The fifty-eighth book: #48 Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
While I've enjoyed plenty of early books, it does feel like at the moment, a lot of styles are still evolving for the better. Epistolaries have not been my favourite, but they have been getting better and while Dangerous Liaisons has its faults, it was a lot more readable. The shorter letters help a lot from me getting too lost if I have to stop halfway during my commute. They also keep the narrative focused, it was nice not to have too many digressions and allowing for a more linear action, rather than the letters dealing with multiple events (possibly out of order). By focusing on the duplicitous characters, the story becomes a lot clearer as well. Still, there's a focus on skipping over the action, which means events get lost sometimes and the gaps seem longer than they really do. Still, it was very readable and I'm happy to feel them getting better.
The ninety-first TV show: #630 I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!
There are some shows on this list that I know I'm not going to love. Reality shows can be a pretty mixed bag and I'm A Celebrity has always been a bit meh for me. I can see why it would be something people would latch on to and it could have won me over, but they type of production and set up doesn't wow me. Celebrities on these shows can always feel a bit weird, even if they usually know better how to entertain, and the concept feels like it could be quite cringy. I watched the 2016 season, which seems like it was particularly conflict free (although I wasn't too enthusiastic about pursuing others). Mostly it feels like they were sitting around in the jungle, in uncomfortable circumstances, but in the end a camp that's mostly set up for them rather than doing more survivally tasks that you might get.
Instead, there are daily tasks for food and sometimes extras. A lot of it relies on eating weird things - the less weird ones are part of their meals every day, but the bugs and other Fear Factor items are part of these challenges. In others, it's about getting keys or stars (each of which presents a meal) from containers that are bad in some way - filled with gross liquids, weird creatures (that might sting if it's not lethal, or are safely kept track of so they can't do harm) or other things like it. It's from the jungle, but not that jungly. For me the most interesting ones were the ones dealing with fears or heights and such - that requires some skill. I understand none of it is pleasant, but it feels repetitive and mostly seems to require getting past it. It feels like it got quite samey early on, unfortunately - especially with the successes I saw most of the time.
The presenting got to me a bit as well. Ant and Dec are quite charming and I could see why they made it on here, but their ad libs are better than the written jokes, which are terrible - sometimes ackonwledged, but sometimes intentional, but often more annoying than anything. I can see the appeal, and enjoyed this more than I would enjoy Big Brother, but this might just be a bit much.