Quarterly Rewind, Fall 2014 – Movies, TV Shows, Senior Year, And An Awful Lot Of Reading

Hey, everyone! Today is the last day of fall (s0b!) so it’s time for another quarterly rewind. Where did this season go?!

Anyway. This post covers the time from September twenty-second through December twentieth. And as always, the idea of a quarterly rewind is not mine – the credit for that goes to Jamie @ The Perpetual Page-Turner.

P.S. You can find earlier quarterly rewinds here, if you’re interested.

Image From This Fall

Taken in early December at my house

Favorite Quote From A Book I Read This Fall

“She missed him. She missed his voice, and his humor, and his warm arrogance, and those moments in his company when she realized that this was when she came alive – finally living, by the side of a dead man.”

– Dark Days by Derek Landy

This quote (from the fourth book of the Skulduggery Pleasant series) is the best. I LOVE the friendship between Valkyrie and Skulduggery, and this passage sums it up particularly wonderfully.

Also, I’m just really really fond of happy/sweet Skulduggery Pleasant quotes because I’ve since read several more of the books and the story is SO MUCH DARKER now. “Read Skulduggery Pleasant,” they said. “It’ll be fun!” they said. (Who is/are this mysterious “they”?! Very strange.)

“They,” whoever “they” are, also neglected to tell me that IT WOULD ALSO MAKE ME BAWL LIKE A BABY.

This Fall In One Word

BUSY.

Most Popular Review This Fall

In October I reviewed The Blood of Olympus, the final installment of Rick Riordan’s  Heroes of Olympus series. While the book wasn’t perfect, overall it was a really good conclusion to an amazing middle-grade series! I can’t believe the story is really over now…

Top Two Books I Read This Fall

1. Blue Lily, Lily Blue is the penultimate installment in Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle, and as always it was BRILLIANT. I’ve never given any of the books in this series anything less than five stars. (And I very rarely rate books that highly, so that should give you a pretty clear idea of how much I enjoyed this novel!)
2. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd should be required reading for everyone. This dark, beautiful, dystopian graphic novel earned a five-star rating from me – I’m not used to reading this many absolutely incredible books in only a few months!

Two Things I’m Looking Forward To This Winter

1. Marissa Meyer’s Fairest, a Lunar Chronicles novella, will be published in late January. I can’t wait!
2. I’d like to finally start watching the TV shows my friends have recommended to me: Orphan Black, Orange is the New Black, Warehouse 13, Once Upon A Time, and Pretty Little Liars. I also need to finish watching Elementary and Being Human (the UK version) and then I might try its US version.

Three New Obsessions This Fall

1. I binge-watched the new webseries Carmilla on Thanksgiving Day and OMG I LOVE IT SOOOO MUCH. It’s so funny and awesome and gay.
2. Speaking of binge-watching: I tend to do things all at once or not at all, don’t I? I started reading Derek Landy’s incredible Skulduggery Pleasant series this summer but finally finished the last eight books all during these past two weeks… and LOVED them.
3. I watched Pacific Rim and it is an awesome sci-fi movie and I love it a lot. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to watch it; this one would’ve been fun to see in theaters!

Most Popular Five Blog Posts Overall This Fall

1. My review of The Blood of Olympus was evidently very popular… which is odd, because I received only two comments on that post!
2. On National Coming Out Day, I listed 32 Things Not To Say When I Come Out To You. People seemed to be confused about this, so I’ll clarify: Yes, people really have told me all of those things – at least once, if not more often.
3. Cait @ Paper Fury tagged me in the 20 Things You Might Not Know About Me meme! Thanks, Cait!
4. Bi The Way, It’s Bisexual Visibility Day! was about… you guessed it! Bi Visibility Day! I talked about all sorts of things here: bi erasure, famous bisexual people, YA fiction with bi protagonists, and reasons Captain America should be canonically bisexual.
5. In Teenage Wasteland – Teens Can Write, Too! November 2014 Blog Chain, I listed what being a teenager means to me.

Five Posts I Loved On Other Blogs This Fall

1. Mawa Mahima @ All Things Wordy wrote about her bad bookish habits, such as dog-earing the pages, in Reading Habits: A Picturesome Confession.
2. Miriam Joy @ Miriam Joy Writes talked about history, memories, and Newnham College, Cambridge, in their beautifully written post Here There Are Ghosts.
3. Cait @ Paper Fury discussed the things she wants to happen in book endings in How Do You Take Your Series Finales?
4. Thomas @ The Quiet Voice talked about why straight people need to stop stereotyping their LGBTQ+ friends and treating them as accessories in Gay Men Will Not Make You Friends. I later shared this on Facebook because it was just that awesome, and I got a ton of comments on it – seems like a lot of my friends are just as fed up with this problem as I am!
5. Matt @ The Little Engine That Couldn’t listed some of his favorite characters in Top Ten Game of Thrones Point of View Characters.

Five Things That Happened This Fall

1. I turned eighteen and began my senior year of high school! And I started a new bloggly feature: Senior Year Saturday, in which I (occasionally) talk about, well, senior-ish stuff.
2. I co-reviewed series eight of Doctor Who with eleven other bloggers and it was SO MUCH FUN.
3. I read just a few books. Like, seventy-one.
4. I saw Mockingjay Part One and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and cried a lot. As one does.
5. I did a lot of college-ish stuff: student housing applications and scholarship essays and whatnot. It wasn’t much fun, but it had to be done.

Six Songs That I Listened To Far Too Often This Fall

1. “Yellow Flicker Beat” (Mockingjay Part One) – Lorde

I love the amount of ATTITUDE in this song. I mean, by this part of the story Katniss is just fed up with, well, everything. With President Snow and District 13 and with some of her family/friends. And that really comes across in this song.

2. “The Hanging Tree” (Mockingjay Part One) – James Newton Howard

This song never really made an impression on me when I read it in the book, but Newton Howard is a musical genius. I love the part with the choir. I cried when this played during the movie; it’s a very haunting scene.

3. “Canceling the Apocalypse” (Pacific Rim) – Ramin Djawadi

I love the main theme, too, but this quiet reprise is my favorite piece from the movie. Very beautiful!

4. “Kung Fu Piano: Cello Ascends” – The Piano Guys

I haven’t actually seen the movie (Kung Fu Panda) that this medley is based on, but so what? That doesn’t stop me from loving this amazing mashup of movie music and Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 No. 20 in C minor. SO. MUCH. PRETTINESS.

5. “City of Blinding Lights” – U2

“The more you see, the less you know / The less you find out as you go / I knew much more then than I do now.” This song makes me feel ALL OF THE EMOTIONS. It kind of reminds me of the Skulduggery Pleasant series. A lot of songs remind me of the characters and plots in my favorite books!

6. “The Last Goodbye” (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies) – Billy Boyd

Wow. Just… wow. I really didn’t think anything could even come close to the amazingness of the Lord of the Rings’ final end credits song, but “The Last Goodbye” is astonishingly beautiful. It makes me cry, but that’s not so astonishing because let’s face it, I get pretty emotional about Middle-earth.

What did you enjoy most on my blog this fall? And what have you done during these past few months?