Raven

^ I still mean to have a go at it one day, maybe next year...

It is absolutely hosing down outside... Hope this clears before I have to go to work in the morning!

Starts this Sunday, 9pm on BBC1. ETA: Just listened to an interview with writer Peter Harness on Radio 4's Front Row (broadcast on Monday if anyone wants to catch up with this on BBC Sounds) where he confirmed this is not a faithful adaptation of the book, even though that is the way the BBC are pushing it. It sounds like he has used elements of the book along with some aspects of Wells own life to tell the story.

Have been intending to pick up the new Nightingale centred graphic novel Action at a Distance, but nowhere seems to have it (including Amazon who were listing a four to six week lead time yesterday!).

Started re-reading The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy, at the weekend. I first read this over 25 years ago now, and I remember enjoying it a lot (I really like the film version as well) but I'm finding the writing isn't as good as I remembered it to be (the Russians are coming across as being a bit hysterical at times, rather than passionate. as I suspect was the intention). It's also depressing reading for a couple of hours only for the page count to move on 5%!

I agree with @willoyd on the first two books; if you are going to start anywhere start with The Lord of the Rings. I found The Hobbit to be a little Tolkien-lite, as you might say, when I tried to read it directly after LotR, and I put it down, but I went back to it several years later and didn't find it so bad (indeed, the last half of the book is quite a good read, but you have to get through the Dwarf singing in the first half first!). I have a friend who has read The Silmarillion and he described it as trying to read the biblical book of Numbers! (from what I understand it's one for the fans - if you really enjoy the detail of Middle Earth - more than an enjoyable read in its own right). In my book news, I picked up a free* copy of Haruki Murakami's latest, Killing Commendatore at the weekend. *Points from my Waterstones card!

Some authors do have Patreon sites you can support them directly through.

The complete His Dark Materials is just £3.99 on Kindle today.

The Basil Rathbone one isn't bad; it was made in Hollywood in the 1930s and it changes some story points but it is largely faithful to the novel. There s a Jeremy Brett version, which is also on YouTube. I would recommend avoiding the Sherlock version, it was pretty awful!

100 'most inspiring' novels revealed by BBC Arts New TV program about books going out at 9pm this Saturday! (09/11/19). List here Looks like there will; be some talking points!

Stories of Your Life and Others, a collection of short stories by Ted Chang (which includes the story the film Arrival was based on) is 99p in the monthly deal at the moment. Annoying, as I only bought the paperback last month...

Most of my reading is done in my living room, the bath or the pub (with a bit most nights in bed before turning out the light). I used to read during breaks and when travelling on the bus to work and back each day, but I don't have the latter anymore and I now walk to work, so that has cut my reading time by over an hour a day from what I was doing 20 odd years ago.

Finished reading The Hound of the Baskervilles this evening, taking my total for the year to 18. It is the first Holmes story I have ever read, but I already knew it backwards because of all the different adaptations I have seen down the years (have just noticed the Basil Rathbone version is on YouTube, so I know what I'll be watching later!) Back to the book, though, and I quite enjoyed it, although the tension that was built nicely all through the book was somewhat wasted on the page and a half of actual hound action! I have an idea I have a collection of Holmes novels somewhere, I think I'll have to dig it out...

I did start reading The Eyre Affair years ago, but never got very far. Can't remember why, now. Still have it somewhere...

That is mildly better than hurling my Kindle across the room...

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. And then the murders started... Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolfe

Been rootling around for a few days trying to decide what to read next, and have settled on The Hound of the Baskervilles. Read the first two chapters in the bath tonight. Quiet flat. Odd noises. Bit spooked. Soap in my eyes from not wanting to close them whilst washing...

If you enjoyed reading this I can recommend the BBC series. Although it has dated, and is a little bit old school - in that it was filmed entirely in the studio, there is no location filming like you would get today - that kind of works in its favour because it feels like a piece of theatre. It also has an outstanding cast (and one of the most shocking scenes on TV I think I have ever seen).

I'll split this reply into two halves... I wouldn't say I hated the book, but I certainly wasn't taken with large parts of it. I don't have a problem with books, TV series, films etc. that have been written to be a bit of a romp, but I still want something that has an internal logic that it follows (even if that logic is daft!) and believable characters (which this did not). There were several points where I just didn't buy what a character did, or the logic of how the world was working, and that is why the book failed for me. There is a good idea here, and in the hands of a better writer this could have been a very good story, but to my mind it just has too may flaws. I'm surprised at that comment (and you're far from alone in saying it, I have read several reviews saying the same thing) because as I said, I found the book ground to a halt on several occasions (I think part of my frustration with those parts of the book was that I could see where it was going and I just wanted it over with!) The Star Trek story was what was termed a Play by E-Mail (or PbEM) game. Players wrote bios for one (or sometimes more) characters - mine was the Chief Engineer on the longest running game I played in - and then posted first-person logs from that characters point of view (both official and personal logs) to move a story forward (both in terms of the main plot and in terms of their characters own development). Players would write their own stuff, or collaborate with other players, and then upload what they had written to a website that would then e-mail a copy to everyone playing (it could be annoying if you had spent an hour or two writing something only for someone else to post something contradictory just before you did!). I played on various different games for a couple of years, but finding good ones proved to be more and more difficult and as they went on a lot of them built up so much of their own history, that went far beyond what was shown on screen, that there was no practical way to catch up. With regard to the Uber characters, they rarely killed a game permanently; they were usually taken to one side and had a quiet word with, or - in some more extreme cases - removed from the game altogether.

