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Fiction log quick comments
Sep. 1st, 2023 10:57 am. I'm still persisting with Re: Dracula. I have some quibbles about some of the adaptation choices, but when it works it really, really works. There was also a rough patch for a couple of weeks where every episode had one or more ads for their other podcasts; even on the longer episodes, it often meant the ad at the end jarred me out of the mood the episode had gone to some trouble to create, and it got quite intrusive on the days when there was only a short chapter -- the pinnacle being a two-and-a-half minute episode which contained one-and-a-half minutes of advertising. Fortunately for my willingness to continue engaging, the next episode had no ads at all and there's only been the occasional ad since.
. One of the other classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. I'm enjoying it so far. I thought I'd read it before, because I knew the initial set-up and the two main characters and remembered at least one scene quite clearly, but so far all the details have been making me go "I definitely haven't read this before", so I think it's just that I've read the one chapter that I remember. It was a class exercise in school, I think; I remember being in a classroom and doing an illustration of a scene from the story. One detail that made it stick in my memory was that there was a character in a kilt, and I drew the kilt as basically a stiff triangle (or do I mean a trapezium?) that didn't drape in anything like a properly cloth-like way.
. Another of the classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for the Sherlock Holmes stories, and speaking of things I thought I'd read, we're up to The Return of Sherlock Holmes now and it turns out that I've never actually read it all the way through. I've read several of the stories in the collection individually (including, naturally, the initial one which contains the actual Return), and I've picked up the general idea of most of the others by osmosis, and somewhere along the line that apparently turned into me assuming that I'd already read the whole thing. As a result, I'm getting to enjoy a fair few stories for the first time.
. The reading challenge for July was "a book you got via your local indie bookseller, bought used, or borrowed from the library"; I read Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which I picked up from a second-hand book stall once because it looked interesting. It was. The two books it reminded me of are The Master and Margarita (satire of life under the regime with supernatural shenanigans) and Les Misérables (written in exile, an interconnected web of characters struggling to make a good life, and also there's like 50 pages of scene-setting anecdotes before the main character shows up -- although, to be fair, unlike in Les Mis most of the characters we're introduced to in the first 50 pages do continue to play a role in the rest of the story).
. The reading challenge for August was "a fiction or non-fiction book about a career you dreamed of as a child"; I read Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines, which is about a wizard who is also a librarian or vice versa. (The career I dreamed of as a child is "wizard"; people were always telling me "you should be a librarian because you read a lot of books" but I never believed them.) I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped; the concept of a wizard who can pull any object out of a book as long as it fits through the page sounds cool, but I felt the execution was unimaginative, and the protagonist is the same nerdy regular joe character who always seems to be the protagonist of this kind of story. And not one of the more likeable examples of the type, either; being a relatable regular joe can only carry you so far when you're doing things like coercing people by threatening to blow their heads up.
. The 1964 BBC TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo is good value for playing Spot the Actor Who Was Also in Doctor Who. As an adaptation, it's very faithful, for a certain kind of faithfulness. The things that happen in the series are, on the whole, things that happen in the book, and at 12 half-hours there's room for more of them than in a movie or a musical, but there's still quite a bit left out, and (whether by accident or design) what's left out includes most of Monte Cristo's stumbles and moments of self-reflection -- the things that, to me, make the heart of the story. (Among other things, it leaves out the entire subplot involving Villefort's second wife and son, and if you've read the novel you know what that means.) The climax of the series features many of the same events as the climax of the novel, but unsupported by much of what made the climax of the novel suitably climactic; people still go mad or have changes of heart because that's what the book says happens, but it's no longer quite clear why. I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's remark that a good adaptation requires an understanding of what the story is about that goes beyond merely knowing what happens in it.
