Today's the time of the month where I supposedly blog about my life, drawing from the New York Times's "650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing." Usually I set RANDOM.ORG to 1 to 650, take the output, and go. Sometimes I respin when I don't get one I liked right away. I'm not sure how many times I've already respun here tonight, but I think I've been sitting here for thirty minutes, jumping from #414: How Have You Handled Being the ‘New Kid’? to #23: Does Your Life Leave You Enough Time to Relax? to #389: What’s the Most Challenging Assignment You’ve Ever Had? to #154: What Objects Tell the Story of Your Life?
Some of what I hit makes me think, "No way!", some makes me think, "That could be interesting, but not now," some makes me think, "Too heavy for me to handle briefly in an evening before I begin to catch up on grading." (So far, I'm further behind than I was yesterday.) The point of spinning the randomizer on those NYT prompts was as a way of eliciting stories about my childhood, but very few of them seem to be causing that to happen, and when I try to think of things that happened in my childhood without them, my mind goes blank, or I start to wonder if anyone wants to hear stories of campouts I went on in the Boy Scouts. (One time it was really cold!)
Or I wonder if I'll just end up giving my opinion about something, and I'm skeptical anyone wants to know my opinion about most things.
It's almost my son's two-month birthday. (Should I use his name on this blog? Does he have a right to be unchronicled by Google? I have a friend who keeps the very existence of his children a secret from facebook. Not even a picture. Should I be doing that? Should I just call him DS or LO?) I don't know how old your child has to be for your parent blog to be viable, but it seems to me that two months isn't it.
Mostly what he does now is eat, sleep, and cry. He used to poop a lot, but these days that seems to happen every three or four days! There's not a whole of times he's doing none of these things, and when he does, I'm at work. 6pm to 10pm are reserved for crying and sometimes eating. I have gotten reasonably good at calming a baby, but every now and again he just goes for it and is completely inconsolable. You can't reason with a baby. I mean, often you can't reason with people, but you certainly can't reason with an entity that I am pretty sure doesn't really understand the concept of other people yet. (Am I right about this?)
(Hayley just asked me what I was writing about; I told her "nothing." Hence, a title.)
A lot of the time he will only sleep on a person's chest, which isn't very efficient. His lack of enthusiasm for efficiency makes me suspicious as to how many Mollmann genes he ended up with.
It's funny, though, the things you rate as an accomplishment when a baby does them. Two times in the middle of the night he's managed to go from sleeping on his back to his front. One time during "tummy time" we watched him flip himself onto his back. He garnered a lot of praise for this, though I'm not sure he really understood what he was doing or how, even if he did like the results.
Work is working. I lucked out this semester. Because of the baby, I asked for my lighter semester to be in the fall, so I only have three classes, but across all three sections, I just have 42 students, which could easily fit into two! I think they're going reasonably well, but I still pore over random people on Rate My Professor and wonder how you end up one of those teachers who has dozens upon dozens five-star ratings.
It's raining now. It rains a lot in Tampa. People ask me if I like it in Tampa. I think I do, but I don't think I could ever love it here. But man do I not look forward to my eventual return to the job market.
These are the thoughts I have on a Thursday night. You know, sometime I look at my old LiveJournal, and I think to myself, Jesus Christ, how mundane, how boring, how trivial, how insensitive. I don't know when I acquired emotional intelligence, but I don't think I had it yet at age 22. (THE READER: You still don't!) Blogging is, like all long-form things on the web, basically dead, but it strikes me how most of the blogs that linger on are so... polished. Here I am, I review books on a schedule. Every academic I know seems to start up a blog to ensure they have two avenues for publishing research no one will read. Most of the other blogs I read are about comic books. Back in the early days of blogging, it was personal and weird. That's what surprised me the most about my old LiveJournal, the things I'd sometimes say to a bunch of strangers in the middle of the night! Now if I express my feelings, they have to be carefully packaged into a piece of creative nonfiction, a little miniature essay to post an attractive link to on facebook, part of a carefully thematized sequence. I don't miss the quiz results, and I don't miss me chronicling the minutia of going to class every day, but there was something about the old Internet that we lost along the way, and it wasn't just the capital "I."
