I shall start giving stars to the books I’ve read and the films I’ve seen.

***** a wholehearted recommendation, within any given genre

**** a recommendation with slight reservations

*** OK but unmemorable

** poor but with some redeeming features

* dire

March Reading

4Mar E A Discovery of Witches ***** – Deborah Harkness. A vampire romance. Not my usual choice of light reading but I really loved it. If I’d read any of the reviews on Amazon first – good or bad – I wouldn’t have bought it and can’t quite believe how different people, even some who liked it, have misread the book. It’s a vampire romance, yes, but it’s also a book about academics, about research and, as the author says, about books. It’s set initially in Oxford University. It is apparently the first in a trilogy and I shall be buying the others.

8Mar E Rent Boy Murders * – John Simpson and Robert Cummings. I gave up at p51. The writing was flat and boring. There were plot holes. We already knew who the murderer was and I wasn’t going to spend another 200 pages finding out how the very dull cops caught him. There was gratuitous sex – the cops were both gay and had both recently married but surely we didn’t need blow-by-blow accounts of their sex lives? This book was a waste of time.

10Mar E Clouds and Rain**** – Zahra Owens. This was an m/m romance set on a ranch. The plot (ranch owner falls in love with stable hand) could have been trite but the writer made me really care about the characters and their problems. It wasn’t the best writing in the world but the story left me satisfied. There was a lot of explicit sex but every sex scene was essential to the narrative. A worthwhile read. It’s a companion volume to Earth and Sky, by the same author, telling the story of two of the minor characters. That’s a worthwhile read, too.

12Mar E Let’s Get Digital***** – David Gaughran. An excellent handbook on the whys and hows of self publishing. Has lots of resources and links, too. I read it on my Kindle, in hospital, but have it on my laptop to refer to – probably again and again. He’s on WordPress – go and look for him! http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/author/davidgaughran/

13Mar E Nanny Dearest* – Shawn Bailey. Trash. An m/m romance that simple didn’t work. I didn’t believe in the characters or the plot or even the baby around whom the plot revolved. Poor style, poor writing, poor editing, a waste of space. And this was professionally published so if anything it’s a further push towards self-publishing.

14Mar E Chicken Little*** – Cory Doctorow. A sci-fi novella with some excellent ideas but I found the ending disappointing. I wanted something more – an epilogue? Good writing but the plotting was just slightly too experimental for me. This is the book I bought when my writing was compared to Doctorow’s on the ‘I write like’ site.

16Mar E Last of the Lesser Kings**** – T.L.K.Arkenberg. Fantasy, with an underlying thread of m/m romance and a hefty dose of philosophy about the uses of power. Intriguing but rather erratic – periods of excitement (magic, war, sex) followed by stretches of boredom and too much thought. However, I couldn’t stop reading!

19Mar E Shot of Tequila** – J.A.Konrath. I hated this. Dark, brutal and full of impossible fights and deaths wrapped up in a skimpy plot. I read it, or rather, mostly skimmed it because it was listed on Konrath’s website as the first (chronologically) in the Jack Daniels stories and I’d liked Whiskey Sour. Now I’m not sure whether to try any more.

19Mar E Microsoft Research DRM Talk**** – Cory Doctorow. A short e-book version of an interesting talk by the author explaining the destructive aspects of DRM to Microsoft staff. I’ve been helping prepare some papers arguing for DMCA exemptions, which of course centre round DRM, so the information in this talk was timely and fascinating. The only thing I’ve done is proofreading but it still helps to know a lot of the background. (For anyone who isn’t sure, DRM is Digital Rights Management, the technology that ‘locks’ DVDs, CDs and e-books.)

21Mar E Finding Lisa*** – Carolyn LeVine Topol. A well written but fairly bland book about a woman going through a divorce who finds herself again as a lesbian. Pleasant, and a nice antidote to too much horror and technical stuff. Totally unmemorable but just what I needed at the time I read it.

24Mar E Dawn in the Orchard*** – Cooper West. I’ve been following West’s blog because of her interest in fanfic so decided to try one of her novels. It was a pleasant enough m/m romance, tecnically well written but badly edited. The plot got a bit repetitive and then the ending was rushed. I seem to be getting very critical…

29 Mar P Wonderful Life***** – Stephen Jay Gould. Subtitle: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Totally absorbing book about paleontology, the revision of early assumptions about the Burgess Shale, and the implications for our history as a species. Gould is a fantastic science writer, making things crystal clear to the interested layman but never compromising the integrity of his thesis. To summarise, the fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Canada suggest contingency rather than any purpose in evolution and add interesting philosophical ideas to Darwin’s central theory. If you like science and history, read this book! But be warned – it took me about a month to get through it!

