pedanther

Fiction books
Aeschylus, tr. Robert Fagles. The Oresteia
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Marvelous Land of Oz (e) (re-read)
CS Lewis. The Screwtape Letters (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped (e)

Abandoned
Richard Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish (eight deadly words)

Non-fiction books
Benjamin Dreyer. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (e)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Sharon Lee, Steve Miller. Salvage Right (e)

1. Shortly after I moved into this house, I noticed that one of the washing lines (there's a set of five, strung in parallel) was looking significantly frayed at the end and was probably going to give way sooner or later. Then I had a look at the other end and realised that each line is on a reel, so that if it breaks you just have to release the tensioner widget and pull some more line out, so I decided to not worry about it until it happened. Well, last week it happened (while I was in the middle of hanging out laundry -- who would have guessed that the time it snapped would be when it was having weight put on it?), so after the laundry had dried and been put away I set about figuring out how to operate the tensioner widget. It took some figuring out (by my count, I unscrewed at least three things that didn't need to be unscrewed at all), but in the end I had restrung the broken line, as well as a couple of others that were beginning to look frayed, and as a bonus had adjusted the tension on all the lines, and it felt like enough of an achievement that I wanted to record it somewhere.


2. At the Rep Club, our big musical for this year is 9 to 5, the musical of the film of the Dolly Parton song. (If you know the song, I'm playing the man from the line "I swear sometimes that man is out to get me".) It's going to be a lot of fun if it comes together; we're currently at the "four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse; three weeks, and it couldn't be worse" stage.


3. Speaking of musicals, the local high school that does a musical every year or two is currently doing The Wizard of Oz (the version that's adapted from the 1939 film). I'm not sure if it's the first musical production they've done since the lockdown, or if I've ignored some in the intervening time because I felt it was too soon to be sitting in a crowded auditorium for several hours, but anyway it's the first one of theirs I've been to since last time I mentioned I'd been to one. There was the usual range of talents on show for a student production, with Dorothy and Scarecrow being the strongest performers, and the kid who played both the Munchkin Coroner ("not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead") and the Winkie Captain standing out among the smaller roles. The guy playing the Wizard did pretty good characterisation, but wasn't so good on the vocal projection (and for some reason, even though all the main players were miked, nothing was done to make his voice more impressive when he was doing the Great and Powerful routine). Their version of the disappearing-reappearing ruby slippers wasn't as slick as the version in the last production I saw of this show, about a decade ago, but it was pretty good. I had a good time.

3a. One thing I used to enjoy doing at these shows, that I didn't get to do this time, was spot the cast members I knew from performances at the annual performing arts festival. The performing arts festival hasn't been held since the lockdown, and I suspect there isn't going to be another one any time soon, because the two most load-bearing members of the organising committee have separately become too occupied with other commitments.


4. I was on the fringes of the solar eclipse last month. Around the time when Exmouth was experiencing totality, I went out into the garden with a pinhole viewer and got a good look at the moon covering about half the sun -- but if you didn't know there was an eclipse on, and were just going about your day, you probably wouldn't have noticed anything. It was a bit less bright than you might expect for a cloudless midday, but that was all.


5. I mentioned back when Dracula Daily was finishing up that I was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to re-read Anno Dracula, Kim Newman's Dracula-meets-Jack-the-Ripper novel, while the details were still fresh, or if that would just lead to me spending a lot of time complaining about things Newman changed or got wrong. In the end, I decided instead to read The Five, Hallie Rubenhold's non-fiction book about what the standard Jack the Ripper myth doesn't tell you about his victims. I have a feeling that this means there are even more parts of Anno Dracula that would make me complain about things Newman changed or got wrong, but I think it was the right choice.

5a. Rapid-fire reading challenge update: November (a book with "ING" in the title) - Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson; December (a book with a number in the title) - The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; January (a book you wanted to read last year and didn't get to) - Deathless Gods by PC Hodgell; February (a book by an author you love) - The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman; March (a historical or epic book) - The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; April (a book about rain or weather) - Winds of Evil by Arthur Upfield; May (a book about emergencies, panics, or escapes) - the first couple of volumes of Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo.

