... and more.

I realize I named the blog "Of books and movies", but I did not mean to exclude any other media.
Fact is, it's not just novels and movies I like, but also comics, television, theater and videogames. Anything that can tell a story and entertain.

So what I want to share is that I have finished "The Fourth Bear" and have started playing "Sam & Max: Season One". And maybe I am simply biased at this point, but I think that there is a similarity between the two, in the setting, a similar sense of nothing's-too-crazy creativity.

I used to love adventure games, as a die-hard Lucasarts fan. I had stopped and fogotten because... well, google it yourself. There's nothing more frustrating than to be deemed irrelevant by the very company you once supported with glowing enthusiasm.
This year's Games Convention in Leipzig threw me right back into my old favourite genre, and I'm in love again all over. At the same time, I understand why companies choose to make action game after action game instead of adventures. You need a good story, interesting characters, entertaining dialogue and fascinating riddles. It's a genre where you really need originality instead of just technical improvements.
Geez, my choice of words, totally crazed-worshipper. I'll go away now.

Jasper Fforde is one crazy dodo.

Amazingly, I've lived for the past few days on little more than coffee, and have dropped two kilos. On the downside, this means I feel absolutely stressed out and my mind feels rather like wool.

I did read the books "The Big Over Easy" by Jasper Fforde and "The Devil in Amber" by Mark Gatiss and have started with "The Fourth Bear" by Jasper Fforde again. I plan to properly catch up with the good man so I can dive into "First Among Sequels" with a clean conscience.

The Thursday Next series boggles my mind. I have some issues with it, but I can never hold anything against the series, it's just so... disarmingly cocky.
Like, when was that, in book 2 or 3, after over a hundred pages of entertaining, but disconnected things the character did, when a plot had not yet decided to materialize in earnest, I was sceptically thinking to myself: "Now, after all that exposition, it would be really nice if the story finally started!"
Bang, on the next page, a character asks Thursday "How was your day today?" and she echoes my thoughts: "Very... expositional."
It made me fall in love with the series all over, when I was considering giving up on it for the time being. Geez... I'm easy.
That having said, I'm sceptical again. The fourth book concluded the series in the perfect way, I found. It was a good point to stop, everything considered, and picking up a series after it has been concluded in a perfect way, that's lame. Then again, this is Thursday Next we're talking about... conventions of literature are there to be poked and broken.

Oh, and "The Devil in Amber" was nice to read. Movie-ish flow to it. I originally picked it up because a) the cover looked funny and b) there was a Jasper Fforde quote on the cover. I'm easy.
I am influenced by cover art and I'm influences by quotes. I once did not buy a book because Dan Brown was quoted as saying it was good.