30 Mar E Bullied**** – Jeff Erno. An interesting, distressing, inspiring book about the bullying of gay teens in America. It takes the form of a number of short stories, each dealing with different teen experiences. Most of the stories, even one that ended in suicide, gave some kind of foundation for hope. I did have a slight problem with it: I found the stories and the characters quite hard to relate to – American teen culture looks remarkably like a very foreign and almost impenetrable country from here and I even had to spend a lot of time getting to grips with the basics of the school system. This was a very worthy book, but also a rather insular one; I think its value would be greater to Americans than to anyone else, and particularly to American teens of any orientation. Read purely as a sociological document in ficional format it gives telling insights into American culture in general in respect of a variety of issues that are quite differently handled elsewhere. Whilst I am not for one moment suggesting that bullying does not take place in UK (I’m an ex-teacher, after all), it would be enlightening to read a UK book on the same subject.

March Viewing

2Mar Cowboys and Aliens.*** Westerns in general meet ‘Alien’ (plus ‘Indiana Jones’) with help from Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. It started well – good concept – but degenerated into trash. Well acted.

5 Mar. Whitechapel.***** (Season 3.)Modern police drama in which the crimes echo Victorian murders. Some preposterous plotting but excellent photography/direction; Rupert Penry-Jones and Phil Davis are a joy to watch. I enjoyed the first two seasons as well and will now look forward to the next.

15Mar The Social Network.**** The story of Facebook, told through flashbacks during the lawsuits that followed its beginnings. The lawsuits were absolutely fascinating. I always knew I didn’t like Facebook… Informative and well done.

19Mar Dirk Gently**** – Season 1. A kind of dark comedy detective series that grows on you. It’s based on characters by the writer Douglas Adams.

20Mar Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.**** I preferred the Alex Guiness version (which I’ve seen twice), and I think I preferred the book (which I’ve read twice) to either. However, I did think Gary Oldman made a better Smiley. This was a mesmerisingly beautiful film but the astounding camera and direction techniques overwhelmed the plot and characterisation. It was full of mega-actors who were given no opportunity to develop the roles they were given. Explanations were missing, truncated or couched in elliptical dialogue. If I hadn’t already known the basic story I think I would have been completely confused. As it is, I still think I only grasped 75% of it and had to discuss the older versions to sort my head out. Worth watching for the visual aspect alone.

25Mar Being Human*****– Season 4. A ghost, a vampire and a werewolf set up house together and try being human… By the end of this season only one of the original cast remained. The plots have got wilder but the acting and direction remain superb. I adore this series.

30Mar Spiral***** – Season 2. We watched season 3 and were so impressed I asked for the boxed set for my birthday. So we have now seen the first two seasons and are still impressed (and might have to watch season 3 again). French cop show (with subtitles) set in Paris where everyone is somehow crooked or incompetent or both – villains, cops, lawyers, etc – and every action is somehow connected with everything else. Superb. Quite violent and dramatic, with wonderful filming and great acting.

I do seem to have a leaning, in both reading and viewing, towards cops and quirky horror. Who knew? If anyone has read or seen any of these, I’d love to have your views!

Books read/finished (as usual, E denotes e-book and P denotes print version)

3Feb P Fat-free Indian – Shehzad Husain and Manisha Kanani. Useful. Some interesting low fat cooking techniques, and a good, helpful overview of ingredients. Some nice new recipes, too.

9Feb P My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘me’?) – Caroline Taggart and J. A. Wines. I bought this for a friend who keeps saying she recognises correct language but doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain it to others. And I bought a copy for myself. It’s good – concise, up-to-date and written in a humorous style that makes points really memorable. A useful resource.

11Feb P The Book of Night with Moon – Diane Duane. A long fantasy novel. I loved the cat characters and the world/language builiding but thought the overall plot was rubbish.

13 Feb E Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage – Seanan McGuire (short story). Fabulous, in every sense, like all this author’s work, and desperately sad. How and why young adults forget the dreamworlds of childhood.

13Feb E Uncle Sam – Seanan McGuire. A short horror story, purporting to explain why American women go in groups to public restrooms. Truly creepy.

14Feb E Calvin’s Cowboy – Drew Hunt. A sweet m/m romance (suitable for Valentine’s Day). Believable characters in a Texas and then a New York setting. Slightly flawed by too many euphemisms in the sex scenes; I counted five in one paragraph.

15Feb E Caught – A.B.Gayle. Well written m/m romance novella set in Sydney. Daniel tries to rescue Taylor from what he thinks is a suicide bid. Lighthouses, disabled landladies, professional photography, kung fu, cross dressing and tropical fish all contribute to this intriguing story.

