pedanther | Entries tagged with oscar wilde

#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I had a couple of false starts, including The Third Policeman, a work of dark absurdist comedy that I found too dark and not detectably comedic, and lost patience with before it even got to the first policeman. (Afterward, I was moved to re-read An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest to confirm that my sense of humour wasn't broken.)

The book I ended up finishing was also my book for May in the Random Book Challenge; the instruction was to sort my TBR by 'Earliest Added' and pick one of the first five books listed. In my case, that didn't actually mean the books that have been waiting longest for me to read them, because when I started keeping a TBR on StoryGraph I first added the books that were on my ebook reader at the time before I went to the physical bookshelves.

Anyhow, the book I selected was A Hangman for Ghosts by Andrei Baltakmens, a murder mystery set in Australia during the convict period. It's an interesting one; the detective character is a convict with a hidden past, so the story's unfolding the mystery of him alongside the mystery of the murder, which he investigates for a variety of reasons - none of which are precisely to see law and order preserved, so neither he nor the audience is sure what he'll do when he does track the murderer down.

#14: Read a book with something on the cover that was also on the previous book’s cover.

The flip side of the "didn't look at the next prompt" coin: the cover of A Hangman for Ghosts featured a noose and not really anything else. I don't think I have anything else in the TBR with a noose on the cover.

I went to the local library to see what they had, and after confirming that their copy of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None isn't one of the editions with a noose on it, and failing to locate their copy of Meg Caddy's Slipping the Noose (it turns out the library has shelved it in the Junior Fiction section, despite the subject matter and the publisher putting it solidly in Young Adult), I borrowed a non-fiction book of True Stories of Australians Who Have Died at the Gallows.

. I'm pretty happy with the outcome of an election, for once.

. At board game club, we played Kemet, a strategy game with an ancient Egyptian theme. ( Read more... )

. I've now read or re-read all the plays in the Oscar Wilde omnibus I was working my way through. ( Read more... )

. I've played Battletech a bit more ( Read more... )

. I haven't played Ingress all week, and so far I'm not missing it. ( Read more... )

Fiction books
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
CS Forester. The African Queen
Kevin Hearne. The Purloined Poodle (e)
Tove Jansson, tr. Elizabeth Portch. Comet in Moominland
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Diviner's Bow (e)
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)
Oscar Wilde. The Canterville Ghost
Oscar Wilde. An Ideal Husband (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. Salomé (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. A Woman of No Importance

In progress
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Abandoned
Flann O'Brien. The Third Policeman

Picture books
Adam Goodes, Ellie Laing, David Hardy. Ceremony
John Hartmann, tr. Edith M Nielsen. A Deer in the Family

Non-fiction books in progress
Isaac Asimov. A Choice of Catastrophes

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

Top of the to-read pile
Andrei Baltakmens. A Hangman for Ghosts (e)

#11: Read a book where the author’s name is not the same color on the cover as the previous book’s author’s name.

A Choice of Catastrophes did turn out to be the kind of book that one picks up only occasionally and reads only a bit of, so in the interests of keeping the momentum going, I revisited the bookshelf and came away with The Canterville Ghost, which fit the prompt, was short enough to make up for lost time, and fit in with some of the non-chain-related reading I've been doing lately.

I liked it okay. It suffered a bit from that thing you get sometimes when you spend decades getting around to a classic, where I'd read extracts from it and had heard of most of the good bits already, so it didn't have the same effect as if I'd been coming to it completely fresh. The edition I read has some nice illustrations by Inga Moore.

#12: Read a book with a title that starts with the next letter in the alphabet from the previous book.

Coincidentally, the first book I finished after receiving this prompt was Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, but that didn't qualify as the Next Book because I started reading it back before I signed up for the Book Chain. I've been working through the collection on and off for the past few months, and mostly enjoying it; a few of the shorter stories felt underbaked, but most of them had something of interest, even the ones I'd read before. One discovery for me was the novella "A Time to Cast Away Stones", which was written and is set between two of Powers' novels and makes clear several things about the second novel that had puzzled me when I read it. (And I note that if I'd read this collection promptly in 2018 when I bought it, I'd have read the novella before the novel - assuming I hadn't also read the novel promptly when I bought it in 2016.)

After making a list of books in the TBR that began with a D, I opted for the shortest one: A Deer in the Family by John Hartmann, translated from the Danish by Edith M. Nielsen. This is a non-fiction account for children about a Danish family that adopted and raised a baby deer, first published in the 1950s; a series of inscriptions on the flyleaf of my copy records that it was originally given to one of my mother's older relatives, then passed down to my mother, who gave it to me when I was seven, whereupon I didn't read it because it was old and the photos were in black and white. The story is quite charming, although the narration (at least in translation) occasionally verges on twee and I wasn't entirely satisfied by the book's answer to the question of whether the baby deer was actually in need of adoption in the first place.

