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Two books and a show
Feb. 23rd, 2011 02:37 pmLast night, I went to see Showstoppers with some friends at The Ambassadors theatre. It was an improvised musical, put together based on suggestions from the audience. One of the suggested titles for said musical (which was rejected by the "director" as too silly) was Shiny Awesomeness - but I think it would have been rather appropriate overall! The whole thing was hilarious - our musical for the evening was called Caesar Salad, a tale of romance and betrayal in ancient Rome. The Bob Fossey number was definitely a highlight, and the references to the Cambridge Latin Course were highly amusing to me (along with a fair few other members of the audience), but my favourite moment came when the director instructed one of the characters to tell Caesar what the men were saying about his current state of mind, using traditional Roman imagery. Maximus the centurion promptly responded, "They say your Ionic column is not as it once was." Perhaps I've been spending too much time with coldjwplay...
A couple of weeks ago, I was having problems concentrating on things - not only work, but also reading, which is always distressing to me. So, I brought out the big guns - I instituted a 36 hour ban on all television, and started reading Trollope. The cure was immediate and I had a highly enjoyable fortnight, spending hours at a time perusing Phineas Finn.
The book was engaging from the very first page, as I now rely upon Trollope to be, like having a chat with an old and entertaining friend, even though the political subject matter would not normally be of interest to me. The novel had its drawbacks - I am now getting the feeling that Trollope managed to be quite so prolific because he reused a fair amount of material. Phineas Finn himself is very reminiscent of Frank from Doctor Thorne, and Lady Laura's dilemma seems rather similar to that of the heroine in Can You Forgive Her? The politics didn't make any sense to me at all - though I'm not sure if this was because of my woeful ignorance of the subject, or Trollope's portrayal of MPs being ridiculous. The book was also very long, and did get rather repetitive towards the last third, with characters having the same conversations essentially over and over again.
However, people do actually do that in real life, and Trollope's characters are archetypal enough to warrant a few repetitions - plus the character of the authorial voice is so engaging, funny and acknowledging of his own and his characters' flaws that the narrative remains constantly enjoyable. In fact, I didn't really like any of the actual characters in the plot, but the authorial voice kept me reading quite happily all the way through.
My favourite line, purely because of its beautfiul cadence: "Must we be strangers, you and I, because there was a time in which we were almost more than friends?"
I moved from a fortnight's immersion in Trollope to a 36-hour romp with Jim Qwilleran and Koko the cat in the second in The Cat Who series by Lilian Jackson Braun. The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern follows on very much in the same vein as the first in the series - very slight, rather silly and not exactly intellectually boggling on the mystery front. However, it was lots of fun and I continue to look forward to joining Qwill and Koko (now also joined by Yum Yum, a femal cat) for their future adventures. I am spotting a potential pattern to the series - I suspect Qwilleran might get a different beat every book (though whether or not there are enough journalistic subjects to get through 29 books remains to be seen), as well as possibly moving house every book (though I realise two instances do not yet a pattern make), while it seems clear that Koko will continue to help in the cases by demonstrating an uncanny sixth sense that will lead Qwill to clues he would otherwise have missed. I'm particularly interested in Book Three, because it took eighteen years to be published after the second one, so I'm intrigued as to what differences I might find.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having problems concentrating on things - not only work, but also reading, which is always distressing to me. So, I brought out the big guns - I instituted a 36 hour ban on all television, and started reading Trollope. The cure was immediate and I had a highly enjoyable fortnight, spending hours at a time perusing Phineas Finn.
The book was engaging from the very first page, as I now rely upon Trollope to be, like having a chat with an old and entertaining friend, even though the political subject matter would not normally be of interest to me. The novel had its drawbacks - I am now getting the feeling that Trollope managed to be quite so prolific because he reused a fair amount of material. Phineas Finn himself is very reminiscent of Frank from Doctor Thorne, and Lady Laura's dilemma seems rather similar to that of the heroine in Can You Forgive Her? The politics didn't make any sense to me at all - though I'm not sure if this was because of my woeful ignorance of the subject, or Trollope's portrayal of MPs being ridiculous. The book was also very long, and did get rather repetitive towards the last third, with characters having the same conversations essentially over and over again.
However, people do actually do that in real life, and Trollope's characters are archetypal enough to warrant a few repetitions - plus the character of the authorial voice is so engaging, funny and acknowledging of his own and his characters' flaws that the narrative remains constantly enjoyable. In fact, I didn't really like any of the actual characters in the plot, but the authorial voice kept me reading quite happily all the way through.
My favourite line, purely because of its beautfiul cadence: "Must we be strangers, you and I, because there was a time in which we were almost more than friends?"
I moved from a fortnight's immersion in Trollope to a 36-hour romp with Jim Qwilleran and Koko the cat in the second in The Cat Who series by Lilian Jackson Braun. The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern follows on very much in the same vein as the first in the series - very slight, rather silly and not exactly intellectually boggling on the mystery front. However, it was lots of fun and I continue to look forward to joining Qwill and Koko (now also joined by Yum Yum, a femal cat) for their future adventures. I am spotting a potential pattern to the series - I suspect Qwilleran might get a different beat every book (though whether or not there are enough journalistic subjects to get through 29 books remains to be seen), as well as possibly moving house every book (though I realise two instances do not yet a pattern make), while it seems clear that Koko will continue to help in the cases by demonstrating an uncanny sixth sense that will lead Qwill to clues he would otherwise have missed. I'm particularly interested in Book Three, because it took eighteen years to be published after the second one, so I'm intrigued as to what differences I might find.
