Other reading in Week 3
Jan. 18th, 2026 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherJanuary: Title containing "Before" or "After"
I have a couple of options on hold at the library, but they're still a few weeks away from coming in. If necessary, I can opt for Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, but apart from the question of whether subtitles count I'm not sure it's a topic I'm in the mood for at the moment.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
I'm about halfway through The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung, the first in a series of books detailing the exploits of the sporting gentleman A.J. Raffles, an excellent amateur cricketer and equally excellent amateur burglar and jewel thief. As told by his faithful and admiring (and somewhat dim) sidekick -- Hornung was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, and conceived of the duo as a kind of criminal homage to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. (The book is dedicated to Doyle, with a comment about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Wikipedia says that Doyle was not flattered, and asked for the dedication to be omitted from subsequent editions.)
I know a few people who really like the Raffles stories, and I had hoped I would too, but I'm not really getting on with this book. I suspect there are a couple of things I'm lacking: I'm not charmed by the central relationship dynamic, and I don't buy into the framing of Raffles as being better than the common run of criminal because he's in it partly for the love of the game. It may be relevant that I come in already equipped with a cynical opinion of the amateur-professional distinction in English cricket of the time, which had more to do with the social class of the players than how much money they were actually making; I therefore find the assertion that Raffles is not a mere professional, despite literally making his entire living from thievery, authentic to the spirit of English cricket but not in a way I'm sympathetic to.
Miscellaneous
Han Solo at Stars' End by Brian Daley.
One of the very earliest Star Wars tie-in novels, written back when "Star Wars" was just one movie, and well before the formation of the set of shared assumptions that informed the tie-ins from 1987 on. So it has moments of feeling un-Star-Wars-like, and sometimes entirely like an original sci-fi adventure that happens to have a few familiar proper nouns in. Particularly as the author made a strategic decision to steer clear of the parts of the galaxy the movies might want to use and set the action in a distant part of the galactic rim, with a local regional government that's enough of a problem for everyone without worrying about the bigger picture; there are no Star Destroyers or stormtroopers (or Jedi or light sabers), and the Empire itself gets only a few passing mentions.
The plot involves an authoritarian government, run for the benefit of its exploitative corporations, that starts disappearing anyone who shows any sign of dissent while its paranoid leaders paint them as part of a single organised resistance movement. So that wasn't entirely the distraction from real-world problems that I was hoping for.
It's got some fun moments, but the climax has problems of scale, and the whole thing has the prequel problem where Han's character development and relationships with other characters are hostage to the necessity of leaving him in the place where the movie found him. I also have access to Daley's two sequels, but I haven't decided yet whether I'm interested in proceeding with them.
Water Weed by Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, et al. A collected story arc from the comic book spun off from Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels.
I've been a bit disappointed by the last couple of these I've read, and I'm not sure if it's me or if there's an actual dip in the quality. One thing I've occasionally found jarring in both this one and the last one I read involves the narration: the novels are narrated in the first person by Peter Grant, and consequently only describe events that he personally witnessed or learned about afterward; the comics have the freedom to depict events that Peter knows nothing about -- and which it's clear none of the people involved would have told Peter about later -- which sometimes makes it feel odd that, when a bit of linking narration is required, it's still done in Peter's voice.
I have a couple of options on hold at the library, but they're still a few weeks away from coming in. If necessary, I can opt for Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, but apart from the question of whether subtitles count I'm not sure it's a topic I'm in the mood for at the moment.
StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge: A book one of your friends gave 4 stars out of 5
I'm about halfway through The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung, the first in a series of books detailing the exploits of the sporting gentleman A.J. Raffles, an excellent amateur cricketer and equally excellent amateur burglar and jewel thief. As told by his faithful and admiring (and somewhat dim) sidekick -- Hornung was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, and conceived of the duo as a kind of criminal homage to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. (The book is dedicated to Doyle, with a comment about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Wikipedia says that Doyle was not flattered, and asked for the dedication to be omitted from subsequent editions.)
I know a few people who really like the Raffles stories, and I had hoped I would too, but I'm not really getting on with this book. I suspect there are a couple of things I'm lacking: I'm not charmed by the central relationship dynamic, and I don't buy into the framing of Raffles as being better than the common run of criminal because he's in it partly for the love of the game. It may be relevant that I come in already equipped with a cynical opinion of the amateur-professional distinction in English cricket of the time, which had more to do with the social class of the players than how much money they were actually making; I therefore find the assertion that Raffles is not a mere professional, despite literally making his entire living from thievery, authentic to the spirit of English cricket but not in a way I'm sympathetic to.
Miscellaneous
Han Solo at Stars' End by Brian Daley.
One of the very earliest Star Wars tie-in novels, written back when "Star Wars" was just one movie, and well before the formation of the set of shared assumptions that informed the tie-ins from 1987 on. So it has moments of feeling un-Star-Wars-like, and sometimes entirely like an original sci-fi adventure that happens to have a few familiar proper nouns in. Particularly as the author made a strategic decision to steer clear of the parts of the galaxy the movies might want to use and set the action in a distant part of the galactic rim, with a local regional government that's enough of a problem for everyone without worrying about the bigger picture; there are no Star Destroyers or stormtroopers (or Jedi or light sabers), and the Empire itself gets only a few passing mentions.
The plot involves an authoritarian government, run for the benefit of its exploitative corporations, that starts disappearing anyone who shows any sign of dissent while its paranoid leaders paint them as part of a single organised resistance movement. So that wasn't entirely the distraction from real-world problems that I was hoping for.
It's got some fun moments, but the climax has problems of scale, and the whole thing has the prequel problem where Han's character development and relationships with other characters are hostage to the necessity of leaving him in the place where the movie found him. I also have access to Daley's two sequels, but I haven't decided yet whether I'm interested in proceeding with them.
Water Weed by Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, et al. A collected story arc from the comic book spun off from Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels.
I've been a bit disappointed by the last couple of these I've read, and I'm not sure if it's me or if there's an actual dip in the quality. One thing I've occasionally found jarring in both this one and the last one I read involves the narration: the novels are narrated in the first person by Peter Grant, and consequently only describe events that he personally witnessed or learned about afterward; the comics have the freedom to depict events that Peter knows nothing about -- and which it's clear none of the people involved would have told Peter about later -- which sometimes makes it feel odd that, when a bit of linking narration is required, it's still done in Peter's voice.
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Date: 2026-01-18 04:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-18 05:43 pm (UTC)