In which I discuss word games, books and a stunning loss

And another week goes by. Hard to believe October is about to call it quits. Lovely wife had a grand birthday. (And apparently we sat just across from Dale Murphy at dinner.) She got a Professor Layton game to help keep those wits sharp and Bananagrams to scratch the word game itch. It's basically competitive crossword puzzle building. You draw a set number of tiles and then at the same time turn yours over and start to build your own crossword. As you run out of tiles you yell "split" and everyone draws one more and on it goes until there are fewer tiles than players and then the first one out of tiles wins. You can dump a tile at the cost of drawing three more, which is occasionally helpful as it gives you more to work with. It's fun. If you like word games it's certainly worth picking up. I like it better than Scrabble as you can work at your own pace and compete that way. McK enjoys playing it as well.

I don't believe any more movies have been watched although we're about to watch The Wrong Guy, so more on that later. I did tape The Dunwich Horror on Syfy last weekend, so Lovecraft goodness coming up as well.

I finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I really enjoyed it. The pitch is Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia for grownups and it mostly delivers. There are a few (not so) subtle nods to those series throughout the book, but mostly it tells its own tale of what it would be like if magic was real. And real people used it. So while it's not a completely depressed Harry Potter, it's close. I think the best description I read was how the main characters were able to consistently snatch failure from the jaws of success. That really does sum it up well. It's a pretty fascinating story though. Great style and fun to read.

And now I'm on to the new Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett and Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (steampunk zombie novel). They are both quite good so far.

Lovely wife and I got stomped on at Settlers of Catan last night by the letter 'r'. It was a pretty disgraceful loss on our part. Although he really did have much better options than either of us. I was arguably close in points, but getting those last couple would have been a real struggle. That's a pretty decent game as well if you've not tried it. (And it sounds like the new Dominion supplement is trés cool.)