pedanther

I've finished reading Our Mutual Friend. With all the characters and subplots, it takes a while to get going, but the way everything pays off is very satisfying.

I was amused by the author's note at the end saying that he anticipated that many readers and commentators would consider John Rokesmith's backstory to be what modern audiences would call a spoiler, when in fact he'd put a lot of effort into hinting at it so that an alert reader could figure it out. He goes on to say that there's another strand of the plot that he did attempt "to keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out... and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last"; he doesn't say which it is, though I have a couple of suppositions.

The reading challenge for March is "a book with a location in the title". I've used that as an impetus to finish off Sig: City of Blades finally, so I've got the rest of the month to my own devices. (It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, it's just that it wasn't a high priority so I kept putting it aside for other things.) I've also set myself a goal of reading one Philip Marlowe novel a month; this month's is The High Window, which will mean that next month, when the Buzzword challenge is "Little or Big", I can use The Little Sister to knock off two birds with one stone.

* I've signed up for the Buzzword Reading Challenge, where each month there's a theme and a list of words and you read at least one book with one of those words in the title, because I thought it might give me an impetus to stretch myself a bit, or at least to get a few books out of the ever-growing to-read pile. The word list for January was "Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How", and the book I picked out of the to-read pile (which would also have done for February, March, August, or November) was The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M Valente. The word list for February is "He, His, She, Hers, Me, Mine, You, Yours, We, Ours, etc.", and I'm having a second crack at Our Mutual Friend; so far it's going much better than the first attempt, which ran out of steam a few chapters in. (I saw bits of the TV version that featured Paul McGann and Keeley Hawes, just enough to have an inkling of the troubles that await the protagonists but not enough to know whether any of them get happy endings. Or, in the case of some of them, to have a clear idea whether I should want them to have happy endings.)


* Our production of All Together Now! went really well. After that I took a break and didn't do anything for the Christmas Show except come and watch one performance. We're currently in rehearsals for the first show of the new year, which is called Female Transport and is a drama set on a convict ship bound for Australia. I'm playing the ship's captain (which, come to think of it, is also what I did last time we had a play set on a convict ship bound for Australia).


* My walking routine has fallen in a bit of a hole since I was boasting about how well it was doing. Weirdly, it feels like the onset of summer did it more damage than winter did. You'd think longer days and less chance of rain would make it easier to go for a walk, but my work hours shifted in a way that made it harder to find time in the mornings, and by the time it cooled down in the evenings I often couldn't summon the energy. One thing that has recently given my exercise routine a lift is that I finally got around to digging the bicycle out of storage and getting it serviced, and now I'm riding it pretty regularly. (And yes, that's how the walking routine started too, but the bicycle lets me do more exercise in less time so I'm hoping it'll persist.)


* I signed up for Disney+ a few months ago so I could watch Loki while my friends were still talking about it, and then I watched What If...?, and re-watched Ant-Man (I had remembered it was a fun movie, but not just how much fun it was)... and now I've fallen into the same trap I always seem to fall into with streaming services, where the monthly fees rack up while I don't watch anything because I can't make up my mind what to watch next. I do want to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp, and I'm at least a bit interested in at least some parts of WandaVision and Hawkeye, and I intend to watch The Mandalorian at some point, and that's barely scratching the surface of what's available. But somehow it always seems like something for another day.


* Instead, I've been watching a bunch of stuff on Youtube. One thing I have been watching a lot of recently is the British game show Taskmaster, in which the competitors are given eccentric challenges ranging from the seemingly simple ("Eat this egg. Fastest wins.") to the more elaborate ("Create the most thrilling soap opera cliffhanger. You have one hour."). A lot of the entertainment comes from comparing the different approaches taken by the different competitors (you might not think there could be four wildly distinct ways to "Eat this egg", but there were). Another thing I've been enjoying is a series of reaction videos on medusacascade's channel, where she's watching Babylon 5 for the first time. It's great getting to watch somebody new discover the show, and while it's not quite the same thing as watching the series again myself, it's enough like it that I suspect it's taking up a "this is the show I'm currently watching" slot in my brain and might be part of why I'm not currently getting around to watching any new scripted drama series.

Fiction books
Steve Gooch. Female Transport
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Mouse and Dragon (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Scout's Progress (e) (re-read)
Emily Rodda. Finders Keepers (re-read)
James H Schmitz. The Demon Breed (e) (re-read)

In progress
Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist (e)
Peter Høeg, tr. F David. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Jason Pitre. Sig: City of Blades

Picture books
Philip Bunting. Mopoke

Non-fiction books in progress
David Attenborough. Zoo Quest for a Dragon
Matt Parker. Humble Pi (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Kim Newman. Something More Than Night

Fiction books
Arthur Upfield. The Barrakee Mystery (e)

In hiatus
Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Adrian Goldsworthy. Philip and Alexander (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Jason Aaron, Esad Ribic. Thor, God of Thunder: The God Butcher