17Feb P The Unbearable Lightness of being in Aberystwyth – Malcolm Pryce. Rather pretentious spoof detective/horror. I read it because it was lent to me and people were insisting it was good. I didn’t enjoy it very much.

18Feb E Publish Yourself E-book – J M Snyder. Extremely useful guide to formatting and distribution.

19Feb E Smashwords guide to publishing and style guide to formatting. Scary but well put together and I might be beginning to understand.

20Feb E Arcane Sampler – ed. Nathan Shumate. Anthology of short horror stories, cheap to enocurage readers to buy later annual anthologies. There were one or two good stories but the quality was mostly poor (though the editing standard was high) and I shall not buy any future issues.

26Feb E Stormfront – Jim Butcher. I had heard so much about the Harry Dresden ‘files’ and I was bitterly disappointed. Flat writing, far too much extraneous description, boring demons and ‘overkill’ in the fight scenes. Plus, scorpions are not insects.

27Feb E Sullivan’s Yard – Chris Quinton. A delightful m/m novella in which the m/m protagonists fall in love with a house, which they hope to turn into a hotel. Lots of detail about various cultures – New Orleans French, American Spanish, Andalusian Spanish – something quite hard to get across in the short format and very praiseworthy since Chris is Brit.

i seem to have gone in for horror in February – something I don’t often read. I think maybe the books about formatting fall into the horror category too…

Films (and TV Series)

10Feb We Were Here – documentary film about the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. Harrowing, beautifully produced and very informative.

16Feb Inception. Sci-fic adventure… Boring. Very very boring. I’d rented it from LoveFilm, partly because I had just finished a beta of a long fanfic which included some of the Inception characters and I wanted to put faces to them. I quickly realised it wasn’t for me but decided to get my money’s worth – but kept reaching for a book. As the book I was reading was The Unbearable Lightness (see above) I had a less than interesting evening.

21Feb The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. A Terry Gilliam film. Heath Ledger and Christopher Plummer with guest appearances by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and others. Visually stunning plus remarkable acting. Convoluted plot along the lines of Faustus but with the daughter’s soul as the bargaining chip.

24Feb Transamerica. (Felicity Huffman). Really good. This is the one that lost out to Brokeback Mountain in the Oscars. In my opinion it should have won. Stanley is about to become Sabrina when he finds he had a son, Toby, an underage hustler. ‘She’ bails him out of NY police custody and agrees to take him to LA. Together they travel across America and through aspects of their lives until Toby finds out that Bree is his father.

I ought perhaps to note that I subscribe to and read a number of magazines (cover to cover) every month.

Writing: a useful resource with interesting articles

Searchlight: the magazine of the anti-fascist research group (European focus)

Good Food: recipes, techniques and food-related news

Cardmaking: papercraft ideas, techniques and resources

Saga: travel and lifestyle for the over 50s – some interesting articles

And some more that I skim weekly.

Radio Times: weekly listings and reviews plus interesting interviews with actors and directors

The Week: current events UK and worldwide. This is a trial subscription and I won’t continue it. I get as much from Google.

The Economist: another trial subscription. Mainly, as the title implies, finance.

Have you read or seen any of these and if so, what did you think? What have you been reading and watching?

I thought I would post a monthly account of what I have been reading and watching. The date beside each book or film/series refers to the date of finishing a book or watching the last episode of a series. So Culpeper only just squeaked in. P refers to printed versions and E to e-books. I have not included fanfiction, despite reading a lot of it, and I have also left out most of the books I bought for/read with my grandson though Lost Worlds has made it onto the list. Magazines and e-zines have also been omitted. I have included unfinished books – which are rare in this household. I give a very brief comment on everything but if you have read/watched them and would like to discuss them, or if you would like further information, I would be delighted!

Books.

Jan1. P Culpeper’s Complete Herbal – Nicholas Culpeper. Fascinating insights into old medical

practices and a good resource for both plant information and names for fantasy writing.

Jan3. P Simply Sushi – Steven Pallett – Instant Masterclass. Interesting but overwhelming. I think

I’ll stick with Tesco’s ready-made variety.

Jan6. P Supertips 2 – Moyra Bremna. This was a re-read, found when I was packing books. It has

some timeless/great tips on all kinds of cleaning, gardening, cooking matters, etc. but also

some dated/hilarious ones. The sections on caring for your record collection/record

player are fascinatingly out of date!

Jan6. E Whiskey Sour – J A Konrath. A competent and gripping, somewhat gruesome thriller, on

the same lines as Karen Rose. I bought it because I’m following his blog about self-

publishing and was curious but will definitely read more by him and have already bought

two. I’ll talk about the blog in another post.

