Stuff I liked enough to rave about…

Greetings Noodlers,

This post is in response to Chuck Wendig’s recent blog regarding ‘Stuff Wot He Liked in 2013’. I was going to respond in the comments as requested, then thought ‘Hell, I haven’t blogged in, like, FOREVER… Perhaps I should!’

So, for your reading pleasure, I have compiled a very short list of things I dug in 2013:

A book you read in 2013:

I cannot go past The Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence (@mark__lawrence). I read book 1 (Prince of Thorns) and book 2 (King of Thorns) in a week or so on my iPad while breast feeding in the middle of the night. That was in 2012. Without these festivals of literary gore I don’t think I would have survived that period. Then I waited like an eager One Direction fan for the release of book 3 (Emperor of Thorns) in August 2013 and my signed, numbered copy finally arrived from the UK. BEST. BIRTHDAY. PRESENT. EVER.

My review on Goodreads plunges into more detail on why this series is so darn cool, so I will end my rant here.

A comic book you dug in 2013:

Having not read comics as a kid, I don’t find them at the top of my reading list now days. I did however see some hilarious Cyanide & Happiness strips floating around on Facebook. If you have yet to encounter these mad little stick figures, make it a 2014 resolution. As a taste test, I present one of my all time favourites:

A TV show:

Wow… For someone with a small kid, I watch A LOT of TV, possibly because I don’t get to the cinema anymore. We have fantastic satellite pay TV, which gives us access to not only brilliant shows, but movies and documentaries. So, I think I’ll try and categorise my shows into genre themes:

Documentary – “The Men Who Made Us Fat” – BBC

Drama – “House of Cards”

Fantasy – “Game of Thrones” (as always!) – HBO

Kids – “Timmy Time”

A movie:

This is the sad moment when I try to recall which movies I saw in the cinema this year without confusing it with last year!

I can’t go past Iron Man 3 as the film that surprised me the most. I didn’t expect it to be as amazing as it was. I also deeply enjoyed Thor: The Dark World, but must reserve my ‘Best of 2013’ gong until post December 26 – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug releases in Australia and I will be there with elf ears on!

A game:

I am under a self-imposed gaming ban. With writing, reading, parenting, washing, dishes, cooking to complete each day, if I got my grubby little claws on an Xbox, I would disappear from the plane of human existence and emerge only for sustenance and other essential bodily functions. Even then, there is a good chance I would go ‘Bear Grylls” and drink my own pee just to avoid leaving the game. Seriously, gaming is a drug I won’t ever try because I won’t ever recover from it.

And with that, I leave you to contemplate your own ‘Best of 2013’!