#13: Read a book set in a different country or world than the previous book.

I hadn't looked ahead when I picked A Deer in the Family, but "read a book that isn't set in Denmark" basically gives me free rein to read any book from my TBR that I want to... which is not entirely helpful, since the point of doing these reading challenges is to narrow the options down to something manageable.

. At board game club, we played Lanterns, Exploding Kittens, Drop It, and Carcassonne. I haven't played Carcassonne in ages, but it turns out I'm still good at it (and, just as importantly, enjoy playing it). I also enjoyed playing Lanterns, which I'm not as good at, and Drop It was okay. I don't remember what the gameplay of Exploding Kittens was like because everything else about it was crowded out by how repulsive the artwork was.

The group of people I've been playing through Pandemic Legacy: Season One with got together on Friday and we played through to the end of the season. I'm kind of glad we're done with it; it was an interesting experience seeing how the game changed over the course of the season, but the story parts continued to be familiar and predictable right to the end. We'd also started to lose track of some of the rule changes, which contributed to us finishing the season on a more successful note than if we'd remembered all the new rules that were added to make the climax of the season more challenging, but I think that even if we had kept perfect track of all the rules we still would have achieved a respectable outcome.

We also played a game called The Isle of Cats.

. Years ago, when we were studying Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in high school, the official text we had to use was an omnibus edition that also included An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, and A Woman of No Importance. I read An Ideal Husband at some point in the intervening decades, but I never got around to reading Lady Windermere's Fan until last month and it was only this week that I read A Woman of No Importance. Wikipedia says it's generally considered the least successful of the four, and that makes sense to me; unlike, say, Earnest, which is clearly and coherently a comedy, A Woman of No Importance is a bunch of witty dialogue crammed into a drama revolving around a subject that is not in the least funny, and I don't think it all fits together quite satisfactorily.

. There's a new podcast called DC High Volume, which is doing official audio adaptations of classic comic book storylines. They've just finished Batman: Year One (which was not bad, although there were a few scenes, including the climactic action moment, that I don't think quite worked without the visuals), and are following it up with The Long Halloween.

. I've either been having more vivid dreams lately, or just remembering them more clearly when I wake up. It might be something to do with catching up on my sleep debt, or possibly because the weather's turned cold and I've started sleeping with the winter covers on.

Fiction books
Tove Jansson, tr. David McDuff. The Moomins and the Great Flood
WE Johns. Biggles Forms a Syndicate
Sharon Lee. Sea Wrack and Changewind (e)
KG Lethbridge. The Rout of the Ollafubs (re-read)
Alexander McCall Smith. The Tin Dog
Andy Weir. The Martian (e) (re-read)
Oscar Wilde. Lady Windermere's Fan
Jane Yolen. Sister Light, Sister Dark (e)

In progress
Tove Jansson, tr. Elizabeth Portch. Comet in Moominland
Tim Powers. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (e)
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Abandoned
Martin Cruz Smith. Gorky Park

Non-fiction books
Colin Duriez. The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook
Alan Loy McGinnis. The Friendship Factor

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

Top of the to-read pile
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Fiction books
Charlie Jane Anders. The City in the Middle of the Night (e)
Alan Garner. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Randall Garrett. Too Many Magicians (e) (re-read)
Terry Pratchett. Making Money (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
(anthology). Playboys of the Western World

In hiatus
V Anton Spraul. Think Like a Programmer (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Rebecca Roanhorse. Trail of Lightning

Fiction books
Terry Pratchett. The Light Fantastic (e) (re-read)
Patricia C Wrede. Talking to Dragons (e) (re-read)

In progress
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Conflict of Honors (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Adrian Goldsworthy. Antony and Cleopatra

In hiatus
Nigel West. MI5

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

Top of the to-read pile
Terry Pratchett. Equal Rites

1. Having got the brass band competition out of the way, I've got time for acting again. I'm in rehearsals for a production that opens at the end of June, and after that it'll be straight into rehearsals for another production opening in October.

The June production is the stage adaptation of 'Allo 'Allo, in which I will be playing an amusing Nazi. It's a bit of a departure for me, in that it's being put on by what I think of, and have occasionally referred to here, as "the other local theatre group". I've been to see some of their shows, and learned from their workshops, but this is the first time I've been in one of their productions.