Jan10. P Mystery – Jonathan Kellerman. Yes, that’s the title though it’s also the genre. Mystery is

the latest in the Alex Delaware series and is as competent as usual. A kind of comfort

reading with exciting bits.

Jan12, E Men under the Mistletoe. Four fabulous m/m novellas brought out as a Christmas

anthology and on a Christmas theme. I bought it for the stories by Josh Lanyon and Harper

Fox, whose work I already know. Ava March and K.A. Mitchell were new to me but are

equally admirable writers.

Jan15. P Manchester Poets – an anthology including a friend’s work. I went to the book launch.

and my copy is signed. A mixed bag, as poetry anthologies so often are, but there’s

something there to appeal to everyone.

Jan19. P Personal Connections in the Digital Age – Nancy K Baym. This was a great summary of

the issues surrounding digital communication, both online and via mobile phones. The

had some interesting research results and some sensible arguments to make. As I’d put in a request to

‘Santa’ who kindly brought it, I had to read it a.s.a.p.

Jan20. P Books do furnish a room – Leslie Geddes-Brown. This is a visually fascinating ‘coffee

table’ book with gorgeous photographs and some good ideas about book storage. Some

weird ones, too.

Jan24. P Madness of Angels – Kat Griffin. This is a surrealist fantasy about London and magic, lent

to me by the same friend who let me borrow the Books book. With this one, I gave up at

p35. Overdone descriptions and no ‘hook’ or suggestion of where the plot might be going.

Jan28. P Lost Worlds _ Jon Howe. Howe illustrated much of Tolkien’s work. This is a great simple

reference book with beautiful pictures of ‘forgotten’ civilisations, some mythical and others

real enough but swept away by history or nature. I bought the book to put away for my

grandson but I suspect it will remain in my house so that I can share it with him.

Jan29. E The Best Christmas Ever – Anel Viz. A delightful and thought provoking m/m story about

an ‘unequal’ relationship between an intellectual and his mildly retarded lover. I shall be

reviewing it for Wilde Oats.

 

I note that this month’s reading is short on fantasy though Harper Fox’s story Midwinter Knights in the anthology contains supernatural elements.

 

Films: DVDs or TV series (usually watched on DVD or iPlayer). Some of the DVDs are rented.

Jan2. Spiral Season 1. (8 eps) A French cop/law show. We had already seen season 3 and bought

seasons 1 and 2 because we liked them so much. Season 1 is gripping and sets up a lot of

scenarios/relationships for the following seasons. The photography, all in Paris, is great, and

the acting is superb.

Jan3. Legend of the Guardians. A confused fantasy, unsure whether to be a cartoon or a serious CGI

adventure. Australian owls battle against the forces of darkness!!! Fun, but I won’t buy it.

Jan7. La vie en rose. Biopic of Edith Piaf. The story was told in a confusing way with too many

flashbacks, and the dark sets didn’t help. There were no complete songs other than ‘Je ne

regrette rien’ at the end. The story was interesting and sad but the film was disappointing.

Jan17. Public Enemies.(BBC. 3 eps) A well-acted drama with an interesting plot exploring the

problems faced by people wrongly accused/convicted. I was surprised by the happy or at least

hopeful ending.

Jan23. The Libertine (Johnny Depp). Amazing acting. Pity about the plot. The story deals with the

decline and fall of the Earl of Rochester in Restoration England. Depp’s portrayal of the earl,

from beautiful courtier to disease-ridden misery, was a masterpiece, though I have to admit I

would watch Depp in almost anything. The story is very thin and hardly worth a full length

film.

Jan24. Sherlock (BBC) Season 2. (3 eps) The second and third episodes were terrifying to watch, for

me. I find knife-edge scenes in films and on TV unpleasant, even though I will read them

happily in books. These were alarming and although I am familiar with Holmes canon, the

BBC version tweaks the stories for the twenty-first century and the viewer does not know

what to expect. I will no doubt watch season 3 next year and be scared all over again.

Jan29. Birdsong (BBC) (2 eps). Visually stunning, filmed around Budapest rather than in northern

France where the story is set. Mediocre acting and some odd ‘takes’ on WW1. I disliked the

book (by Sebastian Faulks)and disliked this.

Jan31. Bent. A Channel 4 film originally made for TV, based on Martin Sherman’s play about

homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps. Incredibly well acted and directed; powerful and

moving. I cried. Highly recommended but I wouldn’t put myself through it again. However,  I now

want a copy of Mick Jagger singing Streets of Berlin and it isn’t available.

 

So, 12 books and 8 films/series in January. I shall be interested to see what I manage in February. And as I said, I’d love to hear your comments on any of these.