Read/watch log

[petronia]

Haven't posted on DW for a while! (Did make a couple of posts on LJ.)

Not holding myself to this on a weekly basis, clearly, but it's still a useful exercise when there's something to report.

Read:

* Close to finishing The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot. This was my main reading during the holiday season -- an Indigo staff pick obtained on a whim

Comments

[koganbot]

Read Silence Of The Lambs a couple of decades ago and recall thinking it was Clarice more than Hannibal who made the book really good, and what was most interesting was her dealings with her wise but cagey boss and with an obtuse and malignant asylum director. The scene I remember vividly is Clarice needing to meet with Hannibal, and the asylum guy petulantly telling her to be quick while showing her a ticket he's got to a concert* that evening to which he doesn't want to be late, then suddenly realizing that by showing her the single ticket he'd let on that he's going alone (i.e., is not the sort of guy who's got a date), and feeling cut off at the knees by the fact that he'd just revealed this to an attractive young woman, and hating her for it, all of which Clarice perceives as it's happening. I think Harris used that very phrase, "cut off at the knees

[petronia]

(back from NYC)

Co-sign that. Red Dragon is, I think, a classic of its genre (in the sense that it reads like an excellent but unsurprising forensic procedural now if you don't know it pioneered a lot of the modern forensic procedural cliches), but SotL rather transcends its genre, which is entirely due to Clarice -- in large part, due to Clarice being a woman. As dubdobdee noted there's a quality of wisdom there, which isn't pushed in the first book and gets lost in the third.

All the asylum director did was accidentally use the singular "ticket"! But Clarice noticed, he noticed her noticing, and she noticed him noticing her noticing. (Harris must have been a sharp observer as a journalist; he makes all his POV characters very perceptive, so he doesn't have to hold back the perceptiveness of his narration.)