pedanther

I've been experimenting with my journal entries in the last week or two, ( Read more... )

We had a family get-together for the public holiday, ( Read more... )

The board game club had another of their long public holiday sessions ( Read more... )

I had a doctor's appointment this week: a routine thing, not because anything was wrong with me. ( The next bit involves injections )

I don't think I've mentioned in one of these posts that I've started reading Solzhenitsyn: ( Read more... )

( Movies current - Ocean - and upcoming - including ) Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The latter had the tagline "Only monsters play god", which is staking out a position in the "'Frankenstein' is not the name of the monster" discourse that I respect.

I finished playing through The Beekeeper's Picnic. ( Read more... )

I got to Parkrun only slightly late this week: ( Read more... )

I've had several experiences this week where I was reading someone's description of their experiences with ADHD and thinking that it sounded worryingly familiar. ( Read more... )

I was yesterday years old when I learned that "Womble" is an actual real surname that actual people really have. (Apparently, it's derived from the Yorkshire town of Wombwell.) The context was somebody mentioning a law firm called Womble Bond Dickinson; the relevant founding partner was apparently called B. S. Womble, which is one of the most made-up-sounding real names I've encountered in recent memory. (His full name was "Bunyan Snipes Womble", which sounds like a law firm all by itself.)

Had a picnic on Easter Sunday with all the family members who were currently in town, which was nice.

My haul from the weekend included ( Read more... )

At board game club, we had an all-afternoon session because of the public holiday, so we played two games that would normally be too long to play in an evening: Fury of Dracula and Mansions of Madness.
( Read more... )

Speaking of computer games (that are adaptations of tabletop games), this week I tried out a new computer game (a phrase which here means that it came out a few years back and I got it on special a couple of months ago): a strategy game called BattleTech, derived from the tabletop game of the same name, which revolves around designing giant nuclear-powered robots and then getting into fights with other people's giant nuclear-power robots.
( Read more... )

Went to one of the Anzac Day morning services. ( Read more... )

There was a post going around on Tumblr inviting people to draw a horse without looking at any picture references, so I gave it a shot:
( Read more... )

Fiction books
(anthology). The Witch Who Came in From the Cold: Season One (e)
Ben Aaronovitch. The Masquerades of Spring (e)
Pamela Freeman. Victor's Quest
Tamora Pierce. Cold Fire (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Fire in the Forging (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Healing in the Vine (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Magic in the Weaving (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Magic Steps (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. The Power in the Storm (e) (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Shatterglass (e)
Tamora Pierce. Street Magic (e) (re-read)
Rafael Sabatini. The Sword of Islam
Shelby Van Pelt. Remarkably Bright Creatures (e)
Evangeline Walton. The Island of the Mighty

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear (e) (re-read)

Abandoned
(anthology). Tremontaine: Season One (e)

Picture books
Lee Fox, Mitch Vane. Jasper McFlea Will Not Eat His Tea
Julia Patton. The Very Very Very Long Dog
Eve Titus, Paul Galdone. Anatole

Non-fiction books
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)
Patrick Radden Keefe. Say Nothing (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Rosaleen Love. Reefscape

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

Top of the to-read pile
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland

Saturday was my last full day in town. I went to Parkrun in the morning, taking the opportunity to visit a course I haven't done before; I picked one near the seashore since I hadn't been properly near the sea yet during my visit, though as it turned out the track was on the landward side of a string of high dunes so I didn't actually see the sea except in glimpses. Later in the day I went to WABA and to Astrofest, and caught up with people I knew.

On Sunday morning, I went to the beach with relatives, and we looked in tide pools and found interesting shells and generally had a nice time. In the afternoon, it was time for the train home. On the train, I read The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, one of a bundle of ebooks I got a while back which had originally been published in a serial format with different authors writing each chapter. I got on better with it than the last one I tried, in that I didn't give up before I reached the end, but I found it disappointing; the plotting was uneven, with elements being introduced without proper set-up or dropped without proper pay-off, and the characters were all Types without enough personal history or individuality for me to really care about what happened to them.

When I got home, I did read Remarkably Bright Creatures. If it weren't for the octopus, it would be a kind of book I don't usually read, but on the whole I enjoyed it, though one of the subplots set off one of my narrative allergies so badly that I started skimming chapters whenever it cropped up. It might have been a good thing that I didn't have it with me on the train; I think I might have been less happy with it if I hadn't been able to put it down and walk away for a bit when it was getting too much.

