Denial and Assassination
Mar. 25th, 2020 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLast night, we held our regular film club online, which worked out very well. The film was Denial, with Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson and Timoth Spall. It was about a defamation case brought against a Jewish historian in the late 1990s, by a holocaust denier she criticised in her book. It was based on a true story, and was mostly about trial strategy and court proceedings. But it was very well put together, with excellent performances from a great cast, and I found it all very interesting. There was an emotive section in the middle when the historian and her lawyer visited the remains of the camp at Auschwitz, and the film raised a lot of questions about ethics, free speech, and the accuracy or lack thereof of historical records. We had a good discussion with the group afterwards, so it was a fun evening overall.
This afternoon, I finished listening to the audiobook version of Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas. It tells the story of a young female assassin, fetched from a prison camp to take part in a contest to be the king's champion, with her freedom offered as an eventual reward for good service. I liked the protagonist, and there were lots of layers to the storytelling in terms of loyalty and betrayal, self-interest and altruism, duty and desire. The various inter-relationship were complex and well-drawn, and the action sequences were tense and well-written. My only criticism is that it seemed very much like it was just setting up the initial plot conceit for the rest of the series, as not that much actually happened outside of the competition. I didn't feel as if the conclusion was ever in doubt, but I mostly enjoyed the book. I'm not sure I'm going to move on to the rest of the series, though, as there are six more and I don't think I'm invested enough in the characters to put that much time in.
This afternoon, I finished listening to the audiobook version of Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas. It tells the story of a young female assassin, fetched from a prison camp to take part in a contest to be the king's champion, with her freedom offered as an eventual reward for good service. I liked the protagonist, and there were lots of layers to the storytelling in terms of loyalty and betrayal, self-interest and altruism, duty and desire. The various inter-relationship were complex and well-drawn, and the action sequences were tense and well-written. My only criticism is that it seemed very much like it was just setting up the initial plot conceit for the rest of the series, as not that much actually happened outside of the competition. I didn't feel as if the conclusion was ever in doubt, but I mostly enjoyed the book. I'm not sure I'm going to move on to the rest of the series, though, as there are six more and I don't think I'm invested enough in the characters to put that much time in.
