pedanther

My random book for February was Devil May Care, a James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks - or, as the cover had it, "Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming". That would usually mean that the book was originally published under Fleming's name before Faulks's authorship was acknowledged, but I gather that in this case the author credit has been in exactly those words right from the first edition, and indicates that Faulks made a conscious effort to mimic Fleming's manner of writing instead of employing his own. I found the result felt slightly exaggerated, not to the level of parody or caricature but enough to be a bit offputting, especially since it highlighted some of the aspects of Fleming's novels that I never much liked in the first place. It also had a few new faults of its own, including that thing you often get when a setting is pastiched by a writer decades later who can't resist throwing in a bunch of references to historical events and people that the original author wouldn't have considered relevant or appropriate to include. All of which I could probably have forgiven if it had succeeded in endearing me to the characters or engaging my interest in the plot; as it was, I hit page 50 and still didn't give a fig for the fate of the world or any of the characters, so I ditched it and went to read something more fun.

My new random book for February is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind, which I haven't started reading yet.


The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic: Legacy with managed to get together on the weekend and play a few more rounds for the first time in a few months. I'm still finding the unfolding legacy plot familiar and predictable, though I appreciated that a document that was revealed this session provided context for an earlier plot development I'd been unhappy about and established it as something that we're intended to not be happy about. I was also amused when the same cache of documents contained an in-story explanation for a game mechanic that's necessary for game balance but hadn't, until now, made a great deal of sense within the fiction of the game.

At the same session, we also played Western Legends, Raptor, and Schotten Totten. In Western Legends, the board is a map of a territory in the Wild West and each player takes on the role of an outlaw or lawman (or stays neutral, but you earn victory points for being a notorious outlaw or a successful lawman and there's no reward for doing neither) and moves around completing activities like prospecting for gold, fighting bandits, robbing banks, or driving cattle, according to personal preference and the character's secret goal cards. Raptor is an asymmetrical game where one player controls a family of dinosaurs and the other controls a group of hunters trying to capture them. In Schotten Totten, two families are fighting over a property line and players win skirmishes by putting together the best three-card combinations.

At the usual Monday evening session, we played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong and Forgotten Waters. In Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, I was the clue-giver once, and succeeded in leading the investigators to the murderer; and the witness once, and succeeded in getting the murderer caught without being identified and nobbled; and a regular investigator once, and achieved nothing of distinction. Forgotten Waters is a pirate game with narrative elements that's intended to be played over several sessions; we started a game about a year ago which fell apart quickly for a number of reasons, so this time we were starting again from scratch with a partly different group of players. That meant that a lot of the story bits we got to were familiar, but the game went well and we remembered to record the game state at the end of the evening so we could pick it up again another time.


Rehearsals have fully started for Guys and Dolls. I'm enjoying the singing, and mostly managing to remember the dance steps.


Still bike riding regularly. Somewhat complicated by the fact that there's an ongoing project to resurface the city's bike trails, and on a couple of my regular routes this has got as far as digging up the old cracked tarmac but not yet progressed to laying down the new smooth tarmac. A couple of days ago, when I was out riding in the morning, I saw a kangaroo, which stood a few metres from the bike trail and watched me go past.

. Poking some more at the thing I wrote last time:

On reflection, I don't think it's about "using time well" for the brain weasels; I think that's too big and complicated a concept for them. They care about doing particular tasks well -- or, more precisely, worry about doing them badly. Contemplating a purposeful and productive task creates anxiety about whether I'll successfully achieve the purpose, which makes it hard to get started. Aimless activities like meandering around on the internet or flumping on the couch might not be a good use of time, but they don't generate the same level of anxiety because where there's no aim there's nothing to feed anxiety about failing to achieve the aim.

Interestingly, my brain weasels apparently don't consider watching TV or a movie to be sufficiently aimless: I know people who, if they want to kill time, can just pick something out and sit down and watch it, but I don't have the trick of it. Apparently there's a wrong way to watch a TV show? Or maybe the barrier to entry is the task of choosing which show to watch.


. Relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr recently that resonated with me, where someone said that when they found themselves surrounded by new things to read or watch and couldn't summon up the motivation to read or watch any of them, it was because starting a new novel or series or whatever required a minimum amount of spare emotional investment and all their emotional investment was currently occupied, either with things they were already reading or watching or with things going on in real life.

At the moment, I seem to have about enough spare emotional investment for one thing at a time; in the last few weeks, I've watched a couple of theatrical streams and a few movies and re-read an old Modesty Blaise novel, one at a time, and in all that time I didn't pick up The Master and Margarita because it was only by leaving it on the back-burner that I had room for anything else. This suggests that if I want to take advantage of all these theatrical streams with their time-limited offers, I'm going to have to be careful with my time management and not start any new long novels or series (or narrative-heavy video games).


