxious which is something I don’t need right now, and to be honest I don’t actually need to write full reviews of everything I watch or read – this is meant to be fun, not a chore.

So what’s been happening chez Bride?

I finished one book this week. After re-reading The Only Plane in the Sky, a very moving oral history of 9/11, I wanted something trashy and lightweight and I found that in the first of the Dr Harper Therapy series (I’m a Therapist and my Patient is Going to be the Next School Shooter) which is very silly in a horror-adjacent way and just what I needed. I was amused to see some people had picked this up thinking it was going to be a genuine memoir – cue howls of outrage.

I’m currently reading two books:

• The Eleventh Day by Anthony & Robyn Summers, which is a narrative history of 9/11 with lots of new to me information on bin Laden and Al Qaeda and what happened after the attacks. My interest in the subject is partly to do with having watched The Looming Tower, listened to Missing on 9/11 podcast and, of course, the recent anniversary.
• The Black Angel by John Connolly – this is the fifth in the impressive Charlie Parker series, grim as always but so well written

I was going to write a full review of The Suicide Squad which we watched last weekend, but I don’t think there’s much I can add to what’s already out there. You’re either already a fan and loving it or it isn’t your cup of tea. I thoroughly enjoyed it; if you’ve been around here for a while you may remember that I am a huge Harley Quinn fan and love the way she is portrayed by Margot Robbie, but the addition of Idris Elba to the cast didn’t hurt. Great bloody foul-mouthed fun.

My current watching obsession is the TV series The Crimson Rivers (original title: Les rivières pourpres), which involves unusual murders, a tenacious pair of detectives and a lot of dead bodies. Most of the murders have some kind of ritual element to them and the series doesn’t shy away from gruesome detail. It’s brilliant and very, very French. We devoured S2 which was showing on TV here very recently, and have gone back to S1.

So that’s where I am at the moment. I hope you are all well and staying safe 🙂