Media recently consumed
Been watching the first seasons of Fringe and Lost Girl. The latter is good cheesy fun, though Bo the Succubus is... really incredibly naive-bordering-on-dumb-as-a-rock. Still, nice to see a show where the female main character isn't punished for having sex. Really, really liking Fringe; I'd ignored it for a while because I thought it was just an X-Files rehash, but Kathy got into it, and I saw enough S2 and 3 episodes that we decided to rewatch from the beginning. Although the MotW episodes can be similar to X-Files, the arc stuff is totally different, and the characters and their relationships likewise. I'm a tad wary of J.J. Abrams shows, because they have a slight tendency to go off the rails after a few seasons, but the premise of Fringe is so weird to begin with that maybe it's already left the rails by the time it starts.
I read Drood a bit ago, and was... it reminded me a lot of another novel I read in the last year and now can't recall the title of, but they were both sprawling Victorian Gothic horror things with extremely unreliable first person narrators who took a lot of drugs. The big difference is that Drood is RPF with Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. My main trouble with both novels was that the narrators were such unpleasant people that I didn't really care much about the awful things that were happening to them. But in the wake of Drood I'm re-reading The Moonstone, and making mental notes about the ways in which Sergeant Cuff anticipates Sherlock Holmes.
I also ripped through Diana Wynne Jones's Dalemark Quartet for the first time last week. It struck me as a very interesting exercise in fantasy world-building, being in some senses more about the country than the characters, but also in that it does things with really seriously flawed characters that you don't often see in fantasy novels - it's written in a YA-accessible style, but the themes are a hell of a lot more mature than a good deal of adult fantasy I've read.
Let's see... also read Death Comes to Pemberly, and there's two-hundred-plus pages of my life I'll never get back. Dullest mystery novel ever. Bleah. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, on the other hand, was a fun romp, albeit it seemed a tad "OMG SERIES ENDING MUST PAIR UP EVERYONE!" (I'm still mourning the fact that we will probably never get a plotty political intrigue novel set in the immediate aftermath of Aral's death, or a thriller starring Aral and Cordelia during their viceroy-age on Sergyar.)
Rants Talk to me
I read Drood a bit ago, and was... it reminded me a lot of another novel I read in the last year and now can't recall the title of, but they were both sprawling Victorian Gothic horror things with extremely unreliable first person narrators who took a lot of drugs. The big difference is that Drood is RPF with Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. My main trouble with both novels was that the narrators were such unpleasant people that I didn't really care much about the awful things that were happening to them. But in the wake of Drood I'm re-reading The Moonstone, and making mental notes about the ways in which Sergeant Cuff anticipates Sherlock Holmes.
I also ripped through Diana Wynne Jones's Dalemark Quartet for the first time last week. It struck me as a very interesting exercise in fantasy world-building, being in some senses more about the country than the characters, but also in that it does things with really seriously flawed characters that you don't often see in fantasy novels - it's written in a YA-accessible style, but the themes are a hell of a lot more mature than a good deal of adult fantasy I've read.
Let's see... also read Death Comes to Pemberly, and there's two-hundred-plus pages of my life I'll never get back. Dullest mystery novel ever. Bleah. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, on the other hand, was a fun romp, albeit it seemed a tad "OMG SERIES ENDING MUST PAIR UP EVERYONE!" (I'm still mourning the fact that we will probably never get a plotty political intrigue novel set in the immediate aftermath of Aral's death, or a thriller starring Aral and Cordelia during their viceroy-age on Sergyar.)
Rants Talk to me