Five Year Engagement

I watched The Five-Year Engagement, a 2012 romcom, on Netflix last weekend. It stars Jason Segel and Emily Blunt (I love Emily), and is rather well done for a story without a plot. Couple gets engaged, life happens, wedding gets continually postponed, couple grows apart, breakup occurs, couple realizes they love each other all over again, wedding happens. Not too exciting, but the film does a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of relationships instead of just skimming the surface, so that was interesting. There was a lot of humor too. 

I began reading No Exit ~ not the Sartre play but a 2017 "thriller" by Taylor Adams, which was made into a film by Hulu. Despite the supposedly dramatic premise of a college woman stranded in a blizzard at a rest stop with one or more very bad dudes, the story plodded along at an excruciating slow pace with a ton of inner monologue and repetitive thoughts. The protagonist came across as a total moron too, as did the rest of the characters. In an attempt to move things along, I downloaded the audio and played it at 1.5 while doing some chores and later driving. This was my first real audiobook experience, and I hated it just as I expected to. I kept wishing everyone would die so the book would end... eventually that sort of did happen, but it took way too long to get there. I can't even imagine how horrible the movie version is. Shudder. One star.

Oh, that book fit the 2025 reading challenge category of (you guessed it)... "became a movie," which is the only reason I did not DNF it.

You know that in addition to the "official" 2025 reading challenge, I have also challenged myself to read/reread all the Victoria Holt (aka Philippa Carr) novels I can find. So far, I have located 48 of them and finished reading 22. I'm not super inclined to buy them all new from Amazon, as I don't want a collection and donate any physical books soon after reading, so I've been getting some at the library and some used off eBay. My reading has thus been haphazard ~ late in the game I realized that it would have made sense to start at the beginning of the Daughters of England series (not all Holt's books are part of that series), but I didn't, so that's that. Anyway, this week I read the first novel in the series, The Miracle at St. Bruno's, which was originally published in 1974, and I gave it only two stars. It was pretty dull with loads of droning dialog and narration about English politics during the reign of Henry the VIII. There wasn't much romance, nor was there a happy ending. I wouldn't even call this a romance novel, though many of Holt's other books definitely are. It's historical fiction, I guess. If I'd read this one first, I might not have been motivated to continue! Many of her others contain history, but they are more character driven. I don't actually think I read Bruno back in the 1970s/1980s when I first discovered my fondness for Holt's books ~ I had no vague recollections while reading it like I did some of the others.

Anyway, juxtaposing The Five-Year Engagement with The Miracle at St. Bruno's gives us a good idea how external factors can really screw up a love match, whether it's your drunken sister getting preggo at your engagement party with your fiancé's best friend, or Catholics and Protestants murdering each other to confiscate land. We like to believe "love conquers all," but that's pretty naive. Hell, men living in Los Angeles won't even cross the Orange County line to go on a date, and that's a lot less brutal than having to move to Michigan or being tortured for your religious beliefs. Or maybe it's not. The 405 really does suck. 

OK, only three reviews tonight because my book club leader just gave us an assignment to read 100-150 pages of a book in the next 24 hours. Yikes! I'd better get started...