Media consumption
Back in February I was watching quite a bit of television - working my way through Orange is the New Black and actively seeking out medical dramas to the point of voluntarily buying a box set of Grey's Anatomy. (I'm not proud.)
Recently though I seem to have completely lost either the desire or the ability to pay attention to more than twenty consecutive minutes of screen content. I recorded The Wooden Horse on VE Day and have so far got about two-thirds of the way through it, in two or three sittings. I recorded 1864 on the recommendation of
nineveh_uk and have so far watched the first fifteen minutes. Similarly the first fifteen minutes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which made me think that I ought to re-read the book. And I actually stopped recording Critical, the medical drama on Sky that I had been watching (amazingly) week by week.
This is not intrinsically a problem, of course. I have other things to do and the television isn't going anywhere. It's just... odd. The problem, I suppose, is that I end up being unsociable with regard to
maxwells_daemon, who's often in the sitting room watching TV when I come through to make tea in the evening. He presses pause and very accommodatingly asks "is there anything I can entertain you with?" and at the moment the answer is usually nothing, unless you count conversation. I should just take a book downstairs more often and read in front of whatever he's watching.
On the books front, I managed to get hold of a copy of Dan Billany's The Cage, which I first heard about (spoilers) via
kindkit. I had previously read his earlier WWII novel, The Trap, which is easier to get hold of and which I was extremely impressed by. But it turns out it *is* currently possible to get The Cage on Amazon UK - my copy, which is not beautiful but is intact and perfectly readable, was £10.
Anyway, The Cage. A very interesting book in that it deals explicitly with the development of a romantic relationship in a POW camp in Italy. Sadly I wasn't as gripped by it as I'd expected and hoped (this is the problem with high expectations). The first half is a funny, vivid account of camp life; the second is the romance. Perhaps the problem is that I would run a mile from someone as obsessed, needy and unable to take "no" for an answer as Alan. You can't fix other people by loving them, it just doesn't work like that. (Hilary/Julian being one of my OTPs, I may be inconsistent here. I don't know; I'm only presenting my immediate reactions to this book.) Perhaps because of my feelings about Alan, I found David's change of heart at the end of the book really unbelievable.
I did love the last lines: I would take his hand. I would lead him back to the world of life... We should not be fighting each other any more. For us the war was over. But for me there wasn't enough leading up to that to make it real in my mind.
Given what I've said about this book I'm just counting down the seconds till someone turns up to call me a gigantic hypocrite. Yes, I ship Hilary/Julian (if not quite unapologetically). No, I'm not sure what makes this different from that, except perhaps that Hilary never loathed him or actively tried to drive him away. I don't know, taste is a fickle and inexplicable thing.
Despite this, plus the rivalling-Renault levels of vulgarised Freudianism (possibly worse than Renault, if you can believe that), I would still class this as "worth a try" if you're interested in midcentury British males in love and if you can get hold of a copy (or care to borrow mine).
Spending quite a bit of time this weekend reading in Icelandic. Yesterday I managed fifty pages of the horrible Harlequin romance I bought for 10 krona last summer - which means I should finally be able to finish it today! Hurrah. But it wasn't such a bad choice for a beginning novel reader.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/600638.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Recently though I seem to have completely lost either the desire or the ability to pay attention to more than twenty consecutive minutes of screen content. I recorded The Wooden Horse on VE Day and have so far got about two-thirds of the way through it, in two or three sittings. I recorded 1864 on the recommendation of
nineveh_uk and have so far watched the first fifteen minutes. Similarly the first fifteen minutes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which made me think that I ought to re-read the book. And I actually stopped recording Critical, the medical drama on Sky that I had been watching (amazingly) week by week.
This is not intrinsically a problem, of course. I have other things to do and the television isn't going anywhere. It's just... odd. The problem, I suppose, is that I end up being unsociable with regard to
maxwells_daemon, who's often in the sitting room watching TV when I come through to make tea in the evening. He presses pause and very accommodatingly asks "is there anything I can entertain you with?" and at the moment the answer is usually nothing, unless you count conversation. I should just take a book downstairs more often and read in front of whatever he's watching.
On the books front, I managed to get hold of a copy of Dan Billany's The Cage, which I first heard about (spoilers) via
kindkit. I had previously read his earlier WWII novel, The Trap, which is easier to get hold of and which I was extremely impressed by. But it turns out it *is* currently possible to get The Cage on Amazon UK - my copy, which is not beautiful but is intact and perfectly readable, was £10.
Anyway, The Cage. A very interesting book in that it deals explicitly with the development of a romantic relationship in a POW camp in Italy. Sadly I wasn't as gripped by it as I'd expected and hoped (this is the problem with high expectations). The first half is a funny, vivid account of camp life; the second is the romance. Perhaps the problem is that I would run a mile from someone as obsessed, needy and unable to take "no" for an answer as Alan. You can't fix other people by loving them, it just doesn't work like that. (Hilary/Julian being one of my OTPs, I may be inconsistent here. I don't know; I'm only presenting my immediate reactions to this book.) Perhaps because of my feelings about Alan, I found David's change of heart at the end of the book really unbelievable.
I did love the last lines: I would take his hand. I would lead him back to the world of life... We should not be fighting each other any more. For us the war was over. But for me there wasn't enough leading up to that to make it real in my mind.
Given what I've said about this book I'm just counting down the seconds till someone turns up to call me a gigantic hypocrite. Yes, I ship Hilary/Julian (if not quite unapologetically). No, I'm not sure what makes this different from that, except perhaps that Hilary never loathed him or actively tried to drive him away. I don't know, taste is a fickle and inexplicable thing.
Despite this, plus the rivalling-Renault levels of vulgarised Freudianism (possibly worse than Renault, if you can believe that), I would still class this as "worth a try" if you're interested in midcentury British males in love and if you can get hold of a copy (or care to borrow mine).
Spending quite a bit of time this weekend reading in Icelandic. Yesterday I managed fifty pages of the horrible Harlequin romance I bought for 10 krona last summer - which means I should finally be able to finish it today! Hurrah. But it wasn't such a bad choice for a beginning novel reader.
This entry was originally posted at http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/600638.html. Please comment there using OpenID.