Sorry for coming into this conversation so very much later than you guys were actually, you know, conversing, but I gave up on The Wire during season 2 as well. Is it possible to just skip it and come back to it later or is it required to get the most of the seasons after it?

I completely agree! It adds another level of mind-game and I love it. Not only are they isolated, deprived of basic comfort and in cut-throat competition with one another; they're also told what sort of person they are and the fact that such a high proportion of contestants are sucked in by it is fascinating.

I think there's an argument to be made that the very reason we look down on romantic fiction so much as a culture is rooted in gender.

I don't know. I think he does get a bit of extra prestige because of his gender. Just the fact we're referring to him as a 'realist' is pretty great. If a woman wrote his books, there's a good chance she'd be known as a romance novelist.

None of the villains take it seriously either. They should be begging and screaming about human rights violations instead they just go placid once they're caught.
Today was particularly bad. That poor girl found out she was going to be locked up alone in a mirrored room too small to lie down in for the foreseeable…

Count me as another person who was enchanted rather than terrified by The Last Unicorn. My cartoon nightmare fuel, for some reason, was a fairly crappy animated movie of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Absolutely. I'm not sure what makes me love it so much but I think it might just come down to tone. Like the movie, the story is pretty simple with some absurd touches, but the way it's written is beautiful. It manages to be melancholy, deeply meta and also full of wonder at the same time.

I have read it and loved it. I was talking about the shared universe of all his books. Apparently Mitchell thinks he's writing one "uber book" with recurring characters and fixed world events across all his novels. It's like the literary version of the Fifty States Project, but hopefully with more dedication behind it.

God I loved Bone Clocks. I feel like David Mitchell is everything I ever wanted in an author but I didn't know it until I started reading him.

Oh man, I love that he picked possibly the worst week in the past decade to ask for this. Criming while white indeed!

Gross.

God dammit. I want this show to be uncancelled and then I want Don't trust the B to be uncancelled and then I want a DC-on-the-CW style crossover event in which Eliza and Chloe hate one another.

Another thing about Zaheer is you get to feel happy for him and that helps us empathise with everything else he does, I think. We see him reunite with his girlfriend with whom he's very much in love. But more profoundly, this guy who's immersed himself in air nomad philosophy and used it to survive a long, lonely…

I've always been baffled by the claims that she's a great songwriter but with 'Blank Space' I can see where her fans are coming from. That is one clever, personal, funny song.

If you can cure infected people, there's just no point to the whole genre.

AQUA. Being a little girl in the nineties leads to lifelong embarrassment. I don't recommend it.