![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A trip to Newcastle
Nov. 7th, 2008 07:37 pmI like business trips, especially when they involve only four hours of actual (and really fun) meetings, along with nine hours on trains and a night out at the cinema!
So, my two-day trip up north results in three reviews:
Halting State by Charles Stross - Dave forced this one on me, having enjoyed it so much that he now ranks it in his top ten books of all time. It was quite fun, but I didn't get any of the programming jokes, and the second person narrative had the odd effect of distancing me from the characters (which is presumably exactly the opposite of its intention) so it was much more like reading text than getting into a story. It was a good idea, and exectued very imaginatively, but it was just too jam-packed with clever references and jargon for me to be able to really enjoy it. Definitely one for online gamers or the IT crowd, and I can easily see why Dave liked it so much, but it's just not my thing.
Being Elizabeth Bennett by Emma Campbell Webster, on the other hand was very definitely my kind of thing. Coincidentally, also written in the second person, as it's a Jane Austen choose your own adventure. The fun comes not in completing the mission successfully (as that would just give you a watered-down version of Pride & Prejudice) but in wilfully messing with the plot as much as possible and ending up in all sorts of utterly ridiculous scenarios. Lizzie marrying Mr Collins is bad enough, but just about conceivable in slightly different circumstances - however, Lizzie marrying Mr Crawford or Frank Churchill is just plain wrong, and don't even get me started on how I ended up imprisoned in the basement of the Tilneys' country house by Fanny Price! Wrong, but very, very funny.
Eagle Eye - what's a girl to do when she's set adrift in a strange city on a weeknight all alone? Head to the nearest cinema for some mindless entertainment, that's what. I considered Bond, but Empire made it sound both dreary and unpleasant, so I went for Shia La Beouf in crazy thriller mode instead. They gave him a really dodgy beard, which made him look much older than his 22 years, but he did a reasonable job as the regular joe thrust into chaos by odd phone calls forcing him to rob armoured trucks and crash the State of the Union address. It was basically government monitoring gone mad, with a rogue super-computer thrown in for good measure - utterly ridiculous, but pretty entertaining all the same, even if they did kill off my favourite character towards the end.
So, my two-day trip up north results in three reviews:
Halting State by Charles Stross - Dave forced this one on me, having enjoyed it so much that he now ranks it in his top ten books of all time. It was quite fun, but I didn't get any of the programming jokes, and the second person narrative had the odd effect of distancing me from the characters (which is presumably exactly the opposite of its intention) so it was much more like reading text than getting into a story. It was a good idea, and exectued very imaginatively, but it was just too jam-packed with clever references and jargon for me to be able to really enjoy it. Definitely one for online gamers or the IT crowd, and I can easily see why Dave liked it so much, but it's just not my thing.
Being Elizabeth Bennett by Emma Campbell Webster, on the other hand was very definitely my kind of thing. Coincidentally, also written in the second person, as it's a Jane Austen choose your own adventure. The fun comes not in completing the mission successfully (as that would just give you a watered-down version of Pride & Prejudice) but in wilfully messing with the plot as much as possible and ending up in all sorts of utterly ridiculous scenarios. Lizzie marrying Mr Collins is bad enough, but just about conceivable in slightly different circumstances - however, Lizzie marrying Mr Crawford or Frank Churchill is just plain wrong, and don't even get me started on how I ended up imprisoned in the basement of the Tilneys' country house by Fanny Price! Wrong, but very, very funny.
Eagle Eye - what's a girl to do when she's set adrift in a strange city on a weeknight all alone? Head to the nearest cinema for some mindless entertainment, that's what. I considered Bond, but Empire made it sound both dreary and unpleasant, so I went for Shia La Beouf in crazy thriller mode instead. They gave him a really dodgy beard, which made him look much older than his 22 years, but he did a reasonable job as the regular joe thrust into chaos by odd phone calls forcing him to rob armoured trucks and crash the State of the Union address. It was basically government monitoring gone mad, with a rogue super-computer thrown in for good measure - utterly ridiculous, but pretty entertaining all the same, even if they did kill off my favourite character towards the end.
