Updatey stuff

It strikes me that I haven't written any sort of update for a while, apart from Twitters, book reviews and my regular posts. I feel slightly guilty about not commenting on other people's journals and blogs but hey ho - them's the breaks. I'm still reading though.

The first couple of months of this year have felt like a bit of a slog, with a particularly cold winter and a change of routine that has seen me driving to and from work in the dark, until the last week or so. I've been getting home, walking the dog and then more often than not falling asleep on the sofa with little inclination to do much else. Things seem to be improving as the days lengthen though, and I am very much looking forward to an extra hour of light in the evenings when the clocks go forward at the end of March.

What have I been up to then?

I've been making a point of using my lunch hours to read, rather than just pottering around on the internet or mooching in town. You've probably noticed the increased hit rate of books being completed and reviewed, split evenly between audio books to listen to in the car and during dog walks, e-books of various sorts to read on my phone in odd moments and good old paper books for the rest of the time. I've also consciously been reading out of my usual comfort zone of fantasy and sf fiction, dabbling my toes into different genres as well as some interesting factual stuff. It has certainly been worth the effort and I seem to be well ahead of my notional not-a-resolution goal of a book a week for 2009.

Games wise, I have been mostly concentrating on the Xbox 360 with Fallout 3 giving way to the excellent 'The Lost and Damned' downloadable content for GTA IV. I've really been savouring the storyline, particularly the way it intersects with the events of GTA IV and Nico's story. Riding the GTA equivalent of a Harley Davidson around Liberty City listening to a new rock soundtrack has certainly given the game a very different feel and a new lease of life. The races where you can smash your opponents in the face with a baseball bat are rather enjoyable too, recalling the joys of the old retro game 'Road Rash'. Good fun.

On the DVD front, we've been making use of a Lovefilm subscription to try new things and catch up on films we missed at the cinema. I can recommend a Japanese film called 'Tony Takitani' which is an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story and certainly manages to capture some of the strangeness and charm of his style. Wall-E was similarly good, although the best part is probably the first half hour or so with the lonely robot cleaning up a devastated planet Earth whilst listening to show tunes. Charming and moving in equal measure.