davidh219
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Posts posted by davidh219
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I quite enjoy Capaldi. I feel like each actor has been a logical progression of the character. Eccleston was self-loathing and indecisive, unable to come to terms with what he did during the time war. Tennant got over it and became proactive, even ruthless and arrogant, wanting to change fixed points in time and exert his will on the universe and losing it when things don't go his way. Smith finally got over the guilt and the depression and allowed himself to really connect with people and enjoy life again, being almost child-like in his optimism, offering second chances and seeking peaceful compromise where Tennant never would have and achieving a place of zen-like acceptance, but after losing so much and suffering so much out pops Capaldi, a hardened and calloused doctor that no longer suffers fools lightly, that struggles to feel emotional attachment and empathy, that has resigned himself to the idea of sometimes sacrificing innocent life for the greater good and killing what and who need be killed with absolutely zero hesitation, to prevent more loss, to keep things from spiraling out of control like his predecessor did. Capaldi is just straight up cool in a way the others haven't been, and it's refreshing.
Also, Doctor Who has always been in turns beautifully written and an idiotic embarrassment, regardless of who's playing the doctor. Any time I hear somebody say a particular run was better or worse than another I just assume they're only remembering the good and forgetting the bad.
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To be honest I buy most of my books on amazon, whether used or new. I'm sure in depends on the area, and you're in an entirely different country than me, but in my experience used bookstores in Chicago are mostly novelty experiences. You go for the atmosphere and/or because you like the owner's tastes and want a small, curated selection to browse to help you pick your next read. And you pay a premium for it, sometimes as much as that book would cost new on amazon. Certainly not the cheapest place to buy used books.
The Newberry book fair is the only real exception to that. You'll pay, on average, I'd say $1.50 per book, because they are all donated and the proceeds are to help the library, so it's more like a thrift store in that sense. I walked out of there one time with something like 24 books for less than 40 dollars. HUGE selection, like multiple enormous rooms. Especially if you're looking for any non-fiction, thrillers, or dramas. I'm mostly a fantasy and scifi geek and their selection there is rather lacking, but I've found some decent stuff. I would recommend finding the biggest book fair you can that's selling freely donated books for some sort of charity or non-profit goal, as they'll be the cheapest and most worthwhile.
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I go to a used book fair every year just because it's supposedly one of the biggest in the country and I already live here so it's easy to get to. I can usually only go on saturday though and the pickings get somewhat slim by then. You really need to show up on thursday or friday. Even if I only leave with a couple books it's still fun though.
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Very rarely I have come across a fantasy novel that will have a short story set in that universe included at the end. One of the Queen's Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner has one, for instance. I'd say that's probably my favorite type of bonus content. Interviews with the author can be interesting as well. Samples of other books I rarely read because they are almost always for the next book in a series and I'll already know if I'm buying it or not based on how much I liked the book I just read. But they have convinced me to buy a book here and there. I probably wouldn't have bought Fairest by Marissa Meyer if not for the sample included at the end of Cress, simply because it's a side novel/prequel to the main series that I probably would have overlooked since it's not necessary to the story.
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New At the Drive-In album is incoming in a couple months, so I've been listening to their old stuff a lot, as well as the two singles they released.
Been playing quite a bit of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently, and I really love the soft, atmospheric soundtrack, so been listening to that a lot as well.
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Just recently finished Stranger Things. It was quite good.
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I tried doing this once. Didn't keep up with it for very long. At some point I finally had to accept I'm just not the kind of person who actually likes writing in a physical notebook. It's a romantic writer affectation that's aesthetically appealing, but it's just too slow and none of the data is easily searched and altered. Everything in my brain just gets dumped into wikidpad, which I can't say enough nice things about. Unfortunately the android wikidpad app is useless garbage so if I'm out of the house and need to write something down I use google keep on my phone and transfer it into wikidpad when I get home.
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I prefer paperbacks, personally. I have quite a few old books, and haven't noticed that hardcovers hold up any better over time as far as paper quality and such. If you're not the type to subject your books to things that will cause the paper covers to get bent, I don't see that hardcovers are any advantage in that sense. They also don't have the cover illustration printed onto the front cover, it's on a separate dust jacket, which is far more fragile than the thick paper of a paperback. My shabbiest looking books are hardcovers with jacked up dust jackets. The real answer, though, is that I literally do not care. Whatever's cheapest. The only strong feeling I have about the physical form of books is deckled edges, which are monumentally stupid and need to stop immediately.
