purplecat

The cover for the first Virgin New Adventure. I read this when it came out and haven't read it since. I recall very little about what I thought on that first read, which is probably informative. I get the impression from views I've heard expressed since that it hasn't necessarily aged well, embodies the fair criticism of the New Adventures that they often interpreted "more adult" as meaning "more sex and nudity", and that the "more sex and nudity" mostly manifests as a slightly creepy attitude towards Ace and other young female characters.

There has been a certain amount of chatter in, admittedly fairly rarified, parts of the Internet about how this month marks the 20th Anniversary of the first appearance of Benny Summerfield in audio (her first appearance in a Dr Who novel was 1992, and her first solo novel was 1997). I've never been much of an audio person so the above is the cover of her first solo novel that was adapted into her first audio adventure. I had forgotten but was reminded by The All New Adventures of the Doctor Who Book Club Podcast that the scene depicted on the cover is a joke from the book itself in which Wolsey the cat (temporarily transformed into a Puss in Boots type character) randomly picks up a gun and stares into the middle distance in order to generate an interesting cover image.

Reading: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett. It's a Doctor Who novel and I expect it will feature Ice Warriors since they appear on the cover. All the chapter titles are lines from famous carols. I'm only about a chapter in so I can't really deliver any kind of verdict. I bought it because fififolle was sufficiently impressed by Abnett's Primeval Novelisation that she bought some of his Warhammer novels (despite not playing Warhammer at all) and enjoyed them sufficiently to write fanfic for them (albeit Primeval AU fanfic, IIRC) which I thought was pretty impressive. He wrote The Story of Martha which I wasn't so taken by, I must admit, but that wasn't in a standard format so I was interested to see what he made of something more straightforward.

Watching: Lupin III Part 4 which we are much enjoying. To be honest I think I'm enjoying it as much as Part 1 which was my favourite of the earlier versions (though I know many people prefer Part 2). I'm a bit bemused by the Italian co-production aspect though. It's very odd to have all these Lupin stories based in Italy rather than in Japan+exotic locations around the world.

Listening: It's mostly been Zombies! Run! episodes recently since I wasn't able to listen for a while and so created a bit of a backlog. It is much the same as always, though with the observation that 5 seasons into the storyline, they are very much downplaying the zombie threat aspect in favour of something more like a political thriller.