Year: 2005

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O’Brian, Patrick: (02) Post Captain (audio)

I started listening to the second of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, Post Captain (narrated by Patrick Tull) quite a while ago, and stalled out somewhere in the first couple of hours. I don’t precisely remember why now, but I suspect it had something to do with the opening:

Post Captain very deliberately starts with the lack of a battle between a French ship of the line and two English ships, on the nick-of-time news that peace has been reached. It then moves to land, to the Sussex Downs, where Aubrey and Maturin have taken a house on Jack’s prize-money. There they meet a number of civilians, including Sophie Williams and Diana Villiers, two unmarried young women. Jane Austen is occasionally mentioned when speaking of this series, and this section would be the most Austen-like part that I’ve encountered so far: courtships and finances and family pressures and so forth. I found it disorienting, and it must have rather been a shock when it was first published. (This book is also structured rather less like a standalone novel than the first, which may also have been a surprise to readers.)

I love Jack and Stephen, and I like Sophie (my feelings about Diana are a bit complex to sum up with one verb), but I was glad to leave this opening section behind; the entanglements of land, where Jack is not at his best, had me wincing a lot in sympathy. The focus eventually widens to include non-domestic affairs. I was very surprised to learn, thanks to Dean King’s A Sea of Words, that one of the featured ships was fictional; I knew that some of the engagements in Master and Commander were based on historical event, and the ship in question is so weird that I expected it to be an example of “truth is stranger than fiction.”

After listening to these, I’ve been flipping through the texts to see how scenes look in print. It’s interesting that the action sequences take up fewer pages than I expect; their intensity makes them loom larger in my mental impression of the story. This is, of course, as it should be, and it’s another point in favor of my listening to these first and reading after.

Post Captain is slightly lumpy here and there, and doesn’t always manage its tone shifts with perfect deftness. It’s still vastly entertaining, and I dived right into the audiobook of the third, H.M.S. Surprise, after finishing it.

(Note: I have a feeling that before too long, I’m going to be mixing up which event happened in which volume. As a result, I plan to make a spoiler-filled post after each regular booklog entry for this series; the posts will be labeled and the spoilers will be behind a “read more” link.)

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Clancy, Tom: (09) Rainbow Six

This is a pretty shameful admission, but I did read Rainbow Six some time ago in paperback, after I’d thought I had given up on Tom Clancy’s books. (This is in the Jack Ryan continuity, but Jack doesn’t appear.) I don’t remember now why I picked it up, but I actually liked it, or at least parts of it. This is kind of two books: in one, a new international anti-terrorist team, Rainbow, responds to a number of hostage situations; in the other, frothing environmentalists plot to kill off all of humanity (except them). No, really.

I liked the hostage rescue stuff; it scratches the same itch as his good stuff. However, the frothing environmentalist sections are unspeakably bad, and I skipped right past them on this re-read. It’s still a sizable novel even with the awful parts excised, so it served fine as bedtime reading. It is highly unlikely that I’ll try any other Clancy books, though.

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Clancy, Tom: (02) Patriot Games

In my Tom Clancy bedtime re-reads, I had hopes that Patriot Games would have remained readable, being the second Jack Ryan book and therefore early in Clancy’s career. Alas, it is not; evidently, Jack has already become perfect in his author’s eyes, and on this read comes off as a gratingly arrogant and insufferable know-it-all. The sex scenes and the sections from his wife’s point-of-view are also cringe-inducing, or possibly are meant to depict aliens. I’d read another four in the continuity back in the day (The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, and Executive Orders) but didn’t bother with them now.

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Clancy, Tom: (01) The Hunt for Red October

Some backlog clearing: After re-reading Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, I acquired a used copy of The Hunt for Red October. This is his first published novel, the start of the Jack Ryan continuity, and probably his best work. Clancy is very bad at people at any level other than their technical competence (such as politics, emotions, and sex), and happily this book is just lots of soothing technogeekery about submarines. It’s not hard to understand why it was initially published by the Naval Institute Press rather than a traditional fiction publisher; I guess its surprising success is a good example of how sometimes readers actually like exposition.

The movie captures the spirit of the book fairly well, though it is dumbed down in a couple of places for (unnecessary) dramatic tension.

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McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics

I got Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics out of the library a while ago, and after posting quick practical notes on my LJ, completely forgot about logging it until now.

This is a book on the history, theory, and practice of sequential art (comics and manga), told through sequential art. I can understand why McCloud made this choice, since he’d need a large fraction in comic form to illustrate his points; and yet I wonder if the format excludes some people who might get something out of a partly-prose book. I checked this out to increase my understanding as a reader, so I skimmed a lot of the history and the exhortations to creators: highly enthusiastic, but not what I was looking for. As for the practical stuff, some of it crystalized things that I’d noticed (especially in several posts doing close readings of Saiyuki art) but hadn’t verbalized; some of it just felt obvious, but then this wasn’t the first sequential art criticism I’d read.

If you have already found that your brain can process sequential art, and are interested in the history or the nuts and bolts of the form, this is worth a quick browse at the least.

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Christie, Agatha: Evil Under the Sun (radio play)

Another BBC radio play, Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, again with John Moffatt as Poirot. I think I must have re-read this one fairly recently, because I remembered enough of the plot to spot every twist just before it was revealed. The adaptation is again nicely produced and voiced, but unfortunately, it fails to convey an important clue. I enjoyed it, but I can’t recommend it as heartily as I did Death on the Nile.

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Arakawa, Hiromu: Fullmetal Alchemist, vol. 2

I wasn’t intending to read volume 2 of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist just now, as my entry on volume 1 indicated. However, despite my express requests, Chad bought me a copy, and well, if it’s right in front of me . . . .

