The Miniaturist miniseries
The BBC miniseries of The Miniaturist now has a PBS airdate of Sunday 9/9 at 9:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/the-miniaturist/
Obviously I have to watch this because Romola Garai is in it (*pours one out for The Hour*), but I also feel bad because I tried to read the book and bounced off of it really hard for totally arbitrary reasons. (It had one of those prologues that actually happens after the events of the book, and I always feel like those sorts of prologues are trying to make me care about a narrative by stacking the deck: look, they always seem to be saying to me, things aren't going to be this interesting right away, you'll have to sit through some stuff, but remember me? Aren't I shiny and intriguing? Don't you wanna know how I got this way? And I'm usually like, "no? Because I don't know who any of these people are, and you can't just grandiose your way into making me care?" And then the tone of the book just after the prologue is often very different from the tone of the prologue, which was the case here, so I only got a few pages in before I just couldn't bother.)
It's a shame, because the cover is gorgeous, and I have very fond memories of walking through cities in the UK just when the book came out and seeing whole bookshop windows devoted to it. I was excited when it came out in the US, and I always meant to try it again after the prologue debacle, but I never did. (I did read Jessie Burton's second book, The Muse, which was a good way to spend the school camping trip, but it had that problem where it had two narratives taking place at different times and I found one of the narratives far more interesting than the other, unfortunately.)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/the-miniaturist/
Obviously I have to watch this because Romola Garai is in it (*pours one out for The Hour*), but I also feel bad because I tried to read the book and bounced off of it really hard for totally arbitrary reasons. (It had one of those prologues that actually happens after the events of the book, and I always feel like those sorts of prologues are trying to make me care about a narrative by stacking the deck: look, they always seem to be saying to me, things aren't going to be this interesting right away, you'll have to sit through some stuff, but remember me? Aren't I shiny and intriguing? Don't you wanna know how I got this way? And I'm usually like, "no? Because I don't know who any of these people are, and you can't just grandiose your way into making me care?" And then the tone of the book just after the prologue is often very different from the tone of the prologue, which was the case here, so I only got a few pages in before I just couldn't bother.)
It's a shame, because the cover is gorgeous, and I have very fond memories of walking through cities in the UK just when the book came out and seeing whole bookshop windows devoted to it. I was excited when it came out in the US, and I always meant to try it again after the prologue debacle, but I never did. (I did read Jessie Burton's second book, The Muse, which was a good way to spend the school camping trip, but it had that problem where it had two narratives taking place at different times and I found one of the narratives far more interesting than the other, unfortunately.)