.
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.
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