New Television Shows and Books...for Fall

Have today off, it being labor day and all that.

Mother: Are you taking tomorrow off?
Me: It's labor day - I have it off.
Mother: But you aren't taking Tuesday off?
ME: No.
Mother: Did you take Thursday and Friday off?
Me: Yes.
Mother: And tomorrow?
ME: It's a holiday, I get it off already - most people do.
Mother: Well not everyone.
Me: True enough.

Finished Five Star Chef - it's not that long and works well as background television while eating and surfing the internet. It also doesn't focus on the food as much as what it meands to be a chef in a five star restaurant. It's basically a competition to see who can become the chef of a five star restaurant in a premiere London Hotel, or in The Langham's Palm Room.

They copy heavily off of Great British Bake Off in regards to judging and how they handle the competition - basically everyone is nice to each other, as are the judges. Critical but nice.

I left it - grateful that I am not in the restaurant business. Also happy with the winner. One of the better ones.

Also found this... New Television Shows Coming This Fall

I don't know -it looks like I'm going to be spending most of my time on Apple TV, Amazon and Netflix, may end up kicking HBO to the curb. On the fence about Disney. For All Mankind - looks really frigging good. And I need to try Invincible on Amazon.

Also got the New in Sci-fi and Fantasy recs - I liked the horror and gothic, but am largely ambivalent. Apparently Elizabeth Hand is still popular and writing. She got the go ahead to write a novel that is a return to Shirely Jackson's classic Haunting of Hill House. I'm on the fence about it - Hand is hit or miss for me, so a dark fantasy writer who has a stick up her butt. (I liked her before I got information on the writer. The less I know about an artist, the better off I appear to be. Not that I know great deal about Hand, just enough to turn me off.)

The one that intrigues me is Starling House. Also the historical series about Hilde. No wait, the one that really intrigues me is the collaboration between reclusive comic strip writer Bill Waterson (yes, that one - who did Calvin and Hobbs) - and sorry that's under this link The Biggest and Best Comics Coming in the Fall

The Mysteries by Bill Waterson and John Kastch - Katsch is helping with the illustrations apparently.

From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America's most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.

In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.

For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate--a mysterious process in its own right.

Waterson is my favorite comic strip artist and author, and among the few I respect. I respect his refusal to let anyone adapt or change his work, or commercialize it. He didn't like what people did with Peanuts, and kind of worked to be the anti-Peanuts and Schultz.

(no subject)

Well that link that I posted to the books coming out in the last post is dangerous. Or the marketing worked. It got me to pre-order two haunted house books, and buy a third.

A Haunting on The Hill by Elizabeth Hand

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

And Wydling Manor by Elizabeth Hand.

I also already have T Kingfisher's "A House with Good Bones", and "The Hollow Places". I've already read The Twisted Ones, and discovered she's now my go-to horror novelist.

It's hard to find a good psychological horror novelist. I'm picky. (I've also read a lot of a genre that I claim not to like all that much. I apparently have a love/hate relationship with horror and dark fantasy novels.)

The Twisted Ones really creeped me out and still haunts me to this day. That was a well done book.