Fiction books
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, tr. Archibald Colquhoun. The Leopard (e)
Arthur Upfield. Mr Jelly's Business (e)

In progress
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (e) (re-read)
L Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Neil Gaiman, et al. The Absolute Sandman: Volume One (re-read)
RA MacAvoy. The Grey Horse (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books
Glenn Fleishman. Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It (e)

In progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Arthur Upfield. Winds of Evil

Fiction books
Agatha Christie. Spider's Web
PC Hodgell. Deathless Gods (e)
William Shakespeare, ed. GR Hibbard. The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (e) (re-read)
Arthur W Upfield. The Sands of Windee (e)
CN & AM Williamson. The Lightning Conductor (e)

In progress
Rachael Allen. Harley Quinn: Reckoning (e)
L Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (e) (re-read)
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

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

Top of the to-read pile
Neil Gaiman, JH Williams III. The Sandman: Overture

Fiction books
Terry Pratchett. The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner (e)

In progress
Jane Austen. Persuasion (e) (re-read)
Sulari Gentill. A Few Right-Thinking Men (e)
Bram Stoker. Dracula (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book

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

Top of the to-read pile
Timberlake Wertenbaker. Our Country's Good

The Sandman is, as far as I recall, the first show I've watched that uses the streaming model of dumping an entire series on the audience in one go, or at least the first one I've watched at release time rather than later enough that the spacing of the episodes was moot.

I don't like it. The streaming model, I mean, not the show. The show is very good; I've enjoyed every episode I've watched so far, and spent some time after each savouring it and thinking about what will or might happen next. And then usually I've had to wait a bit until I could find time to watch and digest the next episode. Which means that I had a lot of fun making excited noises with people after watching the first episode, and then by the time I watched the second episode everybody else was several episodes ahead of me, and by the time I watched the third episode everybody else was finished.

As I write this, I've just watched the fourth episode, and I'm having Thoughts and Feelings about what might happen in the fifth – and about the fact that this is an especially impressive thing for the show to have achieved considering that I've read the books and in theory I already know what happens next – and I've got nobody to share this moment with, because nobody else I know is at the same point in the journey as me.

The frustration gets an extra boost because I'm also doing Dracula Daily, so I've got a synchronous fandom experience to compare it to. I can imagine having a similar experience with The Sandman if the episodes were spaced out enough for us all to react to each episode before the next one appeared: the mix of people who know the story already and people who are discovering it for the first time, people throwing out their theories about what's going on, people going "I'm new to all of this and I wasn't expecting that" and people going "I thought I knew all about this and I still wasn't expecting that" and most of all just people having an experience together and being able to say to each other, "Isn't this a thing that's happening to all of us, what do you think will happen next?"

I think I would have enjoyed that experience.

1. I'm re-reading the last few volumes of Sandman along with Mark Reads Sandman. (To start with I just dipped into the books when I wanted to check a detail, then I started re-reading bits, and now it's definitely a continuous re-read.)

I don't think I've mentioned Mark Reads here before, though I keep meaning to. The general premise is that Mark reads a popular work of fiction that he doesn't know anything about, one chapter a day, and after each chapter he writes and blogs a post reacting to the events of the chapter and trying to predict where the story's going next.
( Read more... )
Things Mark has read include Harry Potter, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, and The Hunger Games. He also has a companion blog, Mark Watches, where he's currently episode-by-episoding his way through Buffy and Angel.


2. I've more or less given up on the multiplayer aspect of Worlds in Time, the Doctor Who online multiplayer game, and am working my way through the storyline as if it were single-player mode, accompanied only by the computer-operated assistants. ( Read more... )


3. Meanwhile, Portal 2 has an actual single-player storyline that I've been working my way through. ( Read more... )


4. For my thoughts on Brave and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, see my previous Five Things post.


5. I went to see Steel Magnolias mainly because I had several friends in the cast; I wasn't at all sure it would be my kind of thing. As it turned out, I liked it a lot. This suggests that there may be whole unexplored areas of fiction that have drifted by me because they seemed on the surface to be not my kind of thing. If so, I'm not sure I want to know; it's not as if I don't have a large enough pile of things to read and watch as it is.

(There's probably some clever way to tie this back around to point 1, since one of the things Mark Reads is built on is Mark discovering and falling in love with works that he'd previously drifted by because they superficially appeared to be not his kind of thing. But it's late, and I'm tired, and I'm not going to bother.)

Fiction books
Neil Gaiman, Yoshitako Amano. Sandman: The Dream Hunters
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles
Kim Newman. Jago

Non-fiction books
(collection). Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It

In progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

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

Top of the to-read pile
Marianne de Pierres. Nylon Angel

Fiction books
(anthology). Ocean
Ina R Friedman, Allen Say. How My Parents Learned to Eat
Ayano Imai. The 108th Sheep

In progress
Ben Aaronovitch. Moon Over Soho
Kim Newman. The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Non-fiction books in progress
Barbara Sher, Barbara Smith. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

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

Top of the to-read pile
Kim Newman. Bad Dreams

Fiction books
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War
Neil Gaiman. Absolute Sandman volume 3
Tanith Lee. The Dragon Hoard (re-read)
Alan Moore, Zander Cannon. Smax
Adam Rex. The True Meaning of Smekday

In progress
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace

Non-fiction books
(none)

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

Top of the to-read pile
S M Stirling. The Sky People