Reading, Listening, Watching

[purplecat]

Reading: I've just finished Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. It turns out this is my office mate's favourite book, or at least top ten. I wouldn't rate it that highly. It is definitely good but it is a book in which the first two thirds are set near future and the last third far future and the difference shows. Though it's not just that far future is harder to imagine than near future. Even in the near future sections there is a lot more detail on orbital mechanics than on genetics (both of which are integral to the plot) revealing where the key interests of the author lie.

Listening: Mostly the usual though with more brexity overtures than is has been my habit. I have flirted with The Westminster Hour but concluded it is mostly politicians saying exactly what you would expect them to say - so generates more heat than light. I wish to be better informed about politics but I lack the patience for in depth pieces and get irritated by less in depth pieces. Brexit has reached the point where I just feel a kind of helpless despair: as far as I can see most politicians are still treating it as a game in which one must manoeuvre for advantage; what little interest in compromise there is, is not based on the understanding that the country is fundamentally divided and we urgently need to find the least worst solution for all constituencies and that involves serious levels of sacrifice on all sides (and yes, it seems to me we are at the point where people will die and we are talking about minimising loss of life because the route to a point where no one dies because Brexit seems so likely to derail into lots of people die that it is necessary to try to find the route of most chance of least death - if you see what I mean)...

This was not supposed to be a post about Brexit. But, fair enough, I'm in a state of kind of numbness where I expect nothing because each day brings the unexpected. I've moved through despair and anger to a kind of weird detached feeling of acceptance of fate. I called that helpless despair above and maybe its that I just... can't... anymore at some level.

Watching:. We watched The Doctor Who Cookbook Revisited on the extras disks for the remastered blu-ray of Dr Who Season 23. We haven't watched any of the remastered episodes since my main motivation for buying the box set was reduction in shelf space. But still, we have the Doctor Who Cookbook and like cookery shows so this seemed worth a punt. B. was hugely entertained, somewhat to my surprise, though he spent an awful lot of time trying to assess the success of various Dr. Who actor careers post-Dr Who based on their kitchens. He was pretty taken by a lot of the recipes too, none of which were ones I had cooked from the cookbook. There was some suggestion I had maybe not been selecting the best of the bunch. Nicola Bryant chose not to cook her 1985 recipe but an entirely different one. Her excuse was that it was a cheesecake recipe and Colin Baker was allergic to cheese. The result was very modern and distinctly appealing, I have suggested it could be made for my birthday. We shall see....

Comments

[a_cubed]

Is Seveneves worth persevering with? I tried to "catch up" with Stephenson a while back, including re-reading Snow Crash. I failed again at Diamond Age (third time, I've bounced off that one, I think) but re-read Cryptonomicon and read the Baroque Cycle for the first time. But then I bounced off Seveneves hard. Harder even than Diamond Age. Lots of people seem to rate it, but it just didn't manage to grab me that way, say, Al Reynolds' stuff grabs me.

[purplecat]

Hmm... well I guess it depends what you're looking for and its hard from what you've said to work out what it is about some Stephenson's that doesn't work for you.

What I would say is that I definitely found it slow in places. I can be quite an impatient reader and I did a lot of flicking forwards in the book to see what was coming up. There is a lot of explanation of things like orbital mechanics and it wasn't clear to me that they needed to be explained in so much detail particularly when I felt other areas of science got less attention.

I definitely thought the final third was weaker than the first two. I found the characters there less well developed (though even in the first two thirds I'd say a lot of characters don't get fleshed out as much as you might expect given the length of the book) and the story in that segment felt oddly underdeveloped.

Stephenson's strength, I would say, is often in conveying his excitement and enthusiasm for technology, particularly computers, algorithms and the history associated with them, and doing so engagingly with a story. That comes across in places here but is probably not as strong as it is in other books. I quite like the survival/improvise vibe of the first two thirds and I liked and engaged with all the viewpoint characters there: Dinah/Doob and, to a lesser extent, Ivy.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I also feel despair about Brexit, and about the political process generally (something that may predate Brexit, but has been catalysed by it).

I don't have a blu-ray player, which is probably just as well, as I can't really afford to upgrade all my DVDs, even though the shelf space would be useful. Mind you, I've still got about 90 Doctor Who videos, kept initially in the thought that they might be valuable to resell at some point (ha!) and now for nostalgia and a fondness for the video covers, some of which were generally very good and artistic (they went through a phase of commissioning new paintings for them) and I sometimes think I could do some kind of artistic "framed cover" thing, maybe, possibly.

[purplecat]

Perhaps you should toss the videos but remove the covers first? That would save storage space if nothing else.

My initial reaction to the blu-rays was a feeling I didn't need them given I've got nearly all the DVDs, but, well, the shelf-space argument was surprisingly compelling. A reflection, I suppose, that as one moves through life one places different values on time, space and money.