The October production is a staging of a 115-year-old West End melodrama called The Duchess of Coolgardie, which was given a topical spin by taking as its setting the gold rush that was going on in Western Australia at the time. This will be the first time it's been put on in the part of the world where it's set. Being a melodrama, most of the characters are broad stereotypes, and the supporting cast are mainly distinguished by being The Irish One, The Yorkshire One, and so on. (Also, The Aboriginal One, who occasionally wanders into talking more like The Native American One when the authors have a lapse of concentration.) I've been cast as the villain; it's not clear yet whether moustache-twirling will be involved, but I've already found a stage direction calling for me to laugh sardonically at the heroes' misfortune.

2. The Rep Club's most recent production, the one which I didn't audition for because brass band competition, was The Importance of Being Earnest. I have a feeling that anybody who knew much about Victorian dress, behaviour, or interior decoration would have picked up a lot of lapses in those areas, but it was pleasantly entertaining, and it got major props from me for playing the butlers straight. (Every professional production I've seen in years has cast physical-comedy actors as the butlers and let them wander around upstaging Wilde's dialogue with slapstick sight gags. Drives me nuts, and I can't imagine why the directors thought that would be a good idea.)

3. Back at the brass band, there are deliberations afoot regarding shifting some of the players to new positions, to cover gaps left by players leaving and what have you over the past few years. (When we were at the competition, we had guests from friendly bands, including a few temporarily-returned ex-members, helping to bring us up to full strength.) I have been approached about possibly being shifted not only to a different position but to a different instrument.

There are two things to note here: The first is that every brass intrument except the trombone is built on the same basic system, so if you know how to play one it doesn't take long to learn a different one, if the one you know isn't the trombone. The second is that the only brass instrument I've ever learned to play is the trombone.

Actually, the conceptual leap was the difficult bit; now that I've actually started learning the new instrument it's going pretty smoothly, and I may actually be up to speed on it by the time they decide whether they want me to play it or not.

(I'm still not entirely convinced they're going to end up shifting me off trombone. It's not that there's a shortage of players: even without counting me, there are more players who identify trombone as their preferred instrument than there are trombone positions, which is one of the things that triggered the deliberations. It's just that when the trombone players were polled on which position they would prefer to play, given free choice, all of them except me wanted the same one.)

4. I have given another project speech at Toastmasters, this one on the subject of Nancy Pearl's Doorways into Reading, which I have written about here before.

I have one more project speech to do and then I will qualify as an official Competent Communicator. If I do it before the end of June, I'll boost the club's standing in the annual assessment of club performance. I don't think that's going to happen, though, partly because I'm not sure I'm going to be available for any of the June meetings, and partly because the requirement for the final project speech is to be inspiring, and I have no ideas for a topic I could be inspiring on.

5. Today's Google Doodle on the Australian Google homepage pays tribute to cartoonist and puppeteer Norman Hethrington, creator of one of Australia's most-loved children's television shows (also, with a suitable amount of hand-waving, arguably the long-running science fiction TV series in the world).

1. Over at Mark Reads, where Mark Oshiro reads popular works of literature he's somehow managed to avoid knowing anything about, Mark has just begun reading the Discworld series. It's really entertaining watching him encounter for the first time things that we long-time Discworld fans have become used to. (Like the Discworld itself, flat and resting on the backs of four elephants which themselves stand on the shell of an enormous turtle.) (And then there's the Luggage...)

2. I am continuing at the gym fairly regularly, though not quite as regularly as I'd like; I'm aiming for at least three visits a week, but often only manage two. (My evenings are pretty crowded these days, and I am very much not a morning person so going before work isn't a thing that is happening.) An unanticipated side-effect, thanks to the gym's choice of background noise being a hit music channel, is that I'm now more familiar with the current popular singles than I've probably ever been in my life.

3. We're not doing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee this year after all; the new year brought unanticipated new workloads and time-sucks for several key people (and, in one case, the news that his employer was relocating him to a city 400 miles away). The club has regrouped and scheduled The Importance of Being Earnest to take its place; all the remaining cast of Bee were invited to take part, but I opted to step back and concentrate on preparing for the National Band Championships.

4. Because, and I may not have mentioned this yet, we will be defending our title at this year's Nationals, even though it means flying over to the other side of the continent to do it. (The flying is actually the bit I'm most worried about; it will be my first experience of commercial air travel, and I could have done without the extra worry of how my instrument case is going to interact with the luggage limits.) The guest conductor who helped us get into shape last year has been back, and I don't know if we're going to win again but I think we have a good chance of not disgracing ourselves.

5. Back to talking about local theatre, our other local theatre group has announced that its next production is going to be Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth. That's an... interesting choice; the play has some tricky staging requirements which I expect would be especially challenging for a community theatre production. I look forward with interest to seeing how it comes out.