After the better part of two years, I've finally finished listening to all of Re: Dracula, the audio drama podcast adaptation of Dracula Daily. I started listening last year on its original release, but stopped partway through, then restarted at the same point when it came around again this year. To be fair to the podcast, a major reason I struggled with it was external; last year was the year I started logging daily reading progress and not just when I completed a book, and I made the possibly unwise decision to log Re: Dracula as an audio book and keep track of the cumulative run time. That would always have been a challenge and a distraction from simply listening and enjoying, though now I'm done being fair I want to also note that having to calculate and subtract the run time of all the ad breaks certainly didn't help.

With that out of the way, Letters From Watson is now the only serialised fiction thing I'm still participating in, and when that finishes next month I think I'm going to want a significant break before I let myself consider getting caught up in any more.

I put my 750 Words account into scheduled vacation mode before my trip, since I wouldn't have access to an internet with a keyboard and I don't write anything of significant length on my phone, and I didn't reactivate it immediately after I got home. Partly that was because I'd found that it was actually quite nice to be able to go "I'm tired, I'm going to bed" and not "I'm tired, but I have to write 750 words before I can think about going to bed", and partly it was because I couldn't decide what to do about the days I'd skipped: try to summarise them, or just write them off and resume journalling from where I was. Anyway, I didn't do any journal entries all week, and one of the consequences was that I didn't have a handy supply of pre-digested things to say. That's one of the reasons this is a week late, though perhaps not the main one – but that is a topic for next time.

Fiction books
Rachael Allen. Harley Quinn: Ravenous (e)
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World (re-read)
Colin Forbes. The Leader and the Damned
Jack London. The Scarlet Plague
Dan Moren. The Caledonian Gambit (e)
Evangeline Walton. The Children of Llyr
Evangeline Walton. Prince of Annwn
Evangeline Walton. The Song of Rhiannon

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Valley of Fear (e) (re-read)
Evangeline Walton. The Island of the Mighty

Non-fiction books in progress
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
(anthology). Tremontaine: Season One (e)

. Went for a bike ride for the first time in a couple of months. My bike is in pretty good condition, although I think the seat needs adjusting to be a bit more comfortable. With the weather warming, I'll need to try to remember to take a water bottle with me if I go on a long ride (my bike came fitted with a carrying bracket for a water bottle, but I've never actually used it).

. The week to 4 October is a big week in the chronology of Dracula, being the week where Dracula's victims start actively fighting back and things begin happening in earnest. In terms of Re: Dracula, there were three days with hour-long episodes and one, the most action-packed day in the entire story, with an episode lasting two hours. I'm generally enjoying Re: Dracula, though continuing to be annoyed by the ads that get stuck on the beginning or end of most episodes (and, in one instance this week, in the middle) and reliably break the mood that the episode is trying to create. I'm also continuing to find sometimes that if I consumed some other dense piece of media already in the day, I'm not ready to listen to the scheduled episode of Re: Dracula as well; the two-hour episode, in fact, I put off until the following morning for that reason.

. The dense piece of media I had been reading on that occasion was "And What Happened After", a long Lord of the Rings fanfic about what became of the hobbits who sailed off to the utmost West with Gandalf and the elves. I was re-reading it so I could write a rec post for

fancake, which you can read here if you want to know more.

. The random book challenge for October is "sort your to-read list alphabetically by author and read a book by the first author you haven't read before". The book thus indicated was the first part of a series that I have no access to the later parts of, so I skipped it and went with This Is Improbable, by Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prize.

. I've reached the end of the story mode in Tactical Breach Wizards. At the end of the final battle, the player is given a choice to make - a variation on the standard "bring the villain in alive to face justice" vs "the world would be better off with the villain dead" dilemma that's usual for this kind of story - and the game, I gather, gives different versions of the 'where are they now' epilogue depending on which choice the player makes. Something that struck me is that, due to the circumstances in which the villain is defeated, there are actually three options presented, one in which the villain winds up dead and two in which the villain ends up alive. I don't know if the two 'alive' options are functionally identical, or if they lead to different epilogues; replaying missions skips the story bits, so the only way to get to the final choice and explore a different option is to play the entire game again, and I'm not sure I'm quite that curious.