. The movies I watched were the three James Bond movies from back when I was the age to start being interested in James Bond movies -- Timothy Dalton's The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan's GoldenEye. Of the three, on this rewatch, I liked The Living Daylights the most; GoldenEye was a lot of fun but felt somehow more hollow than I remembered, and Licence to Kill has good bits but also the problem of being the one where Bond goes on a personal vendetta and gets a bunch of people killed and the movie never quite settles the question of whether everyone would have been better off if he'd just stayed home. (There's a hint that undercover narcotics agent whose operation Bond inadvertantly tramples over might have been about to mess things up for himself anyway, but the movie never follows that idea up because it's got explosions to do.) The Living Daylights, apart from a few moments I found jarring, is charming and has a bunch of actors I like in it, and of the three is the one that to me felt most like Bond and his young lady actually cared about each other and weren't just ticking off boxes on the "young lady in a Bond movie" checklist.


. I picked up The Master and Margarita again this weekend -- it turned out I'd stopped just as the title characters were about to be introduced -- and have now finished it. I said before that it reminded me of The Man Who Was Thursday; with the whole thing under my belt, it also reminds me of Carnivalé, partly because of the moments of people having everyday reality yanked out from under them and partly because it has a similar structure where the first half throws a lot of concepts at the audience and raises a lot of questions and then the second half settles down to start properly explaining how it all fits together. (Which, as the example of Carnivalé taught us, is a perfectly fine way to run a story but it may be a good idea to make sure the audience knows that's what's happening if you don't want them giving up before the explanations arrive.) There was also an interesting shift of mood in the second half where it stopped being nightmarish and became, in places, laugh-out-loud funny; the same kinds of things are happening as in the first half, but now the audience is in on the joke. Despite a somewhat confusing beginning, I found the novel pretty satisfying in the end.


. I got stuck on a crossword for several days because I couldn't figure out what the compiler was after with "Queen of whodunits (6)". "Agatha" had the requisite number of letters, but I couldn't get any of the words that crossed it to work. Ditto "Sayers". After that, I was inclined to think that whatever the compiler was thinking was obviously wrong, but when I did get enough of the cross-words to figure it out -- which was at "_ _ L _ _ Y" -- I had to admit he had a point.

1. From the "I always assume everyone has heard about these already" department: Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere is being adapted into a six-part radio drama, with a cast that's wall-to-wall British acting talent, led by James McAvoy as Richard Mayhew, Benedict Cumberbatch as the angel Islington, and Anthony Head & David Schofield as Messrs. Croup & Vandemar. More details are on his blog.

Also forthcoming from Neil Gaiman: his second Doctor Who episode. Details are not on his blog, except this one: that it guest stars Warwick Davis.


2. A recent discussion at Ana Mardoll's blog got onto the subject of the loaded term "Mary Sue", and started trying to come up with more descriptive alternatives. Two terms have gained traction at the time of writing: "Magic Goose Hero" (so implausibly irresistible that all the characters want to grab on despite it making no sense for them to want to do so) for the character, and "Protagonist Centred Everything" for the problem. And this is the thing which came out in the discussion that I hope catches on, even if none of the actual terms do - that when a story revolves around an impossibly awesome protagonist, the protagonist and the problem are not one and the same. When the plot and other characters exist only to showcase how awesome the protagonist is, they're all part of the problem too.


3. Still reading along with Mark Reads Tortall. Nearing the end of the last book in the Lioness Quartet now, and things are starting to really come together. It's not as easy to stick to the one-chapter-at-a-time schedule as it used to be.


4. One of the nice things about the new washing machine is that it has a delayed start function, which means that I can load it up before I go to bed and wake up to newly-washed clothes in the morning. In theory. In practice, I need more work on getting the timing right - I got up on Saturday morning and went to see if the laundry cycle was finished, and arrived just in time to see it start.

(Also in washing machine news: I don't need a new stool after all, because the existing laundry chair - which the laundry basket sits in while I'm taking clothes out and hanging them up - is a good height for the job.)

(Yes, it's an exciting life I lead. I've learned to live with it.)


5. If somebody had told me Casino Royale opens with Freddy Fisher going down for treason, I might have watched it much sooner. (Or perhaps not. But it did provide a nice unexpected moment of interest. As did Alan Jackson's brief and ill-fated stint in MI6 a bit later, though him I admit I couldn't place until the credits.)

I don't think I'm really the target audience for this sort of thing, though; most of the big bravura action sequences had me, well before they ended, muttering "Yes, very nice, but can we get back to the plot now?"

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White volume 2
Jane Austen. Mansfield Park
Chris Boucher. Doctor Who: Match of the Day
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio. Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones (reread)
Neil Gaiman, various collaborators. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? (and other stories)
Rudyard Kipling. Soldiers Three
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Double Vision
Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, Gene Ha. Top 10 volume 1
Peter O'Donnell. The Silver Mistress
Lance Parkin. Doctor Who: The Eyeless
Michael Salmon. The Pirate Who Wouldn't Wash (reread)

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Stephen Dando-Collins. Caesar's Legion