Alchemists and Kings
Sep. 24th, 2016 07:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLast Friday, we went to see The Alchemist at the Barbican, which turns out to have a very large and very comfortable theatre. I'm quite a fan of this play, and the production was very good, particularly the crocodile. The shenanigans of the three con artists trying to keep all their various marks in the dark about their operation were well-staged and very amusing, and I thought all the main players gave strong performances.
Then, on Saturday, I finally finished listening to the end of The Raven King, the fourth and final book in the Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater. After a very slight dip with the two middle books, I had been enjoying the last one tremendously, not least because of the truly excellent narrator, Will Patton. He really imbues the books with a sense of performance, not just making each character very distinct, but also putting a huge amount of expression into the narrative between the dialogue. It makes for an incredibly immersive experience, which is quite heady when the subject matter is so emotional. I was in agonies over the ultimate conclusion - it's not a major spoiler to say that one of the main characters is destined to die before the end of the series (the prophecy is in the prologue of the first book) - and I had grown to really love Blue and all the Raven Boys quite a lot. I don't know if the slight sense of anti-climax I experienced on finishing the book was inevitable, given the stakes and my over-investment, but I do think I was perhaps being a little unfair to the author. Shortly before the climax, I came up with what I thought was a really great way for everything to be brought full circle and neatly tied up - and then the narrative went a different way and I was a bit disappointed. Still, overall, it was a wonderful series, and the ending could have been worse in so very many ways, so I'm not really complaining! I expect I shall listen to these again one day, as they are some of the best audiobooks I've ever heard.
Then, on Saturday, I finally finished listening to the end of The Raven King, the fourth and final book in the Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater. After a very slight dip with the two middle books, I had been enjoying the last one tremendously, not least because of the truly excellent narrator, Will Patton. He really imbues the books with a sense of performance, not just making each character very distinct, but also putting a huge amount of expression into the narrative between the dialogue. It makes for an incredibly immersive experience, which is quite heady when the subject matter is so emotional. I was in agonies over the ultimate conclusion - it's not a major spoiler to say that one of the main characters is destined to die before the end of the series (the prophecy is in the prologue of the first book) - and I had grown to really love Blue and all the Raven Boys quite a lot. I don't know if the slight sense of anti-climax I experienced on finishing the book was inevitable, given the stakes and my over-investment, but I do think I was perhaps being a little unfair to the author. Shortly before the climax, I came up with what I thought was a really great way for everything to be brought full circle and neatly tied up - and then the narrative went a different way and I was a bit disappointed. Still, overall, it was a wonderful series, and the ending could have been worse in so very many ways, so I'm not really complaining! I expect I shall listen to these again one day, as they are some of the best audiobooks I've ever heard.
