Desi Boyz: Time To Party

Continuing on with the theme of Bollywood reviews, here’s one for one of my favourite movies in recent years. The movie stars some of my favourite actors and is a really good comedy, better by far than some of the others that the two lead actors have done previously. Great songs, great story, great everything, and directed by the son of one of my favourite comedy directors of the last couple decades. This movie pretty much had it all.

Akshay Kumar’s comedies can often be a little hit and miss, especially in recent years, but this one is definitely a hit for me. It has a good subject matter despite some wonky stuff in the second half, but that’s not such a big deal really. Here’s why.

Best Debuts of 2013

In a lot of ways, 2013 has been a fairly good year for debut novels, as much as 2012 was. There have been some really fantastic releases, and they have all continued an unofficial tradition of doing something different with the genres that they have been set in. I can say for certain that of all the debut novels I read this year, none of them have been quite what I expected. Some of these novels have been really, really good while a small handful have been disappointing.

I put together a list at the end of last year in which I ran through my top picks of all the debuts I’d read, and I found the experience to be quite rewarding, and a great help in figuring out just why these novels were so good beyond just writing up the reviews.

All in all, of the 20 debut novels I wanted to read this year as per my list (link), I read 18 of them. Here are the 8 books I consider to be the best of the bunch.

Doctor Who: The Day of The Doctor 50th Anniversary Special (Podcast Chat)

This is going to be a very short post. Just over 2 weeks ago I posted a review of the 50th Anniversary Special episode of BBC’s Doctor Who, one of the world’s longest running television shows. It was my first ever episode of Doctor Who and, in a nutshell, I quite enjoyed it.

This past weekend, I made plans with a couple of friends to do a podcast together and talk about our experiences. Paul (blogger extraordinaire for the Hugo-winning SF Signal) and Sally (chief editor of The Qwillery) are both far more experienced Whovians than me, and they’ve been watching the show for years. We had a really great discussion and I enjoyed chatting with them about the show and the episode in particular. Of course, I listened to these two get into the nuts and bolts of various things more than talking about it, but it was fantastic.

Always great to be able to discuss current shows with people.

Sally was kind enough to upload the audio file of our chat to SoundCloud and get that up and running. So here is the link (and here is Sally’s own write-up). Hope it is a lively discussion.

Doctor Who: The Day of The Doctor 50th Anniversary Special (TV Show Review)

I have, admittedly, never seen an episode of BBC’s Doctor Who. A few years ago, back in college, I once made a list of some really popular SFF shows and at the top of the list was Doctor Who, but I was somewhat turned off by the fact that the show had been going on since the 1960s or thereabouts. I was rather clueless at the time and not much aware of the whole “seasons” nature of television shows in the western media. In India, television shows are broadcast 5 times a week for the most part and so the old-me couldn’t get around the concept of a show that had been alive for more than 40 years. And I didn’t really know any Whovians at the time either, so that was a factor as well.

Recently I’ve had an urge to start watching the show, mostly because a large number of my friends on social media are from Britain and most of them are Doctor Who fans, aside from friends of other countries with similar interests. With the 50th anniversary of the show this year, I thought I’d finally get onboard the whole thing and so I decided to watch the 50th anniversary special yesterday. And it turned out to be a darn good episode, for a first timer to the entire franchise.

NANP: Names As Characters

Kicking off the fourth week of Names: A New Perspective is author Anne Lyle who has been making waves this year with her debut novel Alchemist of Souls, an awesome alternate history set in Elizabethan London in which explorers have discovered a race of magical beings, the Skraylings, inhabiting the Americas (my review). Like all the debut authors I’ve featured on the blog so far, she is another one to watch out for, one you can expect more awesomeness from. I do have an eARC of her second novel Merchant of Dreams sitting on the laptop waiting to be read and I’m looking forward to it, although it will be a while before I get around to it. Here’s what Anne has to say on the topic of names and characters in her novels.