Reading and things
Yes, yes, I know I said I'd post these things once a week, but I've been too busy enjoying Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods series to want to take time off to write about them.
Listening
My little mp3 player remains broken, so I've had to buy a new one - a slightly less basic and tiny one this time. I'm off work tomorrow and plan a long walk, so hopefully - and finally! - I'll be able to return to the story of polar exploration in 1909, and move Shackleton on from the icy winter quarters he's been stuck in since early January.
On Sunday I decided to listen to all our folk CDs in alphabetical order. We normally listen to the same old favourites, but there are probably some long-forgotten gems that we've been overlooking for years - either whole albums, or individual songs that one or other of us could once perform, but have forgotten that we knew. During the course of two long Gloomhaven scenarios, we have gone through the various iterations of the Albion Band and are now half way through Bellowhead.
Watching
We did our big Galavant rewatch last weekend. At under 7 hours, it's a nice, manageable size for a single-day rewatch, unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which requires a prompt start and little dilly-dallying over tea breaks. It's such a fun series! It's such a shame it's never been shown in the UK, given that it was filmed here, and has well-known British TV actors popping up in most episodes. Think The Princess Bride with songs.
Playing
We've reassembled Gloomhaven on the dining table, where it stayed in permanent residence for the last 8 months of last year, only being booted out when I thought it would be nice to eat at a proper table on New Year's Eve. Officially, we've more than finished, really, but for the sake of completeness are now playing all the scenarios that are technically closed to us due to us making different choices in the storyline. More when we finish.
I finished Dishonored 2 last week, having taken over two months to play it, on and off. It's very like the first Dishonored, really - but since I really liked Dishonored, that's a good thing. It's a first person game, which you CAN play as a shooter/slasher, but you can also choose to play it as a sneaker, carefully creeping past all your foes, or removing them by non-lethal means. This is why I like it, since I really really loved Thief: Deadly Shadows back in the day, and Dishonored has something of the feel of that game. I play these games aiming not just for the "clean hands" achievement (kill nobody) but also the "ghost" achievement (never get spotted) which makes for a looooong game with much patient waiting and many reloads. I just missed "ghost" this time, so might replay it as the other character - in the second game, you have two characters to choose between, who develop slightly different skills and powers - but not for a while.
Reading
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Sort-of sequel the The Curse of Chalion, set 3 years later in the same country, but with mostly different characters. The main character - and only viewpoint character - is a 40-something noble widow, who, for Reasons, has been granted very little freedom and independence for years. Freed suddenly from a responsibility, she yearns to travel, and so sets off on a cross-country "pilgrimage." After some misadventures, her party ends up in a frontier castle where something is very wrong indeed, and maybe only she can fix it.
I found this every bit as enjoyable and excellent as the first in the series. I expect the young and foolish me who dismissed The Curse of Chalion many years ago on the grounds of its scarred, older hero would have equally dismissed this one for starring a middle aged woman. What a fool reader I was back then! Older, war-weary heroes seem to crop up all the time in blood-drenched fantasy novels, and young feisty female heroes are all over the place, too, but an older female main character feels very unusual in this genre. I enjoyed watching her growth over the course of the book. Plus, there's all the interesting theology and world-building of the first book, too. An excellent book!
The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
Billed as third in the series, but set several hundreds years earlier, and in a different part of the world. The only connection is the theology.
The book is set in The Weald, a country of forests and mountains, where there used to be a tradition of spirit warriors and shamans - humans receiving animal souls. This is now lost and almost forgotten, squashed by a short-lived imperial invasion and the imposition of the orthodoxy of the Five Gods. Some people still dabble in these old magics, but under threat of strict punishment. But not everyone wants these magics to stay forgotten...
I found this not quite as engaging as the other two books. While they started slowly, allowing the reader to get to know the main character before launching them into Plot, this one jumped straight into a rather complicated and confusing murder investigation. I never really got an impression of the main character as a person in the same way I did in the other two books. Maybe if I'd seen him through other eyes, I'd have come to know him better, but I do often struggle with single-viewpoint stories, unless the main character is very well drawn. There were also rather too many scenes in which history or the workings of magic were told by one character to another in long passages of expositionary dialogue. But, still, I enjoyed it. Just not as much as the other two.
Penric and Desdemona series (novellas) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric's Demon
Penric and the Shaman
Penric's Fox
Penric's Mission
Mira's Last Dance
The Prisoner of Limnos
A series of novellas set in the same world as the above - in (initially) the same country as The Hallowed Hunt, but over a hundred years later.
Penric, the main character, is 19 at the start of the series - a cheerful, likeable, unwarlike young man riding through the woods en route to his betrothal. There he comes across a dying old lady in a coach, and offers to help. His help is accepted... and he becomes the recipient of her demon. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It CAN be bad, but "demons" - elementals of chaos - can co-exist inside a human, giving them magical powers and the wisdom of all their previous hosts. Penric's demon is a particularly old and powerful one, who comes with strong echoes of the personanilities of all its previous hosts, all of them women, most of them quite opiniated. Possession of the demon - whom he names Desdemona - leads Penric into a career of scholarship and theology, and leads him into various interesting adventures.
I loved these! There's a lot of humour in them, especially the first one, and even when they're not being outright funny, there's always a lightness of touch. Desdemona's various personalities are opinionated and interesting, and Penric himself is a really likeable character. Unlike the 3 full-length novels in this world, which only have one viewpoint character per novel, these stories (except for the first) include other viewpoint characters, too, allowing us to see Penric through other eyes, which I very much appreciated, and which only made me like him more.
