Various entertainments

I've got books and movies to discuss, and I suspect TV is going to wander in here too if I get very far, so "entertainments" it is.

First of all, I finished Queen of Air and Darkness, and it had a satisfying ending, although it continued to be almost unbearably talky right up til the end. Another (more minor) gripe is that I think it's misnamed, because the Queen of Air and Darkness was supposed to be the character Annabel (rather than the Seelie Queen, which was what I expected), who hardly ever showed up. (The Seelie Queen was there about as much as Annabel, for what that's worth.) I kept waiting for something to happen to justify that title. Maybe the idea was that Annabel's actions in the last book (in killing a character who I won't name in case that's a spoiler for somebody!) drove this book all the way through, because a lot of this book was about the process of grieving. Anyway, I'm glad I read it, because it's closure for the series, but at this point I'm even more glad to be done with it. - I don't usually think in terms of how many stars I give things, but on a 1-5 basis I'd probably give this a 3.

Yesterday we went to see what I keep calling the "Spider-verse thing" because its name is too unwieldy to bother with, as far as I'm concerned. It was really good. Easily the best Spiderman movie I've seen, although I told Rob that that's a pretty low bar. I saw at least a couple of the Raimi ones back in the day, they were decent but not really anything special. I never saw any of the Andrew Garfield ones. I would say that the best of the ones I'd previously seen is the one from last year - Homecoming, I think? It was still messy in that way that Spider-man movies seem to be prone to, but pretty good.

In the animated one, we get an origin story for teenager Miles Morales, who eventually runs across an irradiated spider - of course - and then into a confrontation between Kingpin & Spiderman (the usual sort of Spiderman, Peter Parker a few years after his origin story, now in his 20s). Kingpin is trying to bring his wife & son back from a parallel universe, which is how the whole multiverse thing gets started. From there we eventually end up with a whole gang of Spideys - male, female, and in one case, non-human. I won't spoil you past that. It's all a lot of fun, and the animation is wonderful. (Who knew Sony had this in them?)

Before I started on the Shadowhunters re-read, what I read was the first book in the Expanse series, which is also a TV series - it's been on SyFy for several years. We used to watch SyFy a whole lot but in recent years we've drifted away from it, for no particular reason. So I didn't know anything about the series except that it existed. And lately I'd started hearing that the series was pretty good, I guess that's what got me started with this. The TV series turned up on Amazon Prime in the past few months, and I knew it was something that came from a book or book series, and my rule is usually if there's a book and a TV/movie adaptation, I'd rather read (or see) the original one first. So I went and found the book - the first one is called Leviathan Wakes. And man, it was good. So I started wanting to watch the series before I'd even finished the book. Once I got past the first big section of the book (where they're on the Canterbury) I figured that was bound to be as far as the first episode went, and so Rob and I watched the first episode and it was also really good. Anyway, if you're not familiar with this, it's, like, straight-out sci-fi, a space opera set in a not-too-terribly-distant future in which Mars is in the process of being terraformed, and the asteroid belt is being mined and some of the moons of Jupiter & Saturn are starting to be colonized. I'm not going to try to really summarize the plot, which is pretty convoluted, but it has action and a mystery, and I love it. (I love the book somewhat more than the series, but they're both good. I'm only about five episodes into the series, but it's well-done, also. At some point soon I'll probably go hunt down the second book.)

(There's another series or two I've been reading lately, but I'll come back to those later.)