back (-ish)

[kindkit]

Thanks to a friend of

Comments

[sallymn]

I'm glad you do have a computer...

VLC is good, isn't it? :)

[halotolerant]

Hooray for computer and interwebs ability! \o/ You have been missed round here *g*

Annoying that Sansom isn't available till next year there (why on earth do that?) I'm reading Ken Follet's World Without End which is fairly good so far and has some incidental queerness of which I approve (main character queerness would be better, but I like historical fiction that acknowledges that Gayness Happened). He's written an epic series about WW2, apparently, so I might try that next.

I've still not got to 'Star Trek' for my usual reasons of accessibility, but literally no one's reaction posts have made me think I'm missing the ride of my life. Which is a shame.

Thank you for the birthday wishes ♥ And once again, I'm so pleased you are back around *g*

[kindkit]

Fortunately, the magic fairies that live in a machine on my desk helped me get hold of the Sansom book. The prospect of waiting until next year was just too ridiculous. I'm about 100 pages in (it's not short, is it?). The info-dumps are a bit frustrating, though I realize that normal readers, who haven't been reading lots of second world war history, wouldn't necessarily know, say, who Lord Halifax was and why the 1940 Conservative leadership crisis was so important. I'm also not sure we need to hear the full details of every single character's childhood. Still, now that I'm a ways in I'm finding it page-turny enough. At least Sansom's tendency to give every character a full psychological profile means that he can write a Gestapo officer who is a believing Nazi but still has some depth, who isn't entirely defined by that and shown as a ranting psychopathic serial killer. One of the most horrifying things, to me, about Nazi Germany was that so many atrocities were committed by people who weren't ranting psychopaths, who were ordinary.

[halotolerant]

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I certainly found it interesting although as you know I had my problems with it, and info-dumps were certainly a stylistic issue. I also realised I struggled with his attempt to criticise something that didn't happen - yes, colonialism was largely bad, but it did not in fact stop us going to war - but on the other hand, I think he does a good job of undermining the smug sense of 'they were wrong, we were right, we were shining and perfect in the face of the nasty people' that can be projected onto the pre-war period. Which again, it makes one think a great deal more than the standard war-set thriller, and indeed more than some AUs. I'd be interested to hear what you think of Certain Characters as you get to them. It's still on my potential Yuletide list, put it that way.

[kindkit]

I finished it last night--it's quite an odd book and I'm not sure what to make of it. I like Sansom's choice to make the adventure-y plot, meaningful though it is to the characters, irrelevant in the face of huge political changes happening elsewhere; I really didn't want a book where a handful of brave souls overthrown Nazism single-handedly. Stylistically and structurally there were still too many info-dumps and too much "now we will pause for a couple of days in a safe house while the characters have Meaningful Conversations together in every possible combination," but I appreciate the fundamental subversion of thriller tropes. Also that there's a spectrum of beliefs even among the Resistance, that people can do some brave and admirable things and still be unpleasant people or hold unadmirable views, and also do terrible things and hold terrible views but not be uniformly Evil. Sansom could perhaps have given the case against war in 1940 a bit more strength--there were plenty of reasons to think that Churchill was a raving