Five Things Make a Post

[pedanther]

. Rock of Ages is only a few years old, but it's a musical in the classical style -- which is to say that the plot is formulaic and the characters thin, but none of that matters while the songs are happening. After the first read-through of the script, I had a pretty low opinion of it, but after the first vocal rehearsal I was much more kindly disposed.


. I didn't end up reading The High Window in March, deciding instead to focus on finishing off Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and a couple of other books that have been lying about half-read for a while. Now that the decks are cleared, I appear to have started reading The Woman in White instead. I didn't have this much trouble starting The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, but then I've read those before and I knew what to expect from them; I haven't read The High Window before and it appears to be getting stuck in the general reluctance to Start New Things.


. It took me a few months to get through Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, but not because I didn't enjoy it; it's a dense read, not to be gulped down too quickly or when the mind is already full of other things. This is a book about the present being built on the bones of the past. The plot has Smilla uncovering a sequence of events stretching back to the second world war, and ultimately caused by something that happened much longer ago. At the same time, the novelist is uncovering, a bit at a time, the events that made Smilla into the person she is. For each of the people she meets along the way, we're given a glimpse of what made them the people they've become. It reminds me of John le Carré's thrillers, which are similarly portraits of people under pressure. (And, like a lot of le Carré's novels, it doesn't tidy everything away neatly and happily at the end. I found that it gave good enough answers to the most important questions, and that I could live with the uncertainties that remained, but this isn't a universal experience.)


. Over the past while, I've been importing my reading log into StoryGraph. Since the first decade of my reading log exists only on paper, this has involved a fair amount of typing, some opportunities to bathe in nostalgia, and occasionally squinting at an entry and muttering, "That's weird, I don't remember that book at all." I've also learned a thing or two about International Standard Book Numbers, including how the typo protection works and how to translate the old 10-digit ISBN into a modern 13-digit ISBN (not to mention an exciting side-trip involving my copy of Tarzan of the Apes, which is so old it only has a 9-digit SBN).


. After a long hiatus occasioned by various life events and scheduling conflicts, our roleplaying group has resumed meeting more-or-less regularly and has got back into the investigation we were in the middle of before things ground to a halt. In our most recent playing session, we started investigating a lighthouse that had been left abandoned(?) after the occupants were attacked in the middle of renovating it. I figured out a way of climbing up the outside of the lighthouse and getting in at the top, a strategy that had served us well for getting past the guards last time we needed to investigate a tower; unfortunately on this occasion it turned out the scenario had been designed to provide an increasing challenge level as the players worked their way up, so going in from the top meant running straight into the most difficult set of opponents in the lighthouse. I was obliged to retreat back down the side of the lighthouse and rejoin the rest of the party, and we used the front door instead.

Comments

[igenlode]

I thought (too lazy to look it up) that "Rock of Ages" was a jukebox musical in the modern style? In which case a series of hit numbers linked together by formulaic characters and a weak book would be exactly what one would predict...

Goodreads has demonstrated to me that a significant proportion of my books don't have ISBNs *at all* (and that the database of existing editions there is heavily biased in favour of American publishers, even for old books by English authors!) On the other hand, it did inform me for the first time that there *are* both 10-digit and 13-digit ISBNs -- presumably the result of edition proliferation unpredicted by those who originally devised the format, just as those who devised telephone numbers predicted a requirement for one number per house, not per device, with multiple devices per head of population....

[pedanther]

It is a jukebox musical, and I suppose that's right when you put it that way. That said, the music's actually more creative in places than I was expecting; it's not just "and now, here's this song you remember, just the way you remember it", there are scenes where two or three originally-unrelated songs are woven together to reinforce or counterpoint each other.

I have a fair few books that predate ISBNs, as well, but at least you know where you are with those. The 9-digit SBN was intriguing because it was clearly related to an ISBN without being a close enough relative to be usable as-is.

[igenlode]

it's not just "and now, here's this song you remember, just the way you remember it", there are scenes where two or three originally-unrelated songs are woven together to reinforce or counterpoint each other.

Yes, that's always creatively interesting (I'm reminded of Voiceplay's arrangements again now).
Although of course it does -- like fan-fiction crossovers -- rely heavily on the audience being so familiar with the original as to appreciate what you've done, rather than simply taking it for granted that the number in question was always like that. (I'm not a fan of "Wicked", so I had no idea that Voiceplay's medley of that involved slipping lines from multiple songs in against each other until other people started raving about how clever it was.)

[fred_mouse]

I am also on Storygraph! If you are interested in friending/following/whatever the verb is there, I'm there under my wallet name (first_last), assuming you remember what that is :)

[pedanther]

I don't think that I do remember, but my username on StoryGraph is the same as here if you'd like to start the ball rolling from your end.

[fred_mouse]

Done!

[pedanther]

And accepted. And it turns out I do remember your wallet name, I'd just forgotten (or hadn't made the connection) that that was you here. I've even seen your name go past in the StoryGraph activity feed from time to time, and been vaguely intending to mention it next time we met, whenever that happened to be the way things are.