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Five Things Make a Post
May. 1st, 2022 08:06 am. The reading challenge for April was a book with "Little" or "Big" in the title. I had intended to combine it with my Chandler reading and use The Little Sister, but that's the one Chandler novel I don't own a copy of and I put off going to the library too long, so when I did I found that the library's one copy was out and there wasn't enough month left to wait for it.
So instead I grabbed the first available thing with a suitable title out of my bookmarks on Overdrive, which turned out to be A Little More, a collection of poems and essays by the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott. I remember her recurring guest appearances on Good News Week (translation for British readers: more or less the Australian version of Have I Got News For You), where she showed a wicked sense of humour hiding within a demure little old lady, but didn't know much about her actual writing. I'm enjoying getting acquainted with it.
The challenge for May is a book with a direction in the title.
. While I was putting off looking for The Little Sister, I read Stolen Skies, the new third novel of Tim Powers's current contemporary fantasy series. I have mixed feelings about it. The premise is intriguing, but three books is the longest he's ever stuck with one setting and set of protagonists, and I'm not convinced it's working; some of the situations are starting to get repetitive, and having generic government agencies as the antagonists is damping down his flair for memorable villains. Part of me wishes that he'd stopped at book two, which ended in a way that would have worked as a satisfying conclusion, and done this premise with a new set of characters. At the same time, since book three does exist, I find myself hoping that he has a fourth book planned; that's partly because the end of book three doesn't work as a satisfying end to the series, and partly because I remember that I wasn't so keen on book one until book two came out and showed where things were going, and I'm hoping he'll repeat the trick with books three and four.
. I also read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White this month, because I saw it when I was in the library and remembered that I'd been meaning to read it some time. I now understand completely why everyone I know who's read it is so impressed with Marian Halcombe.
. I've been getting back into playing Invisible, Inc lately, and trying to get the hang of the Expert Plus difficulty setting, which is required for three of the four achievements I still hadn't ticked off. Expert Plus difficulty, apart from various incremental tweaks like having more guards in each level, requires some mental rewiring because it takes away one of the key tools available in the lower difficulties. In the lower difficulties, if you can see a part of the room you can see if it's visible to a guard or security camera, but in Expert Plus difficulty you have to be able to see the guard or camera to be able to determine which parts of the room they can see; which is more realistic, but makes entering a new room a much dicier proposition requiring much peering around of corners.
. I mentioned a while back that I've been watching the reaction channel Marie-Clare's World as Marie-Clare works her way through Doctor Who. Back when I last mentioned it, I believe, she was still mostly relying on physical video media, but since then she's switched to streaming it on Britbox. One of the ways this makes a difference is that she's made a habit of avoiding learning the story titles in advance, since now she can just hit the "next episode" button without needing to know what the next episode is called, and also covers her eyes when the title comes up at the beginning of the first episode of each story. That way she gets to watch each story even more spoiler-free than even most of the people who watched it when it first aired. Occasionally this has dramatic results, such as when she recently watched "The Five Doctors" with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into and got increasingly emotional as it became apparent what was happening.
So instead I grabbed the first available thing with a suitable title out of my bookmarks on Overdrive, which turned out to be A Little More, a collection of poems and essays by the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott. I remember her recurring guest appearances on Good News Week (translation for British readers: more or less the Australian version of Have I Got News For You), where she showed a wicked sense of humour hiding within a demure little old lady, but didn't know much about her actual writing. I'm enjoying getting acquainted with it.
The challenge for May is a book with a direction in the title.
. While I was putting off looking for The Little Sister, I read Stolen Skies, the new third novel of Tim Powers's current contemporary fantasy series. I have mixed feelings about it. The premise is intriguing, but three books is the longest he's ever stuck with one setting and set of protagonists, and I'm not convinced it's working; some of the situations are starting to get repetitive, and having generic government agencies as the antagonists is damping down his flair for memorable villains. Part of me wishes that he'd stopped at book two, which ended in a way that would have worked as a satisfying conclusion, and done this premise with a new set of characters. At the same time, since book three does exist, I find myself hoping that he has a fourth book planned; that's partly because the end of book three doesn't work as a satisfying end to the series, and partly because I remember that I wasn't so keen on book one until book two came out and showed where things were going, and I'm hoping he'll repeat the trick with books three and four.
. I also read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White this month, because I saw it when I was in the library and remembered that I'd been meaning to read it some time. I now understand completely why everyone I know who's read it is so impressed with Marian Halcombe.
. I've been getting back into playing Invisible, Inc lately, and trying to get the hang of the Expert Plus difficulty setting, which is required for three of the four achievements I still hadn't ticked off. Expert Plus difficulty, apart from various incremental tweaks like having more guards in each level, requires some mental rewiring because it takes away one of the key tools available in the lower difficulties. In the lower difficulties, if you can see a part of the room you can see if it's visible to a guard or security camera, but in Expert Plus difficulty you have to be able to see the guard or camera to be able to determine which parts of the room they can see; which is more realistic, but makes entering a new room a much dicier proposition requiring much peering around of corners.
. I mentioned a while back that I've been watching the reaction channel Marie-Clare's World as Marie-Clare works her way through Doctor Who. Back when I last mentioned it, I believe, she was still mostly relying on physical video media, but since then she's switched to streaming it on Britbox. One of the ways this makes a difference is that she's made a habit of avoiding learning the story titles in advance, since now she can just hit the "next episode" button without needing to know what the next episode is called, and also covers her eyes when the title comes up at the beginning of the first episode of each story. That way she gets to watch each story even more spoiler-free than even most of the people who watched it when it first aired. Occasionally this has dramatic results, such as when she recently watched "The Five Doctors" with absolutely no idea of what she was getting into and got increasingly emotional as it became apparent what was happening.
