It’s a snow day edition of media Monday! We’ve been pretty much just holed up at home for the weekend, and it looks like we have at least another day or so to go. I’d like to say I’ve been reading more, but the truth is it’s mostly just been more watching. Anyway, let’s get to it!
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What I Read
As expected, I finished off Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I think I said last week that this one got off to kind of a slow start, but it did seem to pick up speed as it went, and I think it ended really well. It’s about a large extended family who sees the decline of civilization coming and decides to hole up on their land and be self-sufficient. It’s not a Mad Max situation; it seems that they might actually be the last people on earth, or at least the last ones in the area. Declining fertility means that they turn to cloning to try to keep the human race going, but there are some problems with that.
Once I finished that one, I looked at the library challenge to figure out what I should read next. I wasn’t sure about a few categories, so I decided to take on a “book that starts with the first letter of your name.” As you can imagine, I have quite a few books with titles starting with “M,” but I decided on Make Room! Make Room! By Harry Harrison. If you didn’t know, it’s the book that Soylent Green was based on, so I kind of know how it’s going to go, but I’m not sure how well the movie actually followed the book, and I never watched the whole thing anyway, so I’m hoping it will be an interesting read. Wow, that was a long sentence.
In other reading, I’m getting close to being done with Letters by a Modern Mystic by Frank C. Laubach (as expected). This one is incredibly good. As much as I’d like to devour it, I’ve been sticking to reading one or two letters per day. They typically aren’t very long, sometimes just a couple of paragraphs, up to maybe three pages or so. It goes against my instincts, but I think it really has been a much better experience to read a little and then meditate on it a bit.
What I Watched
Online, I finished watching Leonie Dawson’s “2026 Dream Quest” series. It’s still available on YouTube if you’d like to check it out. I also was able to watch the next installment of “Building Better Creative Habits” on Foxsy live for the first time, since everything was canceled on Saturday.
In actual TV, I’ve watched episodes two and three of season six of All Creatures Great and Small on PBS. I also finished watching the first season of Outlander. That was so emotionally taxing that I decided to move over to Netflix to watch a few episodes of Seinfeld, which isn’t emotionally taxing at all! Starting from the beginning again, I realized that the first season was only five episodes, which is probably good because those episodes actually feel a little flat to me.
What I Listened To
This was pretty much the usual podcasts, with the Organize 365 Podcast after that, since I think I can probably catch up to the present with that one pretty soon. Also listening to Voyager by Diana Gabaldon on Audible, with just over an hour left on that.
This week might be quite a bit lighter. I typically listen to podcasts in the car and audiobooks at work, and I am for sure not driving anywhere, including to work, today or tomorrow. Wednesday is still up in the air. So I might have some catching up to do later, but we’ll see what happens.
Anyway, what about you? Are you also hunkering down in bad weather? How does that change your media habits? Let’s chat about it in the comments!