Fiction books
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Tesladyne Industries Field Guide
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles (e) (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell. Fortunately, the Milk (re-read)
David Langford. He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (e)
Claire North. House of Odysseus
Claire North. Ithaca
Claire North. The Last Song of Penelope
Arthur Upfield. The Mountains Have a Secret (e)
Arthur Upfield. The Widows of Broome (e)
Geoffrey Willans, Ronald Searle. Down with Skool!
Timothy Zahn. Cobra

In progress
Hanan al-Shayk. Women of Sand and Myrrh
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Marc Abrahams. This Is Improbable

. I went to the cinema for the first time in months, to see a new Australian film called Kid Snow, which was filmed on location in Western Australia and has a few people I know in the crowd scenes. (I also know some of the locations, and I'm pretty sure I spotted a sequence where the characters leave a small country town, drive all day, and arrive in a new small country town, in which both small country towns are played by the same somewhat larger country town, a few blocks apart.) The plot is the kind of thing that sounds very familiar if you try to explain it in a single sentence, and some of the dialogue is a bit on the nose, but the main performances are strong (including the tagalong kid character, who is genuinely charming and not irritating except when the story means him to be). Some of the supporting performances, too; at least two of the supporting characters are played by actors who have separately starred in other Australian productions that I've been meaning to get around to (one of which, Mystery Road: Origins, was filmed on location in the same part of Western Australia and has more familiar faces in it).

. Last weekend was a long weekend in WA, which as far as the local boardgaming club was concerned meant an opportunity to break out some of the longer board games that we don't get to play in our weekly evening sessions. Over the weekend, we played several rounds of Pandemic Legacy (which started well and then got out of hand repeatedly as additional constraints began appearing), Fury of Dracula (with unintentionally appropriate timing; in the chronology of Dracula this week in September is when the heroes stop playing catch-up and start actively hunting vampires), and a six-player game of Agricola, among other shorter games.

. I was right, I did end up picking Cobra for the September random book challenge. This involved shamelessly bending the instructions for selecting the book, but I've done that a few times already with this challenge. I feel like it's the kind of challenge where the aim is ultimately to break decision paralysis and read a book, and as long as that goal is achieved it doesn't really matter if you follow the instructions to the letter. I wouldn't be so cavalier with a reading challenge where the book selection mattered in itself, like the challenge I've seen going around where the aim is to read one book originating from each nation.

. Apart from the two monthly reading challenges I'm doing, I'm also doing another less structured one that's just a long list of varied prompts like "a book with a hotel on the cover" or "a book with a title that sounds like exercise". I haven't been mentioning it because the range of prompts is so broad that I can usually find something to check off for every book I read, so I've been tending to treat it as an afterthought and not an aid to book selection. However, since I was caught up on both the monthly challenges with some time left in September, I decided to look at the list of unfinished prompts and see if it would suggest something to read next. My eye was caught by "a book with the word 'secret' in the title", since that seemed like an easy one to match against my to-read list on StoryGraph -- and it was even easier than anticipated, because when I went to the to-read page the very first book listed, in the section at the top of the page for high-priority books, was The Mountains Have a Secret, the next novel in the Bony series. So I borrowed that from the library and read it. Then I immediately went on to read the following book, The Widows of Broome, because the ebook edition has a really ugly cover that I hate looking at and didn't want lurking at the top of my to-read page for however long it would otherwise have taken me to get around to it.

. Somebody in a book-related online group posted a picture of their recent book acquisitions, which included Prez: Setting a Dangerous President. This briefly gave me hope that Prez had somehow been revived without me hearing about it, but when I looked it up it turned out it was just a new edition of the first six issues with a different subtitle and a new bonus story.

The modern incarnation of Prez, written by Mark Russell with art by Ben Caldwell, ran for 6 issues around nine years ago, and then was cancelled just as it was really getting going. I wasn't a huge fan, but it had its moments, and Russell was clearly going somewhere with it and I would have liked to have seen where that was. Of the various questions left unanswered when the series was cancelled, the one that increasingly haunts me as time goes on is the place in the story of comic relief and occasional deus ex machina Fred Wayne, a quirky reclusive multi-billionaire who drops into the story from time to time to give events a nudge, and somehow avoids being one of the series' villains despite being a multi-billionaire with enough money and influence to bend democracy to his whim, whose reputation canonically rests on taking credit for the unrecognised work of more creatively gifted employees. (The bit about him making his first fortune from generative AI that's started crowding human writers out of the market hasn't aged well, either.) It might not bother me so much if there weren't occasional moments that might have been hints that Russell knew what he was doing and that what he was doing was setting Fred up to be an antagonist later on -- I even have a left-field theory, based partly on things that happened in the original 1970s incarnation of Prez that aren't in evidence in the six published issue of the reboot, that he might have been intended as the ultimate villain of the series. Or I could be reading too much into it, and Russell just wanted a convenient deus ex machina and didn't think too hard about the implications. We don't know, and what bothers me is that there is, now, no way we can ever know for certain.

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.

. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.

. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.

. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)

. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. My login to borrow ebooks from the library had stopped working for no apparent reason, which happens several times a year and almost always just means that it's been a while since I borrowed a book in person and the library computer wants me to go in and confirm that I'm still a local resident and active library user. (I had to figure that out from first principles the first time it happened; I don't know why they can't display a message explaining what's going on. Well, probably because the ebook library is a third-party system and it would be some flavour of Too Hard.) Accordingly, I went in to the library to see if anything caught my eye that I could borrow and prove my continued existence. One of the first things that caught my eye, on the display of New and Popular Books near the front desk, was the third volume of Claire North's recent trilogy about what Odysseus' wife Penelope had to deal with while he was off having the Odyssey, which I'd heard about somewhere a while ago and thought might be interesting. While I was browsing through the shelves I found that the library had the first two volumes as well, so I decided to borrow the first one, Ithaca, and see how it went.

. Last year, I started listening to Re: Dracula, the audio drama version of Dracula Daily, but gave up on it a little way into September for a number of reasons, including general Having Too Much to Keep Up With and a more specific Fed Up With All the Ads. I decided that this year, having a bit more mental and emotional bandwidth to spare, I'd pick up where I left off (or actually, a few episodes before, to start at a suitable inflection point in the narrative), and so far it's going pretty well. There are still All the Ads, but I'm coping with them better (and being more ruthless about just skipping through them, since at this point even if there was an ad for something I was actually interested in I would probably avoid it out of spite).

. I've been doing a project for a while now, posting on Tumblr, where I go through The Count of Monte Cristo chapter by chapter and note everything the text says about when the events take place. The hope was at the end of it I would have a set of information I could assemble into a proper timeline that would be useful for future reference, but I am confounded at every turn. And, mark you, it's not that Dumas doesn't give dates, it's that he seems incapable of giving a date without contradicting himself: the most important event in the novel is given no fewer than three different dates in different chapters (and, on one occasion, two different dates within the same scene); the only character who has a birth date explicitly stated has two different explictly-stated birth dates; the date that a week-long event begins is two days after the date that it ends. I still want to present my findings in some kind of useful reference document, but at this point I don't have any idea what form such a thing would take.

. My current standby book, for when I need a couple of pages to keep my reading streak going but don't feel up to anything too involving, is Try Whistling This, a collection of essays about music by the composer and music critic (and host of Radio National's The Music Show) Andrew Ford. One of the essays I've read so far was about the role of nostalgia in popular music, and how musicians who were considered rebellious and dangerous in their heyday, like Elvis and Beethoven, wind up being sold as nice and comforting. (Which reminded me of the time I heard a choir sing "Imagine" at a memorial service, in between a hymn and the Lord's Prayer, and found myself reflecting that it's become so familiar that it's now possible for the words to pass through people without slowing down.)

. Too tired to elaborate, but Natural Six is really very good.

Fiction books
Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (e)
Edgar Rice Burroughs. A Princess of Mars (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Ribbon Dance (e)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Trader's Leap (e) (re-read)
Yoon Ha Lee. Hexarchate Stories (e)
Arthur Upfield. An Author Bites the Dust

In progress
Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles (e) (re-read)
David Langford. He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
Andrew Ford. Try Whistling This: Writings on Music (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Joanna Russ. The Female Man (e)

* Hi! So, it's been a while since I've done a proper post. A big part of that is that I was priced out of the place I was renting, and I've been occupied with the process of finding and moving into somewhere with rent I can afford. There's a funny story about how I found the place I'm living now, or rather how it was found for me, but I don't think I can do it justice without including too many identifying details.

* At the Rep Club, we're currently rehearsing for the Christmas Show. It's going well; it's one of those fortunate productions where everybody gets along and things are progressing fairly smoothly. We might even achieve the rare feat of doing a full run-through more than a week before the show opens.

* I did end up bailing on Dracula Daily and Re: Dracula, shortly after I last posted about them, as part of a general recognition that I was trying to keep up with too many different things on Tumblr. I've stuck with most of the other similar things I was signed up for (am enjoying Kidnapped Weekly, and increasingly convinced that I never have actually read Kidnapped before), but I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into any new ones. Most recently, I managed to resist the temptation to get involved in a readalong of Journey to the West – something I would love to share with people under other circumstances, but right now too much of a commitment to take on.

* The reading challenge for September was "a book with a one-word title"; I read Blitzkrieg by Len Deighton. The reading challenge for October was "a book about people wearing masks, hiding, or masquerading as something they are not"; I read The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (and a whole lot of comic books where Scooby-Doo and friends team up with Batman and friends). The reading challenge for November is "a book by, about or telling the story of an indigenous population"; I wasn't sure a Bony novel would really count, but I decided it was time to try the next one anyway – it was Bushranger of the Skies, and I wouldn't have been comfortable counting it for that prompt but fortunately it did definitely fit the alternate prompt for November, which was "a book about families".