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17 so far. Every year I wind up reading around 75 books so that's basically on par. I'm nothing if not consistent.
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. My girlfriend finally got me to read the books, and we've been re-watching the movie version together each time I finish one. I just finished book six, so that's the movie I just saw. It was bad. All of those movies have been bad.
The last non Harry Potter movie I saw was Arrival, and it was very, very, very good. Best scifi movie that's come out in at least the last five years, maybe more. Can't recommend enough.
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I hate when authors modify the word 'said' with useless adverbs like loudly, sharply, gently, gleefully, etc. J.K. Rowling is especially bad with this in the first couple Harry Potter books, she almost never lets that verb stand on its own. Ideally, you shouldn't be modifying that word with adverbs ever, because the reader glosses over the word and it becomes invisible, which is what you want. If you draw too much attention to your dialogue tags, you're taking attention away from the dialogue itself, which should stand on its own. The tags are just there so that the reader knows who's speaking. To have a book that does it like 70% of the time was quite frustrating and distracting.
I hate when authors kill off characters purely for shock value. Killing off a character is the easiest thing for a writer to do. Making their death feel inevitable and symbolically cathartic is hard. That's good writing. Shock value deaths that nobody saw coming are not. It's why I have no interest in actually reading Game of Thrones, and why I'm basically hate-watching the show. Martin is a hack, imo.
Long descriptions of setting or of a character's appearance that serves no other purpose than the visual. If your writing is good, any description should also be imparting character, plot, or general world-building at the same time. I don't care what that meadow looks like unless the way it looks has something to do with what the dark lord did here 100 years ago and helps the hero figure out his next move. Don't spend an entire page telling me how beautiful the grass in it is for its own sake. I've seen fantastical meadows before, I get the idea. Similarly, I know what a beautiful woman looks like. Just tell me she has red hair, light skin, and is gorgeous and I know what I need to know. Don't linger on the specifics and pile on adjectives, it's just boring and awkward. Furthermore, leaving it open to interpretation means that she is, in fact, gorgeous to all your readers, regardless of taste. If you over-describe her, I might not find her as beautiful as you do, and if it's important that I find her beautiful, then you've just undermined your character and my experience.
I don't mind love triangles as long as they make sense and aren't vapid and tacked on. I've found that usually if a book has a love triangle, at the very least some thought has been paid to the romantic aspect. Much worse is the book where romance was clearly a far secondary consideration and yet it was half-halfheartedly included anyway, because every book has to have a romance subplot to be marketable. Screw that. Don't put a romance in your book if it doesn't fit. I'm looking at you, J.K. Rowling. Harry and Ginny have no chemistry and he starts obsessing over her out of literally nowhere.
I hate when authors with an agenda who refuse to play devil's advocate with their characters. The best authors are people who you would have a hard time guessing their exact political and religious beliefs accurately just from reading their work, because they aren't afraid to write characters who are wholly unlike themselves and are capable and willing to write those characters believably and respectfully without resorting to strawmen or stereotypes. Brandon Sanderson is a mormon and yet his work never comes across as overtly religious or preachy to me, and he writes a very believable and respectable atheist that doesn't make me feel like he's misrepresenting people like me just because he believes differently.
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Fantasy
I second the recommendation for Sanderson's Mistborn series. Vin is one of the most brutal, effective, straight up cool warriors I can think of in a fantasy series. She can turn a room full of enemies into a room full of body parts real quick, but she does it without being super masculine, macho, emotionless, etc. which is a cliche a lot of male writers fall into when writing female characters who are extremely good at fighting, they'll just turn them into typical male power fantasy protagonists with stereotypical masculine personality traits, but with a different pronoun, which usually rings false to me. Overly macho male characters don't usually sit well with me either, but I'm a fairly feminine guy. Point is, Vin affirms that personality traits typically seen as feminine such as being quiet, introverted, unassertive, shy, graceful, gentle, caring, emotionally vulnerable and expressive, finding no joy in violence, etc. and being a horrifying killing machine are not mutually exclusive, which I'm all the way into.
