Sunday Funday: Weekend Update, Logan, & Book Haul

Hey, everyone!  The past couple weeks have been pretty eventful.  The biggest personal news is that I just paid off my car loan, and early at that!  Unfortunately, though, just over two weeks ago someone backed into my front bumper in a parking lot.  No major damage and I can still drive it with no problem, but the bumper has been cracked on one side and there's a long scrape on the other side.  Luckily, working with the insurance hasn't been too difficult, and now it's just a waiting game until my appointment at the auto body shop.  It's still over a week until I can get my car in for my appointment.  Sigh.   But, hey, at least I've got my loan paid off.

On to happier news, a friend and I went to see a local college's theater production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Friday night.  I've seen several shows there before and they always do a fantastic job, but she never had before.  Either way, both of us are big fans of the musical so we were eagerly awaiting it!  Luckily, we weren't let down because the students did well.  The most interesting change from the movie is that this one is set during the London Blitz during WWII.  I wouldn't have expected that to work as well as it did - they really integrated the time period into the story.  Plus, the costumes were great - particularly everything Mrs. Lovett wears throughout.  The songs all sounded very great - all sounded very good, but the real standout was the student portraying Toby.  Otherwise, Johanna and Anthony in particular also gave fine performances.  My only complaint were the casts accents - they were kind of all over the place.  Toby was one of the only actors who had his character's accent down.  The others were a little less consistent - for example, the actress playing Mrs. Lovett at times sounded like she was imitating Helena Bonham Carter during her songs and randomly during the dialogue.  Also some didn't even appear to use an accent for their characters, the one that stood out the most to me was definitely Anthony.  He seemed to be using his regular American accent - if he was attempting something else, I totally missed it - but like I mentioned earlier, he still have a great performance.  In the end, my friend and I had a great time watching the show and I'm sure we'll be singing the songs to ourselves for days to come!

Anyway, on to the bookish news!  Below are the books I've picked up recently: 

The Ship Beyond Time (The Girl From Everywhere #2) by Heidi Heilig - I loved the first book in this series that I actually preordered this novel!  

City of Saints & Thieves by Natalie C. Anderson - I've been eyeing this for quite a while and when I stumbled on a really great deal I had to take it.  

The Problem with Forever by Jennifer L. Armentrout (ARC) - I won this a while back and it just recently arrived!

A Conjuring of Light (Shades of Magic #3) by V.E. Schwab - If you've been following this blog, I have a feeling you know exactly how excited I am to read this!

Library haul: King's Cage (Red Queen #3) by Victoria Aveyard and The Girl With Ghost Eyes (Xian Li-lin #1) by M.H. Boroson - Even though I haven't been terribly impressed with the Red Queen series so far I'd still like to see how the whole thing ends - I totally didn't expect it to arrive this week.  I was pretty far down the wait list when I put it on hold list last week.  As for The Girl With Ghost Eyes, I'll be reading that this month for Book Riot's 2017 Read Harder Challenge - it will fulfill the book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative task.  Originally, my library owned a copy of this novel, but unfortunately it got damaged beyond repair a little while ago so I had to borrow it through another library in our consortium.  I also picked up Outlander, Season 2 which I was on the wait list for for a few months.  I enjoyed season one much more than I expected to so I'm definitely looking forward seeing what'll happen this time around (especially since I haven't read book two - and have no real plans to do so after trying first book).

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Today, I made a day of my time off and went to see Logan at the movie theater!  For some reason I had it in my mind that this movie wasn't being released until this time next month... but I'm glad I got the chance to see it.  It's sad to think that this is Hugh Jackman's and Patrick Stewart's final turns as Wolverine and Charles Xavier, respectively.  I'll miss them in those parts - it's hard to believe it's been 17 years since they began.  Let me just get this out of the way first, but if you haven't already heard this movie has definitely earned it's R rating.  Lots more blood and violence, and language.  And, you know what, the rating definitely works in the movie's favor - it's a bit jarring at first going from the other X-Men films to Logan, but it totally works for the the characters here.  I don't want to give too much away, but Laura gets some great fight scenes.  Plus, the actress plays very well off of Jackman and Stewart.  I'd definitely like to see more of Dafne Keen in the future.  Definitely be sure to take some tissues with you because aside from the bloody (but not gratuitous) violence it also tugs on your heartstrings.  Thanks for the fantastic ride, Mr. Jackman!  

Theater notes:  There was a total of around 30 people at the showing I attended.  Only one trailer played beforehand and it was a teaser for Deadpool 2!  As you can imagine, Deadpool mentioned Logan.  Also, when I went up to the box office to purchase my ticket, an older gentleman probably in his upper 70s was right ahead of me in line.  He was trying to decide what movie to see since several were starting at the same time.  After really studying the listings he asked the guy behind the counter, "What's Fifty Shades Darker about?"  The cashier looked like he didn't know what and how much to say, but he settled on "Uhhhh, it's a chick flick."  He was really trying not to laugh when the older gentleman decided to go with Logan after much deliberation.  When I stepped up, I think the cashier half expected me to get a ticket for the Fifty Shades sequel - he looked really relieved to sell me a ticket to Logan instead!

If you made it this far, thanks and congratulations!  I hope everyone has had a great weekend!  Have you seen Logan or read any of these books yet?