The Week in Entertainment

The weekend got away from me...

DVD: The annual back-to-back-to-back marathon of The Lord of the Rings. Yes, Peter Jackson changed stuff, but when you're making a movie you have to. He got it as right as it could be gotten, I expect.

TV: The House finale. I'm not totally crazy about that format - teasing us throughout the show with the knowledge that he (did/is going to do) something terrible - but it worked well enough. And I do wonder how he's coming back. The finales of The Middle and Modern Family were, respectively, good and very good - I love Cam and Manny together, even if it didn't work out just like Cam wanted. And Haley's saving Alex from herself was lovely. A commercial for The Closer makes me hope that Leverage will be back really soon, too.

Read: I realized when I saw One of Our Thursdays Is Missing that I'd never finished (maybe never started) First Among Sequels, so I caught up on the whole series. The latter two aren't nearly as good as the first four, though the last one is intriguing in that it's told by Thursday5 (a written version) rather than the real Thursday (who's the missing one of the title). I do wonder about "9/11 conspiracy" people being in existence; surely in this alternate universe 9/11 didn't happen? But then, who knows what 9/11 might mean there... Finished Baba Yaga Lays an Egg, the third part of which is weird and undercuts the first two, in my opinion. But the first two stand on their own as quite remarkable works. Began Simonov's The Living and the Dead (Мертвые и живые) in Russian; it's one of the great WWII novels of Soviet literature, and I'm heartened at how easily I can read it... unlike Marinina, they're not filled with current slang! (Well, probably with '40s slang, but that I learned in school ;-) )