The Emperor's Soul, also by Brandon Sanderson, is another good one. Sanderson in general is quite good at writing believable female protagonists. Warbreaker is another good one. Both of these books are much less action-oriented, though, so I don't know if they fit the "hold her own in a fight," requirement, but Mistborn definitely does.
I really liked Elphaba in Wicked, but she doesn't really fight anyone, per se.
Patricia McKillip writes wonderful female characters. And male characters, for that matter. She's just a great character writer. There's not a lot of action in her books though, so her female characters don't really get into physical fights. It's mostly politics and character relationships. They're incredible though. Alphabet of Thorn is a great place to start.
Abhorsen series by Garth Nix. I don't even know what to say. You have to read this. Do it.
Scifi
If you're into young adult books at all, I'd recommend The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. Cinder and Scarlet kick serious butt and there are two other female characters who aren't the fighting type but certainly strong in their own ways and well written. No love triangles, but there are four very different, very compelling romances involving eight people. I'm not super into romance generally, but she made me really invested in not one, but four relationships. Quite a feat. If you're interested in a chilling and compelling female villain, there's a side novel showing how the main antagonist of the series came to be who she is called Fairest, which I recommend you read between books 3 (Cress) and 4 (Winter).
That's all I got off the top of my head. I'm not much of a scifi guy, unfortunately.
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This is legitimately one of the best books I've ever read. I honestly didn't find it scary at all, though, and I'm always surprised when I see people who were scared by it. It didn't seem like much of a horror novel to me. More like an experimental literary fiction tour de force masquerading as a horror novel. I liked how he played with the idea of a documentary, complete with academic commentary on that documentary with in depth footnotes, while all the time even our fictional narrator acknowledges that it's not a real documentary. A fictional documentary that's not trying to be funny (mockumentary) but instead trying to be so detailed that it unnerves you with how real it feels and seems is...quite something. Powerful concept. And he completely inverts that at the end when the documentary breaks the fourth wall into johnny's world, which cascades into breaking the fourth wall of our world. And then there's the parallels between johnny truant's life and danielewski's that make you wonder, how much of that is coming from a real place? Are those letters from johnny's mom the exaggerated way danielewski saw his own mentally ill mother at some point in his younger days? Johnny is also a bit of an unreliable narrator which is always fun. God, this book is so good. It's hard to even talk about it, though. I feel like I need two cups of coffee and an hour of quiet time just to gather my thoughts on it.
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Tolkien was an academic so it's only natural that he should be a better writer. H.P. universe is not that original but then again neither is Tolkien's if you think of it. It's just that when it comes to a wide audience, that is not relevant. Quality and popularity don't always go hand in hand (Tolkien's work wasn't exactly deemed as being good back in the days) but simplicity goes hand in hand with popularity and sales. I am not blaming Rowling for writing like this since many popular books and authors are junk(Dan Brown being an example)but most readers want something accessible and easy to pick up.
My point is that maybe so many bad/average works come out because the audience demands it.
Tolkien's world may not be original now, but it was wholly original when it first came out. Everything that the epic fantasy genre is started with Tolkien. Fantasy as we know it started with Tolkien. Dungeons and Dragons would not exist without him and, by extension, video games would be wholly different. The only author who could be said to have an earlier influence on modern fantasy is George MacDonald, the author of arguably the very first modern fantasy novel, but even those were still more like extended fairy tales for adults than the epic fantasy we know today. It was Tolkien that took those ideas and really bridged the gap and created the template people would be copying for the next forty years, and then trying very deliberately not to copy for the next twenty (Game of Thrones).
As much as I feel lukewarm about Tolkien's work and think modern epic fantasy authors have surpassed him in almost every respect, especially character and plot, to not give due credit is downright criminal. We've been living in Tolkien's shadow for sixty years, whether we like it or not. Harry Potter's influence is practically non-existent in comparison. It has changed literally nothing about how stories are written because it was just a generic copy of everything that came before.
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I love the HP book precisely because they are not complex. I would not say the fantasy genre is hard to get into, unless you somehow read Ursula LeGuin as your first but most people go for The Lord of the Rings as a first "serious" fantasy read. LOTR isn't very complex at all and at the first reading, unless you have a little background on Tolkien, you miss on a lot of his points.
