I listened to Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye as a 90-minute BBC radio play. It’s a Miss Marple mystery about deaths that appear to fit a nursery rhyme’s pattern. June Whitfield is a perfectly good Miss Marple, and I enjoyed listening to her discussions with the police, but ninety minutes wasn’t long enough for this story. The solution to the mystery rested on character development, which just couldn’t be fit into the time available. However, I’m still recording them when they appear on BBC7, since they’re quick, non-demanding listens when I don’t know what else I feel like hearing.
Gabaldon, Diana: (106) A Breath of Snow and Ashes
A Breath of Snow and Ashes is the sixth of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and not, I emphasize, the last. (Gabaldon had previously planned only six books, and I have seen some consternation on message boards about whether the series was ending here. It’s not. [*]) It does somewhat fit Gabaldon’s previously stated plans of having an Old World trilogy and a New World trilogy; this strikes me as the last book in a pre-Revolutionary-War New World trilogy, with an uncertain number of Revolutionary War books to follow. A quite remarkable number of plot threads are wrapped up, and there is a strong sense that the table is being cleared to fully focus on the War.
[*] There’s a continuity error, or perhaps over-cleverness, in the second Epilogue that leads to this confusion.
This is also a more satisfactory novel than the prior, in that it weaves together its new plot threads into a self-contained tale, which moves smoothly through space and time. Consequences appear and are resolved within the space of the volume, which is a refreshing change. (There’s an unnecessary quantity of sex early in the book, which is not.)
It’s hard to say much else about this book. Like all of the Outlander books, the pages are soaked in some addictive substance (in the words of Rachel Brown), but details are either meaningless (if you haven’t read prior books) or spoilers (if you have). I am pleased with it, though; it really seems as though Gabaldon has made a concerted effort to wrestle the series back under control, and I am much more optimistic about the next book(s) after reading it.
Two words about the hardcover as a physical object. It is deceptively slim, being printed on very thin paper; it’s actually 980 pages. And the cover is not a light gray, as the online pictures led me to believe, but a shiny shiny silver—I mean, if you were lost in the desert, you could probably blind passing airline pilots with the reflection off this thing, that’s how shiny it is. Use caution when carrying it around.
O’Brian, Patrick: (02) Post Captain (spoilers)
And here are the SPOILERS for Post Captain. If you’re here by a random link, here’s the non-spoiler post.
Continue reading “O’Brian, Patrick: (02) Post Captain (spoilers)”
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.