I think I have a better Austin... It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. And then the murders started... Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austin. Also... Call me Ishmael. And then the murders started... Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. And I thought knocking off hats was the danger here...

I'll reply to this at greater length later, but the Amazon pages for these books all start with a 'If you like Ben Aaronovitch & Jasper Fforde, you'll love this!' comment, and I just don't think that is true. I've not read any Fforde, but the Rivers of London books are much better plotted and written than this was, and are a much better example of how to write a first person story.

Just One Damned Thing After Another By Jodi Taylor Madeleine "Max" Maxwell is a history graduate, who is invited by her old teacher and mentor to apply for a position at St Mary's Institute of Historical Research, which might sound like a rather dull and pedestrian academic institution full of stuffy old research fellows, but guess what? It's not! It's a front for a group of time travellers who spend their days witnessing key historical events, confirming what actually happened and sometimes often dying in the process. Before long Max is thrown into the fray, bringing her own special brand of chaos to proceedings… Many years ago now I used to write a character in a collaborative Star Trek story. None of us were great writers, it was just a bit of fun, but every now and again someone would join the group with what we termed an Uber character; someone who was multi-skilled and bordered on being omniscient. When characters like this popped up they killed the story, because they would resolve every situation themselves and continually place their character at the centre of events. I thought about this a lot about that whilst reading this book because, to me, Max is the very definition of an Uber character. Now I know first-person writing is from the point of view of the character telling the story, but that doesn't mean that character has to do everything, but in this case Max pretty well does (to the point where she saves the Institute not once, but twice from financial ruin! It doesn’t make you marvel at her character’s resourcefulness, it just makes you wonder how incompetent the people in charge are in the first place!). Also, knowing this is a series of books, I would have expected the character to gradually rise through the ranks of the Institute over a number of stories, but no, she’s pretty much running the place by the end of book one (I found this deeply unsatisfying because the character had done very little to earn the levels of trust and respect her seniors and peers started showing in her – unless you count just being likeable and surviving as skills, I suppose…). The bottom line, for me, is that this is a very poorly written book and going back to the fan-fiction reference above, that it was this feels like. There are some positives; Taylor does a reasonable job of world building – St. Mary’s feels like a functioning place, although they probably need to wind back on the partying – and her action scenes are well paced with plenty in them to keep the reader enthralled. On the minus side, there are several sections of the book where things just grind to a halt, bogged down in pages of tedious description (I found myself shouting at my Kindle more than once to just get on with it!). The plotting also seems to take direction from the book’s title but the biggest problem for me is the characters. There are just too many cliché characters in this book; the reserved and authoritarian Boss (who isn’t actually all that reserved or authoritarian); his stern, spinsterish secretary that everyone lives in fear of; the Luddite security guards… (I could go on, but I won’t). In some ways though, they are the lucky ones - the villains don’t even get to be clichés; one is just there and another is just a bitch! (that’s it, that’s all the character is!). To call them cardboard would be generous as that would infer they at least had some depth… There are also far too many characters. At the beginning of the story they are introduced and leave so quickly it makes your head spin, and then, when you do start to make sense of the cast, Taylor doesn’t help things when she starts changing the way she refers to various individuals (one character is referred to in three different ways – names and titles – in just a few pages). And yet, having said all that, I can kind of see why these books have got so many fans. It is an undemanding read, there is humour and Max herself isn’t without some appeal. Perhaps reading it off the back of le Carré and Chandler was my mistake but overall, this has to be one of the worst written books I have read in a long time, and it isn’t one I can recommend.

Borrowed and watched the BBC version from my Dad over the weekend and although it has dated (in terms of the way it was filmed) it still holds up very well and I enjoyed it more than the film version. Also thumbed through the first few pages of An Honourable Schoolboy in Waterstones at the weekend. Getting very tempted to give that a go. Finished reading the next Philip Marlowe novel in the series last week; The Little Sister - very good! Getting a little despondent that I only have two more Marlowe novels to read...

They are good books.

I'm reading this now, and am in a love / hate relationship with it myself! The idea is a good one, but I'm struggling with the writing. I'm about 15% of the way through, according to my Kindle, and I've lost count of the number of times I've winced! My sister loves them, btw.