As far as the genre itself goes, does it really matter how serious it is? Why would you even expect it to be anything but childish in the first place? Fairy-tales are childish and for kids but you don't expect them to be serious (not these days at least, I don't wanna get into the Grimm brothers now).
Also, your categorization on people that love H.P. is plain silly.
Lord of the Rings is, however, far better written than Harry Potter is and was far more original for its time. Honestly I don't think LotR holds up that well anymore, but that's besides the point. Again, I have nothing against people that love Harry Potter. I feel like I have to repeat that over and over. The OP was questioning the validity of Harry Potter's popularity and whether it was a mass marketing manipulation or not, which they believe is the case because the books aren't very good nor very original. I'm just explaining that it blew up in popularity precisely because it's simplistic and very derivative of all other fantasy that came before and contains practically every fantasy trope that has ever existed. This is true of lots of super popular things, whether it's a fairy tale for children or a BDSM erotica novel for adults (I think you know the one). The more popular something is, the more likely it is that it's just an "entry point," into a niche that has already existed for a long time but wasn't palatable to the general public until somebody wrote a boiled down, oversimplified version of it. If you find that offensive don't get mad at me, I have absolutely nothing to do with it, I was just countering the OP's nonsense with the truth.
Also, my categorization is not silly, because it comes from my life. I said, and I quote, "most people I know." I also still fail to see how people are taking offense to it. Is there something wrong with somebody reading Harry Potter, loving it, but then moving on to Brandon Sanderson, Neil Gaiman, Pratchett, Patricia A. McKillip, V.E. Schwab, or the Thursday Next series? Ya know, things that scratch that exact same itch but don't have terrible prose and plot holes, have a more complex plot, more complex characters, and that actually attempt to invert or avoid tropes so that their work doesn't just come across as completely generic? What's wrong with that? I'm not talking about James Joyce here when I say "deeper," I'm just saying, "better written and more original than Harry Potter."
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Yeah, it's a bugger when people post things on an open forum without giving due notification. Personally, I try to let off fireworks, or taser people, just so they know I'm commenting on their precious words.
If that is the case, I'd suggest you try to widen your circle of friends.
First of all, I don't think my words are "precious," but I won't know someone is talking to me unless they quote me, which prevents me from explaining myself or making reparations. It was sheer coincidence I even popped back into this thread. I had no idea someone took offense to something I'd said. That really sucks. Don't you like to know when people are talking to you?
Secondly, widen my circle of friends to include who? People who have only read Harry Potter and nothing else? I'm sure those people exist, but it's not my fault I don't know any. Most people read more than one book (or book series) in their lives. What are you even getting at?
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So, what you're saying is that those of us who enjoyed HP are too simple and shallow to understand "deeper" books?
Totally insulting. You've been on this board all of five minutes and this is what you bring to the table? Not a good move.
Maybe quote me next time so I actually get a notification and know I'm being addressed? This seems pretty akin to talking behind someone's back.
Anyway, I'm sorry if I offended you, that was not my intent, and I'm glad others caught on to that. The fact of the matter is, the Harry Potter books aren't very complex or challenging. As books in general, and particularly as fantasy. But that's okay. You know how I got into fantasy? The Chronicles of Narnia. They have stronger prose, sure, but they're even shorter and more simplistic than Harry Potter is. People need something that doesn't intimidate them, because fantasy can be very intimidating to newcomers. I'm delighted that Harry Potter exists, because it has only had positive effects from my point of few. It's gotten lots of people into fantasy, it popularized children's literature with readers of all ages and lifted it out of the genre ghetto it had been in up until that point, and it set a trend where all children's books to come after tended to be much longer.
Most people I know who love Harry Potter fit one of two descriptions:
- They went on to read better written and more complex fantasy
- Harry Potter remains some of the only fantasy they've read, but they read much better books in other genres
My girlfriend fits the second description. Harry Potter is some of the only fantasy she's read, even fifteen years later, but she reads stuff like The Kite Runner or The Other Boleyn Girl, so my comments about Harry Potter can hardly be seen as a condemnation of her; she reads plenty of deeper books. Nor are they a condemnation of anyone's character, merely an explanation for why Harry Potter caught on with such a wide audience. Just like Star Wars, world-shattering popularity almost always comes with some concessions, namely that your plot is most likely pretty derivative and pretty "fluffy." I have no value judgement about this, I'm merely pointing out that it is so.
