pedanther

1. One thing that struck me, looking back over my fiction logs for 2014, was that if you don't count fanfic (of which more in a moment), I read only two new novels in 2014 that weren't chosen for me by a book club or similar endeavour. I read both of them in April, when I had a holiday with a lot of travel time to fill and only limited contact with the book-clubs-and-similar.

Now, to be fair, I read quite a few new novels for the book-clubs-and-similar, but there was a certain lack of variety. So for 2015, I've made myself a rule that I'm going to read at least one chapter each month of something I've picked for myself.


2. The thing is, I did actually read several more novel-length works of fiction in 2014, but they didn't get into the fiction log because they were fanfic. (I read an enormous quantity of fanfic in 2014, I suspect at least partly as a way of getting some variety from all the book-clubs-and-similar, and although I was reluctant to have too many novels on the go at once, fanfic didn't trigger the reluctance even if it was long enough to otherwise count as a novel.)

Most of the novel-length fics were from the Undone Universe and Motion Practice series. They're both based on the Marvel Avengers movies, and mix novel-length works with shorter fillers and side-stories. Undone Universe mixes the Marvel multiverse, mythology, and a threat to the totality of existence; it's interesting and complicated but really, really grim. Motion Practice is an AU in which Nick Fury is a District Attorney, the Avengers are his team, and Loki is that one defense attorney whose reputation is based on being able to get anybody off if they have the money; it's a lot of fun, but also has its serious side - one of the things I like about it is the way the drama arises naturally out of the solid character work. (The character- and world-building has enough solidity that a lot of the stories in the setting arise from those rather than just being echoes of things that have happened to the non-AU Avengers.)

It seemed weird in retrospect to not be logging fiction that I'd spent so much time reading. So this year, I'm logging any fanfic I read that's at least 7500 words long (which I picked arbitrarily because it's the cut-off for novella length in the Hugo Awards).


3. I have, of course, been to see the third of Jackson's Hobbit movies by now, and I'm not at all surprised that the internet already contains at least one fan-edit that attempts to squeeze the trilogy into a single film with most of Jackson's inventions removed. There were parts of the third movie where I was mentally marking it up for edits while I was watching it in the cinema, which I think marks a failure of engagement on the film's part.

The thing that bothers me about The Battle of the Five Armies is not so much how much time Jackson devotes to depicting the eponymous battle (which Tolkien, in a sign of how important he considered it to the story, pretty much skipped entirely), but the way he chooses to depict it. All the named characters who die during the battle do so in meaningful one-on-one confrontations with named characters from the other side, some of whom have been invented for the purpose, often physically separate from the main mass where the nameless extras are hacking away at each other. I don't think I like that, and not just because it's a big departure from the book (where Thorin and Kili and Fili are in the thick of the fighting the whole time, and Thorin is killed not by a single blow from a Dramatic Archenemy but from the accumulated injuries from all the people he's fought). It's also generally a misleading thing to be suggesting about the way battles work.


4. I finally got around to watching the first episode of Leverage yesterday. It was fun, but I don't know if I'll be watching any more, because a feature that I suspect is going to be integral to the format going forward turns out to hammer one of my narrative turn-off buttons. I've been known to say that as a kid I spent more time watching I Love Lucy from behind the sofa than I did Doctor Who, because alien monsters don't inspire dread in me but what does is the prospect of someone being publicly humiliated because they thought they knew what was going on but they were wrong. And it turns out, apparently, that this happens even if the someone in question is the villain of the episode.


5. I've mentioned before that when the Modesty Blaise comic strip ended in 2001, our newspaper started running the strip from the beginning, and then in 2012 it started from the beginning again even though it had only got a third of the way through.

I recently realised something else: This time around it's printing the strip off a different set of masters. (The way you can tell is that the strip was first printed with a title block in the top left corner of the first panel, which was removed in reprints and the artwork extrapolated to fill the space left behind. Comparing the strips we're getting now to the ones we got in the 2001 re-run, many of them have differently extrapolated details.)

I have a theory that this means that there are two versions of the strip being made available to newspapers, and the reason our newspaper restarted was that they discovered they were signed up for, according to some definition, the wrong one. (Speaking historically, in the original run the distributors started offering two different versions of the strip to newspapers starting with the story "Cry Wolf" - which, as I noted at the time, is precisely the point at which our newspaper re-started in 2012.)

