Audio, Graphic, Text, Performance
Oct. 18th, 2015 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearAn eclectic mix this week - I do like having range!
I finished listening to the sequel to Time and Again by Jack Finney - this one called From Time to Time (and I can never remember which is which - I think they're pretty stupid titles, if I'm honest). Anyway, having really enjoyed the first one, I thought the sequel was really bad. The richness of the detail was still there, and it certainly transported me to 1912 New York. But the plot was absolute bobbins. Now, I'm all for suspension of disbelief to just go with a whacky concept and enjoy a book - but this had me cursing at every turn. The time travel method in the first book was unbelievable, but was at least internally consistent - the sequel broke its own rules repeatedly in ways that even I knew didn't make any sense. And it was such a shame, as the premise was quite fun - prevent the First World War by stopping the Titanic from sinking. But people could suddenly jump around to very specific times and places without the requisite training, there was a whole subset of characters who opened the novel in quite an interesting (if nonsensical way) and then were never seen again, the internal knowledge of the characters of different timelines was suddenly fluid, and what the protagonists eventually did was to bring about the timeline they had actually come from, which was exactly the opposite of how it worked in the first novel. It was rather a shame, since the first one worked so well within its own rules.
I also finished the whole run of Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, which had a rather disappointing ending. I didn't mind that the reason behind the plague that killed nearly all the men in the world wasn't categorically explained. However, there was one thing that happened right near the end that just seemed unnecessary to me, and the reason for which turned out to be incredibly annoying. I don't mind writers subverting reader expectations, but sometimes it's done in a way that's really contrived and serves no purpose than to shock and upset, and that was the case here. The epilogue section was also rather unclear, and I felt it didn't really round things off in the way I'd hoped. Still, the majority of the series was very good, so it's back to the age-old debate of whether a bad ending ruins a whole thing or not.
About a year ago, Dave bought me You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop To A Coffee Shop by John Scalzi, and I finally got around to reading it this week. It's a selection of posts from his blog, with the focus being what it's like to make a living as a writer. Scalzi has quite a refreshing attitude to this, and it was certainly apropos for me, considering I've just finished the first draft of my novel and am trying to decide what I want to do with it. I'm pretty sure I don't want Scalzi's version of professional writing - though it seems to work rather well for him - but he did have a lot of useful advice, and I like his style a lot. Parts of the book were a bit repetitive - exacerbated by him juxtaposing posts that have similar themes - but mostly it was highly enjoyable and very interesting. His experience of and attitude to writing itself seems quite similar to mine, and I agree with quite a lot of his expressed views, so this was a good read.
Friday night saw us enjoying free tickets to McQueen at the Haymarket. I'm not entirely sure what I thought of the play. It kept me interested all the way through, and I thought the staging of it was quite interesting in places, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to all my friends (which is a good job, since it close last night!). The review I read of the play called it 'meretricious', which I would disagree with completely - I actually thought it was the opposite - it depicted ugly things but had some value, rather than being attractive but without value. This was demonstrate particularly well by a conversation Dave and I had in the interval about our attitudes towards those more successful than ourselves. Dave said he had little sympathy for the main character, who was rich and successful and famous, so didn't have a right to be miserable about it. My argument was that wealth and fame and success can't make people happy, and that successful people shouldn't be criticised for being unhappy, when emotional well-being has little to do with your financial circumstances. Dave and I have both suffered periods of depression during times when, outwardly, we would be considered to have few problems, and we have learned not to criticise ourselves for that, so what right do we have to criticise others for the same thing? Dave agreed that I had a point. So, the play was interesting in identifying attitudes we have towards other people that are perhaps unfair. I also found the discussion of creativity quite compelling - there was a scene where the McQueen character described what it felt like to have an idea, versus what it feels like to be without ideas, as a creative person, and I thought it was very well written, since it matched how I myself feel about the subject. So, some good aspects, and some thought provocation, but not exactly a barrel of laughs.
I finished listening to the sequel to Time and Again by Jack Finney - this one called From Time to Time (and I can never remember which is which - I think they're pretty stupid titles, if I'm honest). Anyway, having really enjoyed the first one, I thought the sequel was really bad. The richness of the detail was still there, and it certainly transported me to 1912 New York. But the plot was absolute bobbins. Now, I'm all for suspension of disbelief to just go with a whacky concept and enjoy a book - but this had me cursing at every turn. The time travel method in the first book was unbelievable, but was at least internally consistent - the sequel broke its own rules repeatedly in ways that even I knew didn't make any sense. And it was such a shame, as the premise was quite fun - prevent the First World War by stopping the Titanic from sinking. But people could suddenly jump around to very specific times and places without the requisite training, there was a whole subset of characters who opened the novel in quite an interesting (if nonsensical way) and then were never seen again, the internal knowledge of the characters of different timelines was suddenly fluid, and what the protagonists eventually did was to bring about the timeline they had actually come from, which was exactly the opposite of how it worked in the first novel. It was rather a shame, since the first one worked so well within its own rules.
I also finished the whole run of Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, which had a rather disappointing ending. I didn't mind that the reason behind the plague that killed nearly all the men in the world wasn't categorically explained. However, there was one thing that happened right near the end that just seemed unnecessary to me, and the reason for which turned out to be incredibly annoying. I don't mind writers subverting reader expectations, but sometimes it's done in a way that's really contrived and serves no purpose than to shock and upset, and that was the case here. The epilogue section was also rather unclear, and I felt it didn't really round things off in the way I'd hoped. Still, the majority of the series was very good, so it's back to the age-old debate of whether a bad ending ruins a whole thing or not.
About a year ago, Dave bought me You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop To A Coffee Shop by John Scalzi, and I finally got around to reading it this week. It's a selection of posts from his blog, with the focus being what it's like to make a living as a writer. Scalzi has quite a refreshing attitude to this, and it was certainly apropos for me, considering I've just finished the first draft of my novel and am trying to decide what I want to do with it. I'm pretty sure I don't want Scalzi's version of professional writing - though it seems to work rather well for him - but he did have a lot of useful advice, and I like his style a lot. Parts of the book were a bit repetitive - exacerbated by him juxtaposing posts that have similar themes - but mostly it was highly enjoyable and very interesting. His experience of and attitude to writing itself seems quite similar to mine, and I agree with quite a lot of his expressed views, so this was a good read.
Friday night saw us enjoying free tickets to McQueen at the Haymarket. I'm not entirely sure what I thought of the play. It kept me interested all the way through, and I thought the staging of it was quite interesting in places, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to all my friends (which is a good job, since it close last night!). The review I read of the play called it 'meretricious', which I would disagree with completely - I actually thought it was the opposite - it depicted ugly things but had some value, rather than being attractive but without value. This was demonstrate particularly well by a conversation Dave and I had in the interval about our attitudes towards those more successful than ourselves. Dave said he had little sympathy for the main character, who was rich and successful and famous, so didn't have a right to be miserable about it. My argument was that wealth and fame and success can't make people happy, and that successful people shouldn't be criticised for being unhappy, when emotional well-being has little to do with your financial circumstances. Dave and I have both suffered periods of depression during times when, outwardly, we would be considered to have few problems, and we have learned not to criticise ourselves for that, so what right do we have to criticise others for the same thing? Dave agreed that I had a point. So, the play was interesting in identifying attitudes we have towards other people that are perhaps unfair. I also found the discussion of creativity quite compelling - there was a scene where the McQueen character described what it felt like to have an idea, versus what it feels like to be without ideas, as a creative person, and I thought it was very well written, since it matched how I myself feel about the subject. So, some good aspects, and some thought provocation, but not exactly a barrel of laughs.
