WHAT have you finished reading recently? After Christendom, Michael Warren Davis

WHAT  are you reading now? Listening to Troy, prepared and read by Stephen Fry.

WHAT  are you reading next?   Probably The True Flag by Stephen Kinzer, focusing on Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain as opposing voices on the question of imperialism. And by “probably”, I mean “I’ve read a quarter of it already”. I say probably because I’ve had an idea for this year’s Blast from the Past, my annual warp back to my younger self’s reading.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “reasons we’ve stopped reading or watching a series”.   The number one reason, of course, would be sheer distraction.  

(1) Dutton Ranch. (TV)  I came for Morgan Wade. I don’t see any Morgan Wade. Someone give me timestamps, life is too short to watch an hour of a show just to spot her playing bartender in the background.  Here’s some immediate MW gratification for the curious; her new release, “Love’s Insane”.

(2) Cobra Kai. (TV) Just got distracted. Planning on returning to it. Strike first! Strike hard! No mercy!

(3) Star Trek Strange New Worlds, season 3: (TV)    Paramount Plus does not like my browser extensions that cripple information-harvesting, so it usually takes 4-5 tries to get it to start streaming.   Also, season 3 is a little…odd. I will return.

(4)  Rick Riordan’s Norse series. (YA books) At some point I went “Eh, I’m tired of reading about a trio of kids who are told to take a road trip to save Earth from a chaos monster before the Solstice/Equinox in three weeks”.

(5) Rick Riordan’s Roman series. (YA books) I literally just missed everything after The Mark of Athena. So, all of them. (Last read in 2012, oofdah.)

(6) Shrinking. An AppleTV series with Marshall from How I Met Your Mother and Harrison Ford from Witness, in which Marshall plays a therapist whose patients’ problems give him an emotional blue screen of death.  I watched the first few episodes and enjoyed it, but I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched an entire series through. Okay, it was late spring,  when I re-watched 11.22.63.  And before that it was Chernobyl. But except for those, I honestly can’t tell you. 

(7) Star Trek Picard (season 3). The less said about season 1 and 2, the better. I liked season three, except for the weird smoking alien, but after they killed off my favorite surly Bajoran (no offense, Colonel Kira), I meh’d right out.

(8) Star Trek Discovery (season 2). I have started watching this 3-4 times. I must persevere, if only for Anson Mount and Ethan Peck. But man. Maybe the next time I’m hospitalized or something.

(9) Clan of the Cave Bear (the last novel). I read all but the last of the Jean M. Auel Cro-Magnon novels in which Ayla invents everything from equestrianism to sewing. Auel did a crazy amount of research, but the books got progressively more like a soap opera, and I just didn’t care enough to tackle the huge one.

(10) History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill. I enjoyed the ones my library had, but we didn’t have all of them. So, I technically haven’t finished it..