Fiction books
Lynley Dodd. Hairy Maclary's Caterwaul Caper
Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell. Fortunately the Milk
Catherine Jinks. Pagan's Daughter
Catherine Jinks. A Very Unusual Pursuit
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Trade Secret (e)
Bernard Marshall. Cedric the Forester (e)
Tamora Pierce. Trickster's Choice
Susie Poole. All These Things
Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam
Michael Rosen, Helen Oxenbury. We're Going On a Bear Hunt

In progress
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Local Custom (re-read)
Tamora Pierce. Trickster's Queen

Non-fiction books in progress
Joachim Fest. Plotting Hitler's Death

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Scout's Progress

1. You probably didn't notice, but my computer's been in the shop for over a week, restricting my internet access to what I was able to get at work. (The actual amount of time required to fix it, according to the bill, was less than two hours.) Funnily enough, I hardly missed it. For all its ability to fill up my waking hours, apparently I don't really depend on the internet all that much.

2. It probably also helped that many of my waking hours for the last week that would otherwise require occupation have been taken up with preparations for the National Band Championships, which are being held on this side of the continent (and thus within a reasonable travelling distance of us) this year. We have a Resident Conductor visiting from over east for a few weeks, helping with rehearsals and fixing up our technique, and there have been a bunch of extra rehearsals and workshops to take advantage. He's been picking us up on a lot of little things, the small-but-important details that you miss out on because either your teacher didn't know about them or thought they were too obvious to mention explicitly. Personally, I've been picked up on everything from how I hold my trombone to the size of the mouthpiece to how I breathe. (That last one doesn't sound like much, but honestly it's worth the price of admission all by itself.) I've been feeling a lot of the same sense of discovery I felt when, at the age of 28, somebody finally taught me how to tie shoelaces properly.

3. And now I'm enjoying playing the trombone again, to a degree I haven't felt, except in brief bursts, for a long time. This calls for further thought, because there are other parts of my life that I don't enjoy and that seem like they might profit if I could find a way to get them similar treatment. (And also because there's an area of my life that I do enjoy, where in retrospect it's at least partly because one way and another the opportunities for self-improvement have been available in the last few years.)

4. I have now seen Les Misérables and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Short version: Entertaining enough, but on the whole I'm not entirely sure I approve (though I did like that one scene where the protagonist is given more motivation than in the corresponding scene in the source work).

5. I may be gradually getting the hang of the valuable skill of knowing when to give up on a novel that isn't working for you. Sword at Sunset, Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the King Arthur story in historical post-Roman Britain, is not a bad book (and it's got a better grasp of "historical" than the 2004 film that attempted the same thing, not that that's a high bar), but it's not my kind of thing. There's an essay about recommending books I read once, and wish I could find again, that posited several approaches to fiction which each reader prioritises differently. Sword at Sunset is a good book for people who read for Descriptions (of landscapes, historical details, etc.), but I'm one of the readers for whom that sort of thing is what you wade through to get to the good stuff, which for me is Plot and Character. The plot has one handicap in being derived from a familiar story, and another in that the novel is written in Retrospective Regretful (never my favourite form) so that even when the plot goes somewhere new you have a pretty good idea of how it's going to turn out. The characters I didn't find very engaging; I didn't outright say Dorothy J. Heydt's Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care what happens to these people"), but I did say something less snappy to the effect of "Particularly given that I already know what happens to these people, I'm not looking forward to wading through all this prose just to find out the details".

1. Wreck-It Ralph is a wonderful, wonderful movie. It hits a lot of familiar plot beats for a children's movie about the outsider who just wants friends (not that children are likely to notice or care) but it hits them really well, with a lot of humour and warmth and heart.

"Paperman", the short film that runs in front of it, is also really good.


2. I still haven't seen The Hobbit or Les Mis yet.


3. scarfman, a cartoonist whose hobbies include mapping periods of time onto other periods of time, is marking Doctor Who's 50th anniversary year thus: He has mapped the show's 50-year history onto a single year, and on each date corresponding to a milestone like "first appearance of the Daleks" or "first companion departure" is blogging a series of one-panel cartoons marking the event.


4. Not going to do the fanfic year-in-review meme this year; it hardly seems worth it when I finished exactly one fanfic this year. (A definite winner for the "What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?" question, though.)

Once again, all the unfinished stories I had the first year I did the meme remain unfinished, though some of them did stir in their sleep. (One has actually progressed from "This needs completely rewriting but I have no idea where to start" to "I have a pretty good idea of what is needed now". Not that that means it's going get done any time soon.)


5. If anyone asks me if I did anything noteworthy this weekend, I may mention that the most noteworthy thing was something that I didn't do. (In fact, I'm not doing it right this moment. I'm not feeling any great sense of occasion about not doing it, which tends to confirm my feeling that it was the right thing to not do.) I probably won't be inclined to go into detail about it, though.