Fiction books
Robert Bolt. A Man For All Seasons
Dorothy Hewett. The Man From Mukinupin
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Local Custom (e) (re-read)
Anne McCaffrey. Black Horses for the King
Tamora Pierce. The Emperor Mage (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Peter Macinnis. Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World

In progress
David Fromkin. A Peace to End All Peace

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

Top of the to-read pile
Maurice Broaddus. King Maker

1. The season of one-act plays opens tomorrow, and my first attempt at directing will be exposed to a paying audience. I'm not worried; the play's come together really well, it got a good response from the people who saw it at the dress rehearsals, and in the unlikely event that the proper audience is less appreciative I have Oscar Wilde's bon mot ready to hand.

The fact that I'm not worried didn't stop me having the usual between-final-rehearsal-and-opening-night-mare last night. Interestingly, it was the usual "on stage and forgotten my part" version, even though I'm directing and not acting this time; I suppose since I've never directed before, my unconscious doesn't have any raw material to craft an appropriate horror out of.

2. The annual performing arts festival was last weekend. (The music section; the drama section will be in a few weeks, after the one-acts are done with.) What with one thing and another, including rehearsals for the one-acts, I didn't make it to any of the sessions except the one in which I played in the brass band. I didn't even stick around long enough after we played to find out the results, but I expect we did as well as we usually do. I completely missed the Character Vocal section, which is the bit I look forward to all year. According to the programme, that means I missed out on someone in the under-14 division attempting my solo number from Chicago; I have no idea whether that's something to regret or be thankful for. I also note the unusual fact that nobody sang "A Whole New World", "Beauty and the Beast", or "Colors of the Wind" this year. I've always suspected there was a particular singing teacher with a partiality; I wonder if somebody's left town?

3. I have seen the new Doctor Who episode. The gap between a new Doctor Who episode airing in Britain and in Australia has been gradually decreasing: at first, the ABC wouldn't begin running a new season until the whole thing had run on the BBC, then they started airing new episodes with only a few weeks delay, then it got down to one week. It's probably stuck at one week as long as the BBC and ABC both prefer showing Doctor Who on Saturday evenings (the ABC can't show it on the same Saturday as the BBC because Saturday evening in Australia is Saturday morning in Britain, so Australia would be getting it first) - but this year, new episodes are being made available for viewing on the ABC's web site less than 24 hours after they debut in Britain. So I have seen the new episode, even though it hasn't actually aired in Australia yet.

I'm not going to do a reaction thingy, partly out of respect for

lost_spook's expressed intention not to read such things. (Probably a sensible attitude. Certainly some of the reactions I've been reading have made me wish I'd adopted a similar resolution.)

4. I assume everybody on my friendslist who's interested in the Liaden novels already knows that the latest one just came out in hardcover (and has probably already read the e-book), and that all the novels - including the latest one - have just been released as Audible.com audiobooks. Just in case, though, details are available here.

5. I've occasionally pondered the idea of an alarm clock that matches itself to your sleep cycles, so that the alarm goes off when you're in a position to wake up easily, and not when you're in the middle of a deep sleep. I'd always assumed that this would require being wired to the clock with some kind of complicated and impractical sensor to detect out where in the cycle you were. Apparently I was wrong: a lot of people can get by with assuming an average sleep cycle duration, and get the same effect with a normal alarm clock and a bit of mental arithmetic. Somebody recently pointed me to http://sleepyti.me/, which has an explanation of the math, and automatic calculators for both directions (one suggests good times to go to bed, given what time your alarm's set for, the other good times to set your alarm for, given when you plan to go to bed). I've been using the system for nearly a week, and getting good results. (Especially considering that I'd previously been giving serious thought to giving up on the alarm clock entirely because I slept through it so often.)

Fiction books
(anthology). Batman Black and White volume 2
Kurt Busiek, Brent Eric Anderson, Will Blyberg. Astro City: Confession
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Shadow From Beyond Time
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: The Fourth Man
Warren Ellis, John Cassaday. Planetary: Leaving the 20th Century
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Lust For Life
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Lonely City
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: The New Scum
Warren Ellis, Darrick Robertson. Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard
John M Ford. The Dragon Waiting
John M Ford. The Princes of the Air
Diana Wynne Jones. Enchanted Glass
Diana Wynne Jones. The Game
Joe Masteroff, Fred Ebb. Cabaret
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant. All Star Superman volume 1
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant. All Star Superman volume 2
Dennis Palumbo. City Wars
Anthony Price. The Alamut Ambush
Steve Purcell. Sam & Max: Surfin' the Highway
Osamu Tezuka. Astro Boy: Volume 3 (re-read)
Naoki Urasawa, et al. Pluto: 007 (re-read)
Naoki Urasawa, et al. Pluto: 008

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
Russell T Davies, Benjamin Cook. The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter
Paul Dini, Chip Kidd. Batman Animated

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

Top of the to-read pile
Louisa M Alcott. Little Women

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