Raven

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.

I would hate to be an author with that weight of expectation on me. He has no obligation to do anything, and if other things come up that divert him from what fans want, so what? You only have to look through social media to see how fickle fans are; authors should be given room to do their own thing in their own time and to be allowed to enjoy it.

I've not seen him act the role, but from the pictures I've seen of the series he does look more the part. Oldman is a little too... trim?

It's a good book, as is A Murder of Quality. Between these two books and Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, however, le Carré reworked Smiley's time line, so you might notice some discrepancies. I watched the Gary Oldman film last Sunday, and whilst good, it didn't live up to the book. I don't think Oldman was quite the right person to play Smiley, but he did a decent enough job (Cumberbatch definitely wasn't right for Peter Guillam…). I think my Dad has a copy of the BBC Alec Guinness version on DVD. Might have to borrow it sometime!

There are quite a few George Smiley books, but he doesn't always feature prominently in them. He is the main character in the first two novels Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality (which are set in the early 60s), and the next two - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Looking Glass War - only feature him as a background character. (I've read all of the above with the exception of The Looking Glass War, and enjoyed them all). More here: George Smiley Novels.

Thank you! (I thought it was a little thin!) Tinker is the first book in a series of three called the Karla trilogy (the other two are The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People). I got the latter on Kindle for 99p recently, but didn't buy Schoolboy, which I thought was a standalone novel. Doh!

A good, late, Valentine's for someone.

All of the Narnia novels are all 99p on Amazon (Kindle) today.

According to Aaronovitch the book is finished, his publishers just wanted a little more time. Release date is 20/02/20.

Bad news, False Values has been pushed back to February 2020!

Now up to a heady 15!

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy By John le Carré George Smiley has been forced out of the Circus and a new order has taken charge, but when an agent delivers news of a high level mole at the very heart of the organisation, Smiley comes out of retirement to track down the traitor... This is the fourth le Carré novel I've read, and I find myself asking why have I left it so long since the last one? This is a meticulously written story, with an understated delivery that draws the reader in, but I think the thing that makes the book for me is the characters and especially Smiley himself; a flawed man trapped in a train crash of a marriage, but at the same time quietly brilliant when it comes to seeing what is going on in the world around him. A very British hero, in a lot of ways. Highly recommended.

Looks like this is finally going to air this autumn now. From what I've read this had been due to screen last Christmas, but it wasn't ready in time. It got bumped to the spring schedule and then disappeared, but more information about it is surfacing now, along with some show footage.

I had the same reaction to Halle Berry.