DVDs

Made a tiny amount of headway on the To Be Watched mountain this week.

Watched the first episode of Monkey. Dear Lord, it's even cheesier than I remembered. The sets and special effects are exactly what you'd expect of late 70s sf/fantasy, and I'm sure Modern Youth would be most disappointed. There is scenery-chewing. And it is enormous fun. It is every bit as brash and irreverent as the title character, and I am looking forward to watching the rest of the series.

I bought Other Half Jeff Wayne's The War of The Worlds 30th Anniversary Edition for Christmas. This is the limited edition boxset with the twin DVD of the 2006 stage show, and a copy of the HG Wells book. Other Half watched it while I was at Redemption, so I watched the first two sides while I was doing the ironing yesterday. Yes, the first two sides, because I am an Old Fart and I own the original double album on vinyl. I may not have actually seen that copy for nearly ten years because it's in storage along with anything we could play it on, but it got played often enough that I know *exactly* where the side breaks are.

Nothing will ever be quite the same as the original cast. But this is a damn good try at it, and the film segments are wonderful. The Richard Burton head doesn't work for me, as it's unliving proof of the Uncanny Valley effect, but it was certainly the right decision to keep Burton's narration. Slight shock at how very much older Justin Hayward looks since the last time I saw him in anything. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of it, and the assorted extras on the DVDs.

Happy St David's Day

The Google icon reminds me that it is St David's Day. A few years ago predatrix and I wrote a little something in the Syndicate universe set on St Patrick's Day, with Vaughan sulking about how nobody ever remembers St David's Day:

( the boys are in a pub )

The complete story is on my website. It involves quite a lot of Allard demonstrating that he'd rather shag the Welsh.

Book review: Ron MacLean -- Why the Long Face?

I received a review copy of this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme. As with many of the books I've requested on LTER, it's a book that I might not have picked up and bought in a bookshop, but which looked intriguing enough on the LTER information for me to want to try it. As such, it's outside my usual reading range, which does have some bearing on my review.

The book is a collection of contemporary short stories by Ron MacLean. It was described in the publishers blurb as "MacLean's characters – from a girl who walks on telephone wires to a memory-addled truck driver — all offer revelatory evidence of the strange workings of the human mind." I've found that it doesn't quite match the impression I picked up from the blurb, being much more experimental litfic than I'd really expected. This isn't a problem as such, but I found some of the "quirky" stories to be a lot less experimental and cutting edge than the publisher suggests, at least from my perspective as a long-time reader of speculative fiction and high end fanfic.

The stories are very much character-driven, a step into the lives of people who range from the ordinary to the bizarre. The characters and their concerns are deftly portrayed in beautiful prose, but I've found that a common feature of the stories is that they feel as if they're the first chapter of a longer story -- there's no real end or closure to any of the ones I've read so far. It works when the stories are taken one at a time, but I find it irritating when reading two or three in a single session, which is a large part of why I still haven't finished the book. I fully intend to read every story, and expect that I'll want to re-read some of them, but I enjoy it better taken a story every so often rather than reading the book through.

In the end, a worthwhile use of my time, but rather hard to review in any coherent fashion.


LibraryThing entry
Amazon US
Amazon UK

February book log

My reading was very bitty in February, and I'm not sure I can even remember all that I read. This is because I got hammered by tonsillitis in the first week, and have never really recovered. I had two review books from LTER which I really wanted to read, but put off because I didn't think I could give them proper attention.

I did start one of the LTER books, and got about 30 pages in before deciding that I simply wasn't up to reading a brand new book. But I greatly enjoyed what I did read of The Agency by Ally O'Brien, and I really want to get back to it once I'm feeling capable of it.

Read several more stories from an older LTER offering, and reviewed the book earlier today: Ron MacLean -- Why the Long Face?

Bought a Wycliffe omnibus, "How to kill a cat"/"The Four Jacks" on my first afternoon in Coventry, and read "The Four Jacks" during Redemption. The usual Wycliffe fare -- I read this one because I've read it before so could manage it even in my dilapidated state, but had read it long enough ago that it still felt fresh. The omnibus isn't listed on the Orion website and has a rather odd listing on Amazon, and I strongly suspect it of having been printed specifically for the remainder market, a specialist remainder chain being where I bought it.

The other omnibus picked up in the remainder shop was two of the early Dalziel and Pascoe novels, "An April Shroud" and "A Clubbable Woman". Started "An April Shroud" but haven't finished it yet -- again, a book I've read but with enough of a time lapse to be interested in reading it again.

And on the Cybook, E Nesbitt's Book of Dragons, which I hadn't read before and found enormous fun; plus started on Jane Eyre, which I haven't read for at least ten years, and probably longer. ETA: And Thorne Smith's "Topper".