. I don't remember how Richard Powers' The Overstory got on my to-read list, as it's not the kind of thing I usually decide to read; I have a suspicion that I was under the impression that it was a non-fiction book about trees. It is in fact a novel (it was awarded the Pulitzer, but for fiction), about humanity's relationship with trees, and with each other, and about the extremes people will go to and the things they'll go to extremes for. Somebody I know, when I mentioned I was reading it, described it as poetic and sad and fierce, which is probably as good a summation as anything I could come up with.
. One of the other classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. I'm enjoying it so far. I thought I'd read it before, because I knew the initial set-up and the two main characters and remembered at least one scene quite clearly, but so far all the details have been making me go "I definitely haven't read this before", so I think it's just that I've read the one chapter that I remember. It was a class exercise in school, I think; I remember being in a classroom and doing an illustration of a scene from the story. One detail that made it stick in my memory was that there was a character in a kilt, and I drew the kilt as basically a stiff triangle (or do I mean a trapezium?) that didn't drape in anything like a properly cloth-like way.
. Another of the classic literature read-alongs I'm doing is for the Sherlock Holmes stories, and speaking of things I thought I'd read, we're up to The Return of Sherlock Holmes now and it turns out that I've never actually read it all the way through. I've read several of the stories in the collection individually (including, naturally, the initial one which contains the actual Return), and I've picked up the general idea of most of the others by osmosis, and somewhere along the line that apparently turned into me assuming that I'd already read the whole thing. As a result, I'm getting to enjoy a fair few stories for the first time.
. The reading challenge for July was "a book you got via your local indie bookseller, bought used, or borrowed from the library"; I read Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which I picked up from a second-hand book stall once because it looked interesting. It was. The two books it reminded me of are The Master and Margarita (satire of life under the regime with supernatural shenanigans) and Les Misérables (written in exile, an interconnected web of characters struggling to make a good life, and also there's like 50 pages of scene-setting anecdotes before the main character shows up -- although, to be fair, unlike in Les Mis most of the characters we're introduced to in the first 50 pages do continue to play a role in the rest of the story).
. The reading challenge for August was "a fiction or non-fiction book about a career you dreamed of as a child"; I read Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines, which is about a wizard who is also a librarian or vice versa. (The career I dreamed of as a child is "wizard"; people were always telling me "you should be a librarian because you read a lot of books" but I never believed them.) I didn't like it as much as I'd hoped; the concept of a wizard who can pull any object out of a book as long as it fits through the page sounds cool, but I felt the execution was unimaginative, and the protagonist is the same nerdy regular joe character who always seems to be the protagonist of this kind of story. And not one of the more likeable examples of the type, either; being a relatable regular joe can only carry you so far when you're doing things like coercing people by threatening to blow their heads up.
. The 1964 BBC TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo is good value for playing Spot the Actor Who Was Also in Doctor Who. As an adaptation, it's very faithful, for a certain kind of faithfulness. The things that happen in the series are, on the whole, things that happen in the book, and at 12 half-hours there's room for more of them than in a movie or a musical, but there's still quite a bit left out, and (whether by accident or design) what's left out includes most of Monte Cristo's stumbles and moments of self-reflection -- the things that, to me, make the heart of the story. (Among other things, it leaves out the entire subplot involving Villefort's second wife and son, and if you've read the novel you know what that means.) The climax of the series features many of the same events as the climax of the novel, but unsupported by much of what made the climax of the novel suitably climactic; people still go mad or have changes of heart because that's what the book says happens, but it's no longer quite clear why. I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's remark that a good adaptation requires an understanding of what the story is about that goes beyond merely knowing what happens in it.
. I don't remember how Richard Powers' The Overstory got on my to-read list, as it's not the kind of thing I usually decide to read; I have a suspicion that I was under the impression that it was a non-fiction book about trees. It is in fact a novel (it was awarded the Pulitzer, but for fiction), about humanity's relationship with trees, and with each other, and about the extremes people will go to and the things they'll go to extremes for. Somebody I know, when I mentioned I was reading it, described it as poetic and sad and fierce, which is probably as good a summation as anything I could come up with.