We’re up to episode 20 in the anime now (so again, if you spoil me for future developments, I will kill you with my brain—also unwelcome are hints, clues, suggestions that something will be important later, and the like. Sorry.), and volume 2 is again stuff that we’d already seen. Here’s the breakdown:

  • Chapter 5, “The Alchemist’s Suffering”: corresponds to the Shou Tucker plot of episodes 6 and 7, “The Alchemy Exam” and “Night of the Chimera’s Cry.” Again, unlike the anime, these chapters are not flashbacks: Ed and Al are using Tucker’s library to research bio-alchemy after arriving in East City after the events of the first volume, as Tucker undergoes strange stresses leading up to his yearly assessment to renew his license as a State Alchemist. The anime’s ending is also different in a way that I find more interesting and complex.
  • Chapter 6, “The Right Hand of Destruction,” and chapter 7, “After the Rain”: these correspond to the Scar sections of episodes 14 and 15, “Destruction’s Right Hand” and “The Ishbal Massacre.” A serial killer targeting State Alchemists is on the loose, and Ed is in danger.
  • Chapter 8, “The Road of Hope”: this corresponds to the Marcoh sections of episodes 14 and 15, as well as the beginning of episode 16, “That Which is Lost.” The brothers accidentially happen upon a hot lead in their quest for the Philosopher’s Stone.

I personally find that the anime’s interleaving of the material in chapters 6-8 / episodes 14-15 works better from a dramatic standpoint, as does its expanded history of the Ishbal Massacre. And I’m beginning to think that Roy Mustang’s complexities were created out of whole cloth by the writers of the anime (a good thing, as far as I’m concerned).

I recall reading that anime tends to be produced faster than manga is written, so that anime ends up with filler episodes, or plot divergences, or both. Comparing story choices with the manga confirms that some anime episodes felt like filler because they were, though at least they were thematic filler; however, it also seems that the difference in production schedules encourages, or at least permits, more time spent on backstory and on setting up later developments. As before, the manga isn’t bad, but in a straight comparison between the manga and the anime at this point, I like the story choices of the anime better, filler bits and all.

I’ve got some further comparison notes, with spoilers, over on my LiveJournal; the specific anime episodes spoiled are 8, 14-16, 18, and 20.

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James, Eloisa: (01) Much Ado About You

Eloisa James’ Much Ado About You was mentioned favorably by Rachel Brown recently, and I picked it up as a lunchtime book while I was getting the new Diana Gabaldon (because I am not hauling a 980 page book back and forth to work). As light lunchtime reading, I have no complaints.

This is the first in a Regency romance series about four sisters; those sibling relationships are the distinguishing characteristic of the book. The romance moves a touch faster than I’d like, but has its good points; the overall plot also had a few elements that didn’t go as I’d expected, which is particularly a plus in the romance genre. A number of the secondary characters are also very interesting and I look forward to seeing more of them, though I suspect that a couple of them are going to be taken in a direction that strikes me as awfully tricky (I’ll still read the story even if I’m right; James seems a lot less frothy than Regency authors can be—and while frothy is all well and good for certain moods, it’s not what would be called for in that case). I’ll be checking out James’ backlist from the library.

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[2005] Site relaunch & implementation notes

Welcome to the relauched Outside of a Dog, now powered by Movable Type 3.2. The left sidebar now features a search function; automagically generated indexes by genre, author, and series, which I hope will make it easier for you to find your way around (I know it will make my life easier); and, just for fun, a link to a random entry. The comment system has also changed, but it shouldn’t affect you unless you’re a spammer.

All posts and comments have been imported (some of the multi-book posts are somewhat awkwardly split up to make the indexes work, but they’re here), and all old links work. Thanks to Michael Bruce for writing the script to import comments from Blogkomm.

[Implementation details have been moved to the about page.]

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Pratchett, Terry: (34) Thud!

Terry Pratchett’s newest Discworld book is called Thud!; it’s named after a chess-like game where the sides are trolls and dwarfs. It’s the anniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley, at which the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls—no-one really knows. Inter-species tensions have been exacerbated by the arrival in Ankh-Morpork of some seriously conservative dwarfs who preach the extermination of trolls, and Commander Vimes and the rest of the City Watch have their hands more than full trying to keep the city from exploding. And that’s before one of the conservative dwarfs is murdered and a troll club is found nearby . . .

But every night at six o’clock, without fail, Vimes reads Where’s My Cow? to his fourteen-month-old son.

(Where’s My Cow? has actually been published separately as a picture book; I haven’t seen it myself yet.)

This is a “things from the Dungeon Dimensions”-type plot, with an invisible quasidemonic entity mucking about looking for a way to influence events. These are normally not my favorite Discworld plots, but this one is worth it for the climactic scene. The rest of the story makes good use of new and old secondary characters, and of expanding prior worldbuilding bits into interesting dwarf and troll cultures. It also introduces a new element, which from a lesser author would strike me as a very bad idea; because this is Pratchett, however, I’m sure he knows where it came from and what effects it’s going to have, which I’m looking forward to learning.

This book also has some particularly good footnotes, such as:

Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.

And:

” . . . I’ve never played games since I grew up. I used to be good at tiddley-rats* when I was a nipper, though.”

* A famous Ankh-Morpork gutter sport, second only to dead-rat conkers. Turd races in the gutter appear to have died out, despite an attempt to take them upmarket with the name Poosticks.

I have a couple of minor quibbles: the Brick POV sections seem superfluous, but they’re short and, as Chad points out, consistent with the genre; and the Da Vinci Code references already feel dated (though I suppose in a while they won’t stand out as references at all). Other than those small points, however, a solid and very satisfying book.

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