purplecat

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Reading: I finally finished Crime and Punishement which was interesting but very monologuey. I've moved on to Unshapely Things by Marc del Franco, which seems quite good but I have a feeling I've exhausted my patience for wizards in garrets brooding about their tragic pasts.

Listening: I just listened to the first of the David Tennant and Catherine Tate Big Finish audios which I enjoyed more than I expected to - although they paired Donna up with another London temp and I actually, on audio, found them quite hard to tell apart.

Watching: A mixture of Wallander, Killjoys, Yuri on Ice and classic Doctor Who. We're doing quite well for choice of viewing options at the moment.

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/404961.html

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From:

a_cubed

I read the first two or three of the Unshapely sequence and one of a spin-off, but it was mostly spinning its wheels and there're better urban fantasies out there, IMNSHO. If you haven't tried them I recommend Benedict Jacka's Verus sequence (ISTR we've discussed this sequence on your blog before, though).

From:

purplecat

I've read the first Verus novel. In fact I've now read the first Verus, the first Dexter, the first Matthew Swift and am reading the first Unshapely Things novel - of the four the Matthew Swift's are the one's I think I'm most disposed to continue with.

From:

a_cubed

Hmm, I don't know the Dexter series.
The Matthew Smith ones are interesting, but after three MS ones she veers into a different series, which I wasn't as fond of. The problem with having a god for a viewpoint character got a bit much, I think.
The Verus ones go interesting places - I've just got book 8 and am looking forward to reading it, after I go through the Peter Grants on a re-read (I fancied a re-read due to jet-lag).

From:

purplecat

I don't mean Dexter, but my mind has gone almost completely blank. I can't even think of a good search term since I suspect "Wizards in Garrets" won't help. One of the most famous series, briefly made into a TV series (I believe), in the first book he runs around a big city implausibly naked for a bit without cutting his feet.

I'd forgotten Peter Grant, but he's less disposed to brooding about his tragic past and doesn't live in a garret so I can plausibly maintain he's a different genre. I've actually read the first two of those, probably because of the Doctor Who connection, but felt they veered a little too far into horror for my tastes.

From:

a_cubed

The Jim Butcher Dresden Files series?

Hmm, yes the Peter Grant books are a darker shade than some of the others. Not too dark for me, and I wouldn't call them horror. The "Nightclub of Dr Moreau" sequence, which is probably what you're thinking of, was clearly dark fantasy to me, since it left most of the action off-screen and didn't dwell on the details. For me, that's the difference between dark fantasy and horror - while the former will contain nasty stuff occasionally, it won't linger over it to deliberately invoked horror/disgust, but will use it for a purpose. In this case, to set up the antagonist as a truly evil person.

From:

purplecat

Yes, the Dresden files. Those are the ones. Jim Butcher was very entertaining, in a well-practised fashion, at Eastercon a couple of years back so I picked up the first in the series.

From:

a_cubed

I really like the Dresden Files. I've read my way through the whole lot a number of times, and he's in the teens now. He's go a long term plan he's working towards, but they don't really gel until book 3. The first two are decent but are his first published novels and it shows. The world-building has really survived, though. Very few ret-cons. Lots of Chekov guns placed early and fired much later in the series.

From:

daniel-saunders.livejournal.com

I really must re-read Crime and Punishment. I expect it would be a different experience reading it now to how it was when I was sixteen.

From:

purplecat

Reading it from a 21st Century perspective, it seems clear that Dostoyevsky is trying to portray some kind of mental health issue with Raskolnikov - in the early parts it reads a lot like depression, though of course Dostoyevsky had no access to modern categorisations. Of course, that subsequently makes Raskolnikov's crime and the role his mental state had in it, somewhat uncomfortable to a modern reader, almost as if the behaviour is being excused in some way.

Similarly, the passages leading up to Svidrigailov's suicide, the only ones from his point of view, don't read like rational thought processes, even though his behaviour up to that point as viewed by others has been fairly clearly manipulative arguing he knows more or less exactly what he's about.

So I was left wondering exactly what Dostoyevsky was trying to say about the mental state of criminals.

From:

daniel-saunders.livejournal.com

I have to confess that I read it before my mental health issues had started, or had at least been diagnosed, so I wasn't as aware of these things. Something to watch out for when I re-read it.

From:

liadt

You are certainly are enjoying a variety of viewing.

Yeah, wizards get out and have a fight!

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