The first novella is an origin story, the next two are separate but linked, while the last three are really one long story spread over 3 parts. I do hope there'll be more!
Listening
My little mp3 player remains broken, so I've had to buy a new one - a slightly less basic and tiny one this time. I'm off work tomorrow and plan a long walk, so hopefully - and finally! - I'll be able to return to the story of polar exploration in 1909, and move Shackleton on from the icy winter quarters he's been stuck in since early January.
On Sunday I decided to listen to all our folk CDs in alphabetical order. We normally listen to the same old favourites, but there are probably some long-forgotten gems that we've been overlooking for years - either whole albums, or individual songs that one or other of us could once perform, but have forgotten that we knew. During the course of two long Gloomhaven scenarios, we have gone through the various iterations of the Albion Band and are now half way through Bellowhead.
Watching
We did our big Galavant rewatch last weekend. At under 7 hours, it's a nice, manageable size for a single-day rewatch, unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which requires a prompt start and little dilly-dallying over tea breaks. It's such a fun series! It's such a shame it's never been shown in the UK, given that it was filmed here, and has well-known British TV actors popping up in most episodes. Think The Princess Bride with songs.
Playing
We've reassembled Gloomhaven on the dining table, where it stayed in permanent residence for the last 8 months of last year, only being booted out when I thought it would be nice to eat at a proper table on New Year's Eve. Officially, we've more than finished, really, but for the sake of completeness are now playing all the scenarios that are technically closed to us due to us making different choices in the storyline. More when we finish.
I finished Dishonored 2 last week, having taken over two months to play it, on and off. It's very like the first Dishonored, really - but since I really liked Dishonored, that's a good thing. It's a first person game, which you CAN play as a shooter/slasher, but you can also choose to play it as a sneaker, carefully creeping past all your foes, or removing them by non-lethal means. This is why I like it, since I really really loved Thief: Deadly Shadows back in the day, and Dishonored has something of the feel of that game. I play these games aiming not just for the "clean hands" achievement (kill nobody) but also the "ghost" achievement (never get spotted) which makes for a looooong game with much patient waiting and many reloads. I just missed "ghost" this time, so might replay it as the other character - in the second game, you have two characters to choose between, who develop slightly different skills and powers - but not for a while.
Reading
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Sort-of sequel the The Curse of Chalion, set 3 years later in the same country, but with mostly different characters. The main character - and only viewpoint character - is a 40-something noble widow, who, for Reasons, has been granted very little freedom and independence for years. Freed suddenly from a responsibility, she yearns to travel, and so sets off on a cross-country "pilgrimage." After some misadventures, her party ends up in a frontier castle where something is very wrong indeed, and maybe only she can fix it.
I found this every bit as enjoyable and excellent as the first in the series. I expect the young and foolish me who dismissed The Curse of Chalion many years ago on the grounds of its scarred, older hero would have equally dismissed this one for starring a middle aged woman. What a fool reader I was back then! Older, war-weary heroes seem to crop up all the time in blood-drenched fantasy novels, and young feisty female heroes are all over the place, too, but an older female main character feels very unusual in this genre. I enjoyed watching her growth over the course of the book. Plus, there's all the interesting theology and world-building of the first book, too. An excellent book!
The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
Billed as third in the series, but set several hundreds years earlier, and in a different part of the world. The only connection is the theology.
The book is set in The Weald, a country of forests and mountains, where there used to be a tradition of spirit warriors and shamans - humans receiving animal souls. This is now lost and almost forgotten, squashed by a short-lived imperial invasion and the imposition of the orthodoxy of the Five Gods. Some people still dabble in these old magics, but under threat of strict punishment. But not everyone wants these magics to stay forgotten...
I found this not quite as engaging as the other two books. While they started slowly, allowing the reader to get to know the main character before launching them into Plot, this one jumped straight into a rather complicated and confusing murder investigation. I never really got an impression of the main character as a person in the same way I did in the other two books. Maybe if I'd seen him through other eyes, I'd have come to know him better, but I do often struggle with single-viewpoint stories, unless the main character is very well drawn. There were also rather too many scenes in which history or the workings of magic were told by one character to another in long passages of expositionary dialogue. But, still, I enjoyed it. Just not as much as the other two.
Penric and Desdemona series (novellas) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric's Demon
Penric and the Shaman
Penric's Fox
Penric's Mission
Mira's Last Dance
The Prisoner of Limnos
A series of novellas set in the same world as the above - in (initially) the same country as The Hallowed Hunt, but over a hundred years later.
Penric, the main character, is 19 at the start of the series - a cheerful, likeable, unwarlike young man riding through the woods en route to his betrothal. There he comes across a dying old lady in a coach, and offers to help. His help is accepted... and he becomes the recipient of her demon. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It CAN be bad, but "demons" - elementals of chaos - can co-exist inside a human, giving them magical powers and the wisdom of all their previous hosts. Penric's demon is a particularly old and powerful one, who comes with strong echoes of the personanilities of all its previous hosts, all of them women, most of them quite opiniated. Possession of the demon - whom he names Desdemona - leads Penric into a career of scholarship and theology, and leads him into various interesting adventures.
I loved these! There's a lot of humour in them, especially the first one, and even when they're not being outright funny, there's always a lightness of touch. Desdemona's various personalities are opinionated and interesting, and Penric himself is a really likeable character. Unlike the 3 full-length novels in this world, which only have one viewpoint character per novel, these stories (except for the first) include other viewpoint characters, too, allowing us to see Penric through other eyes, which I very much appreciated, and which only made me like him more.
The first novella is an origin story, the next two are separate but linked, while the last three are really one long story spread over 3 parts. I do hope there'll be more!