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David, if you're a fan of Saki and British humour, you MUST try some Wodehouse
I believe he was influenced by Saki's writing and you can certainly see similarities. Jeeves and Wooster stories I think are his best work and the Blandings series is very funny as well.He's already on my radar, don't worry. I've got the librivox audibook of My Man Jeeves on my phone, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
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Here's what I've come to see as the reason behind stuff like this. Not the whole picture, but I think there's a lot of truth to it.
Scifi/fantasy, unlike romance, isn't marketed almost entirely towards women. Any genre of any form of entertainment that isn't specifically marketed towards women will under-represent them to some degree. Why? Because, from an early age, women are expected to read and enjoy stories about boys and men. Women will read books with both male and female protagonists, written by writers of either gender. They don't care, they're used to it, even if it frustrates them that there aren't enough "girl" books around it doesn't diminish their love for the "boy" books, and they'll still have no problem empathizing with and rooting for male characters doing male things.
Boys and, by extension, grown men are never expected to do this. There's this mentality that's so prevalent in our society that boys need to be allowed an immediate "out" from anything that's too girly to interest them, to the point that it's assumed they're not interested before they're even asked. I experienced it myself growing up, and I continue to experience it. I can't tell you the amount of times the movie Mean Girls comes up and people are surprised I love it, because I'm a guy, and it's not even that "girly." Does anybody act shocked when a girl likes action adventure type movies with male leads, like Deadpool or Inception? No, they don't.
Thus, books with female protagonists, that have heavy romance elements, that focus on family relationships, that explore social issues, that are low on action and violence, aren't given the recognition that maybe they deserve even if they sell alright and are critically well received by women readers. And these are the types of books female authors in the genre tend to write a lot of, because it interests them, and because they're trying to change the status quo and get the kinds of stories out there that they aren't seeing. Scifi/fantasy can do anything any other genre can do, you can write a fantasy romance family drama, but by doing so you are immediately marginalizing your book and limiting its audience, because the average man won't read it and that's half the population out the window. It's hard to win awards and recognition if only half the population will even give your book a chance. If you write a more "traditional," male-centered story both genders will read it, as long as it doesn't skew so heavily towards machismo that it becomes a ridiculous Duke Nukem-esque parody of masculinity.
Alphabet of Thorn is one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time, it has a super high average rating on goodreads. It's fantasy, but there's no action, no violence, and the entire story is about a really unusual daughter/mother relationship across time that resolves itself with feelings of familial love rather than at sword point. Ask a fantasy fan if they've read it, or even heard about it, and their answer will almost entirely depend on their gender, at least in my experience.
And for anyone bringing up exceptions to the rule, like Le Guin, or Rowling, they are, well, exceptions. Rowling had to hide the fact that she was a woman, and Le Guin has come to realize in recent years that when she wrote Earthsea, she was writing a story for boys and she didn't even know she was doing it, such is the prevalence of this bias. Those were the kinds of books that she had read, and she thought that's just what a story was. The idea of writing a story centered around the female experience didn't even occur to her, and she's a woman.
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Ooh, I didn't know he did plays. I haven't read anything by Saki yet, but the others above said that his humour is Wodehouse-esque. Are his plays the same? I'd love to put on a Wodehouse play with my local theatre group, but it doesn't seem possible. Could Saki be a good alternative?
ETA: Oh, I just saw Marie's response:
I guess that's a no to humorous plays then?
Haven't read any Wodehouse yet, sorry. Saki's done three plays, or at least there are three plays in my copy of The Complete Saki. I thought they were hilarious. -shrug- Opinions, and all that. They're really short, though. One is longer than the other two, but still probably not long enough for a whole full production. My neighborhood theater is known for doing stuff like "TEN" where they do ten ten-minute plays, so that's the sort of thing I was pitching it for.
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Has anyone read Gravity's Rainbow? I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts. It has received a lot of very positive reviews but I'm wondering whether it is worth it - and also whether it lives up to its reputation of being ridiculously difficult. I want to give it a go, but am put off by its reputation.