* I've been watching Pluto on Netflix. I could write a post about the experience, but it would be pretty much exactly the post I wrote about the experience of watching The Sandman on Netflix with a few proper nouns changed.

Fiction books
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 1 (e)
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela, Scott Jeralds. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 2 (e)
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 3 (e)
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela, Dave Alvarez, Scott Jeralds. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 4 (e)
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela, Dave Alvarez, Scott Jeralds. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 5 (e)
T Kingfisher. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (e)
Thornton Wilder. The Matchmaker (re-read)
Thornton Wilder. Our Town
Thornton Wilder. The Skin of Our Teeth
Devon Williamson. The Hardcase Hotel

In progress
L Frank Baum. Ozma of Oz (e)
Shannon Chakraborty. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
Sholly Fisch, Dario Brizuela, Scott Jeralds, Walter Carzon, Horacio Ottolini. Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Volume 6 (e)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

In hiatus
T Kingfisher. Nettle & Bone (e)

Non-fiction books
Len Deighton. Blitzkrieg
Katherine Rundell. Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Agatha Christie. The Secret Adversary

. 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.

Fiction books
TS Eliot. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Jim C Hines. Libriomancer
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Wizard of the Crow
Richard Powers. The Overstory (e)

In progress
L Frank Baum. Ozma of Oz (e)
T Kingfisher. Nettle & Bone (e)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Thornton Wilder. Our Town

Fiction books
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Alliance of Equals (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Neogenesis (e) (re-read)
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Salvage Right (e)
Arthur Miller. All My Sons
John Parker. The Village Cricket Match

In progress
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Wizard of the Crow
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
L Frank Baum. Ozma of Oz (e)

. 9 to 5 ended up coming together really well. I've so far managed to avoid being dragged into the orbit of the next production. (I hear they actually had enough people turn up to the first round of auditions to cover all the parts, which I'm not sure I remember the last time that happened.) I did get dragged into helping with set construction on 9 to 5, and have finally failed to avoid learning how to wield a paint roller effectively.

. I've read the new Liaden Universe novel, Salvage Right. I found much to like, and also a few things that weren't to my taste. I'm looking forward to the next one.

. I had a fun time watching Across the Spider-Verse, but I don't like it as much as Into the Spider-Verse. In general, it felt like there was More Of Everything You Liked In The First One, and more isn't necessarily better. A lot of the sections were great in themselves, but I'm not sure it all fits together satisfactorily -- although it is of course difficult to judge that when half the pieces of the jigsaw are still in the box.

. I hadn't intended to do Dracula Daily two years running, but was intrigued by the debut of Re: Dracula, a parallel project releasing a full-cast audio adaptation of Dracula on the same serialised schedule. It's very well done, and having a new way of experiencing the story is helping, but I'm still feeling Dracula fatigue already and I'm not sure I'm going to go the distance.

. The reading challenge for June was "read a book about things/people/places/galaxies being fixed and/or broken", for which I finally got around to reading The Oresteia, which has been on my to-read pile for about a decade on account of an interesting anecdote I read in a Doctor Who novel once. (Salvage Right would also have been a good fit, but it didn't come out until June was already over.) The challenge for July is "a book you got via your local indie bookseller, bought used, or borrowed from the library"; I haven't picked a book yet, but I have plenty of eligible options in my to-read pile. (Not to mention two books on hold at the library which I keep bumping because I'm not sure I'm in a good frame of mind to face either of them.)

Fiction books
Aeschylus, tr. Robert Fagles. The Oresteia
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Abandoned
Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish (eight deadly words)

Non-fiction books
Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Salvage Right (e)

Fiction books
Tatsuya Endo, tr. Casey Loe. Spy x Family, volume 1
Tatsuya Endo, tr. Casey Loe. Spy x Family, volume 2
Arthur Upfield. The Mystery of Swordfish Reef

In progress
Aeschylus, tr. Robert Fagles. The Oresteia
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)

Abandoned
Tatsuya Endo, tr. Casey Loe. Spy x Family, volume 3 (october point)

Non-fiction books
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish

Fiction books
Hilary Mantel. Bring Up the Bodies (e)
Hilary Mantel. The Mirror and the Light (e)
Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall

In progress
Charles Dickens. Our Mutual Friend (e)

Abandoned
Peter Morwood. Prince Ivan (e)

Non-fiction books
Ron Chernow. Alexander Hamilton (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Adrian Goldsworthy. Philip and Alexander

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Entries tagged with dracula: adaptations

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