☀️ Sunday Sharies: March 2024

'Dune Part Two', a funny podcast, a game-changing office chair, and 2 sweet treats...

It’s the last Sunday of the month, and you know what that means. There’s a lot of stuff we’d like to share that won’t fit in our usual Thursday TV newsletter. Some of that stuff is here. Read on for a special monthly peek into what your trusty Double Take duo has been watching, reading, listening to, and more.

— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll

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Jenni:
First read of the month was actually just finishing The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. To recap: it’s a Game of Thrones meets Lord of the Rings-style fantasy with a more feminist energy and better writing than any other fantasy I’ve read lately. It is incredibly long (848 pages), but paradoxically I actually felt like a quite a few parts were rushed. I wished this book had been split into 2 or 3 parts in order to give even more time to the interesting places and major players in the story. On the whole, though, I enjoyed the journey! (3.75/5)

I followed up fantasy with the whimsical autobiographical essays of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. I am not often able to read memoirs from start to finish so quickly, but Sedaris’s books are so funny and light and sometimes bitter in the best ways. (4/5)

Then two holds came in at the same time — a gothic horror/fantasy set in Kentucky and a paranormal romance, i.e. Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (3/5) and Bride by Ali Hazelwood (2.5/5), respectively. Starling House was a bit spooky and unexpected, and Bride was cute, if a little odd. I don’t have much more to say about either of them except that they were easy reads to get through one after the other. Definitely quick weekend fodder.

Jess:
In a noticeable decline from my typical reading rate, I only fully read one book this month. I blame that on the fact that I spent many days trying to get into The Fragile Threads of Power by V.E. Schwab, a book that I picked up because I enjoyed Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, only to still feel completely confused and disinterested around the 30% mark. Apparently, even though it’s listed as the first in a series, it’s actually the fourth in a larger series. No wonder I was lost (and annoyed)!

Eventually deciding to DNF that slog, I moved onto Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez, a romance following the “fake dating” trope. It was cute enough and a breeze to get through — which I needed after the previously mentioned drudgery — but it was also overstuffed with clichés and the plot rested heavily on miscommunication, which is my least favorite romance book device. (3/5)

Jess: Maybe one day this newsletter will expand to including more of my long-form movie reviews, but for now I’ll just give the quick hits. My 4 favorite new watches from March were: