Another 90-minute BBC radio adaptation of a Miss Marple mystery, this time The Body in the Library. As the title indicates, a young woman’s body is found on the library hearth of an old friend of Miss Marple’s. I wasn’t quite enjoying this one as we went along, because some of the characters exhibit class prejudices that really got up my nose (and I am not nearly as sensitive to this stuff as, say, Chad). The adaptation was also disappointing in that it not just failed to give an important clue, but gave me exactly the opposite impression of the relevant fact. Who’s editing these things?
Roberts, Nora: Blue Smoke
From the library, a new Nora Roberts hardcover, Blue Smoke. This is a single-couple novel, perhaps indicating that two- or three-couple novels are not going to be a permanent trend in her mainstream novels. It takes its sweet time getting the couple together, mind, letting one-sided “love at first sight” at around page 50, and a number of near-misses, suffice until they meet almost half-way in. The romance feels almost secondary to me, which is just fine, because I read the book as Catrina Hale’s story, how and why she became an arson investigator. Despite its crashingly obvious villain, that story is more interesting than fated love at first etc.
As usual, a good way to pass a lunch and a sleepy evening; I don’t ask it to be more than that and it doesn’t try.
Pratchett, Terry: (20) Hogfather
Before Thanksgiving, I was feeling stressed and overly-sensitive; thus, when I grabbed books to take with me, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was a natural choice. It’s seasonal, being about the Discworld’s equivalent of Christmas, and the better Discworld books are always comfort reads for me.
This was the only book I read over Thanksgiving, so it was a good choice. I really like the principal character of this book, Susan (Death’s adopted grand-daughter), and moments like “Hi! I’m the inner babysitter!” make me want to cheer. I also like the commentary on the Christmas season, belief, and childhood.
On re-reading, I do think the plot has one incident too many; or, rather, while the last bit in the snow serves thematic purposes, it feels tacked-on. Pratchett’s plots have improved vastly over the course of the Discworld books (of which this is the 20th), but I do think they’re his weakest area. It’s a minor point, however, and Hogfather remains great comfort reading.
O’Brian, Patrick: (03) H.M.S. Surprise (spoilers)
SPOILERS for H.M.S. Surprise; here’s the non-spoiler post if you got here by mistake.
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O’Brian, Patrick: (03) H.M.S. Surprise (audio)
I’ve heard the third of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, H.M.S. Surprise, cited as the point where the series really comes together. I don’t know that I can speak to that; it seems smoother to me, in that its land-based plot isn’t just a big lump at the beginning, but on the other hand, we no longer need to be introduced to those land-based characters. However, to the extent that these assessments are based on Stephen’s expanded role in the plot, I think it’s fair: it’s necessary for the overall balance of the series that Stephen be more than just the sidekick along for the ride, which is accomplished nicely here.
I remembered basically nothing of this book but the sloth (which Patrick Tull pronounces “slowth”; is it just the animal that’s pronounced that way, or the sin too?). I don’t know how I could have forgotten various events, but that just goes to show that audio is really the best way for me to first experience these.
A spoiler-filled post follows.
Christie, Agatha: Pocket Full of Rye, A (radio play)
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.
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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.)
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.