In considering what to write about this week, I had several things, so I’ll just touch base briefly on all of them.

1. The King of Dramas is a great show. It entertained all the way through and everyone grew for the better in some way, especially the two protagonists. The only misstep I thought was the shoehorning of a blindness handicap into the story which was something really not needed. Perhaps it was meant as a satire on writers inserting such issues into TV shows, etc., but as a whole I didn’t think it worked.
2. War and Peace. I am still reading, though it is sloooow going. Page 200 is in sight.  Only 800+ more to go. I greatly appreciate it’s not all battlefield descriptions or I would seriously be depressed.
3. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster. Forster is easily one of my favorite authors.  I love A Room with a View and have read it many times. This book is sort of a precursor to that and is about a young widow who goes to Italy and ends up engaged to a poor Italian a lot younger than herself. Her inlaws are horrified. Great fun so far and I can easily see how this story morphed into A Room with a View.
4. Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology by Paul Ehrlich. My brother plumbed the thrift stores to find this publication from 1970. I’m reading it to do “opposition research” as he calls it. Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb was more or the less the beginning of the current environment vs. human hysteria–I don’t even know what it’s called now. Climate change, I think? What’s next, changing the name again to the weather and then saying people who disagree are weather deniers? Oh, man, let’s just do that. So much fun. Anyway, I detest this whole idea that there are or ever will be too many people in the world. The world was built for humanity. Some hilarious quotes so far: “Spaceship earth” is “filled to capacity.” 2017: 7+ billion and growing – 1970 was about half that.  The earth is not full, not even close. This one had me nearly rolling on the floor in laughter: “Demographers who are interested in the total population of the planet work primarily with birth and death rates since there has been no migration to or from the earth.” A well of entertainment this book is. To be fair to the author I think he’s stepped back on some of his claims since then.
5. Silence by Shusaku Endo. First, I am appalled I’ve never heard of this book before. Second, as a Christian I find the story intriguing. Do and will Christians hold to their faith in the face of real physical harm? Would I? Haven’t started reading it yet, but if I like it I will also try out the movie by Marin Scorsese.
6. New Kdrama: Perfect Wife. Viki.com has it (I bounce between them and Dramafever). I watched episode one not really grasping what the show will be about.  The main character, Shim Jae Bok, is a woman in her thirties with a couple of kids and a not-so-faithful husband, but there’s a strange twist of someone behind the scenes manipulating events to incite her husband to cheat on her and to also get their family to move to a certain house. Sung Joon is in the cast as an annoying younger coworker (and future love interest?) and the cheating husband is played by Yoon Sang Hyun. Shim Jae Bok is played by Ko So Young who in this looks eerily like Rosamund Pike from Gone Girl, so I felt this foreboding while watching it.  By the end of the episode I wasn’t clear on where the story is heading, but I kind of like that. Viki.com has at least up to Episode 9 subtitled in English, so I’ll have to catch up at some point.  Other drama recommendations: Goblin, When a Snail Fails in Love (Chinese one), and She Was Pretty.

–P. Beldona