It's incredibly difficult. People will have differing opinions about this to be sure, but Infinite Jest is far more approachable, imo. Infinite Jest is really long more than it's anything else. Gravity's Rainbow is on a whole different level. Pynchon is much, much smarter than you are, much smarter than David Foster Wallace is, and he hates every single one of us for not being on his level. Don't know if the hate part is true, but that's definitely how it feels. Be ready for it. How worth it it is depends on what you're looking for. How much do you want a piece of that post-modern pie, and how hard are you willing to work for it? Personally I'd say pick up Infinite Jest or House of Leaves for your post-modern fix if you haven't read them already. You'll know when you're ready to tackle Gravity's Rainbow. The fact that you're asking means you're not ready, lol.
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I know some people who do that. I personally couldn't do that. Reading more than one book is very confusing for me. At school I had to read books for Dutch and English, and I wanted to read one of my 'own' books. I always found it hard (especially if all are fictional, with information books it's a bit less difficult). In the rare occasion that I do start two books, I tend to gravitate towards one of them and just read that one until it's finished. I can't do multiple things at once very easily, I have trouble enough focusing on one thing. But I'm amazed you can read so many books at once.
To be fair, The Illustrated Man and Writers of the Future are both short story collections, so they basically don't even count. You read one story and you put it down, there's no ongoing plot or characters to keep track of. But yeah, I've always had a really good memory which I guess is the main thing you need for this? I can also put a book down for months at a time and come back to it with minimal issues which I've been told is weird. But you know what I think is weird? That my girlfriend can have 3-4 different serialized shows going at once that she watches every week, but she can only read one book at a time. I don't understand what makes them different. -shrug-
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Interesting.
I used to be the type of reader who read very very quickly, to the point that I would skim passages just to get to the action (I used to read a lot of Fantasy).
However since I started reading genres outside of Fantasy I found myself going back to passages that I felt have been particularly well written. I find it interesting to see how the author has constructed a sentence so beautifully that it sticks in your mind. Particularly as I've started to become interested in writing as well, I find it quite helpful to look at the different words, rhythms and metaphors that are used as a way to inspire myself really.
Anyway, going slightly off topic - sorry.
Sure, if you're really studying the language that makes sense. I take my time with authors that have truly incredible prose, but those are few and far between and mostly I'm reading for the story behind the words so I don't sweat it when the exact sentence structure didn't sink in.
It's funny you should mention fantasy. I'm kind of the opposite, I skim action in fantasy. Well, I wouldn't call it full on skimming (most of the time), but the thing I'm most excited about in fantasy typically isn't the action.
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What makes you say this?
Just articles about reading speed and my own experience and talking with people I know. Most people re-read unnecessarily. I had a problem with this maybe five years ago or so. Every sentence is surrounded by context, you can power on without going back and it will be perfectly fine 99% of the time, and you'll retrain your brain to absorb it better the first time by doing it. And If it's the meaning behind the words that matter, stopping to re-read a sentence you understood the meaning of but didn't process fully (I.E. exact sentence structure and word choice), doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's why most people stop and re-read most of the time. That was certainly the case with me, anyway.
Anybody looking to read faster should first see if they are either re-reading sentences a lot or sub-vocalizing.
Doctor Who Series 10 + New Doctor?
in Music / TV / Films
Posted · Edited by davidh219
I've been less interested in the bigger story arcs so far with Capaldi than I was with Smith, there's just not as much mystery and intrigue and it's not operating on that grand, universe-shattering scale. On the other hand, some of the answers we got for Smith's story arcs were disappointing and/or overly cheesy, and there have been some absolutely stellar Capaldi episodes when taken on their own. Into the Dalek, Listen, Kill the Moon, In the Forest of the Night, The Zygon Inversion, Heaven Sent, etc. If there are three episodes in a season that truly move me emotionally, I call that a grand success, because it doesn't always happen. Series 5 had exactly one, the van gogh episode, one of the best the show has ever done. That and Matt Smith's charisma carried me through it.
In general I wish they would focus less on bombastic, long plot arcs with villains and epic fights and silly looking monsters and instead focus on having a bunch of stand alone, subtle, character-focused episodes, because that's always when the show is at it's absolute best. The Doctor as a character has a lot of intellectual, philosophical, and emotional depth that they just aren't taking advantage of like 90% of the time. If I was writing the show, almost every episode would be like the van gogh episode, or Human Nature/Family of Blood, The Doctor's Wife, etc.