28 September 2018
27 September 2018
Review: Useful Knowledge by Alan Rauch
Hardcover, 292 pages Borrowed from the libraryPublished 2001 Read July 2018 |
by Alan Rauch
I like this book, but it feels like two separate projects. The first chapter is about the ways knowledge was disseminated in the early nineteenth century: encyclopedias, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and educational texts for children. Rauch demonstrates how British society became interested in the acquisition of knowledge, but also how there was some pushback against it-- Coleridge was outraged by how miscellaneous encyclopedias were. There was no system! Anything could be next to anything based on the whims of the alphabet!
The other five chapters examine the depictions of knowledge in five different nineteenth-century novels (not all Victorian, despite the subtitle): Jane Loudon's The Mummy!, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsely's Alton Locke, and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. I don't think a strong connection is forged between the first chapter and the other ones; I don't see how encyclopedism (for example) influences my understanding of The Mummy! (for example). What I also find a little frustrating is that the concept of "knowledge" is kind of diffuse-- most of the time, Rauch seems to use it to basically mean "science," but sometimes it's more broad, and so much so that it's hard to trace a strong trajectory through the book. I do think the analysis of The Mummy! takes the book a little too seriously at times, but on the other hand, I really enjoyed the analysis of Alton Locke. I haven't read it myself, but I do love a good discussion of Kingsley, religion, and science, and Rauch brings out the correspondences that Kinglsey saw between the transformation of species and spiritual transformation. I haven't read The Professor, but Rauch made it sound like something I ought to read, which is always a good thing, too.
26 September 2018
Review: Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories edited by Mark Clapham
Another review up at Unreality SF: the Fifth First Doctor (I think that's right) returns in The First Doctor Adventures, Volume Two!
Bernice Summerfield XIII: Secret Histories
edited by Mark Clapham
2009's Bernice Summerfield book is another anthology, with a frame story that fleshes out what Benny was doing between deciding to confront Braxiatel at the end of Secret Origins and being captured by a giant robot in Dead and Buried. On a dig, Benny discovers a collection of sentient skulls at the site of a war crime, and ends up telling them stories to pass the time. The stories cover a wide range of her life, but there are essentially three or four clusters: a few from her youth, before she had her graduate degree; a couple from the heyday of the Braxiatel Collection, when it was her and Adrian and Jason; a couple from her freelance on-the-run-from-Brax years; and then a number following on from the end of Secret Origins, as Benny and company plan their next move against Braxiatel and in the meantime have some wacky adventures.
I like the diversity on offer here. It's nice to see a young, inexperienced Benny alongside an older, but more carefree Collection-era Benny alongside her present-day status quo. And Mark Clapham's frame story is suitably atmospheric, additionally raising the kind of issues that work well with Benny as a character: dealing with the consequences of history and memory. But though Bernice Summerfield usually thrives in the anthology format (during the Big Finish era, the weaker books have almost always been the novels), Secret Histories isn't among the best of them. It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but I just felt like a lot of the stories here were weirdly plotted, not really coming to climaxes even when they had a solid foundation.
For example, there's a set of stories built around a common incident, where a mysterious machine shunts Benny, Adrian, and Peter back in time: Benny ends up in 1914 England, where she once again encounters Mycroft Holmes and John Watson; Adrian lands in World War I-era France; and Peter ends up in a vaguely Victorian freakshow. Each of the stories is evocatively written, with a great concept. But each one just kind of stops: in Jim Smith's "A Gallery of Pigeons," Mycroft deduces a time-travel mystery but it's more of intellectual interest than dramatic; in Eddie Robson's "The Firing Squad," a pair of alien time travelers (who I think are meant to be pre-existing characters?) tell Adrian what was going on; and in Mark Michalowksi's "The Illuminated Man"... I don't really know what happened at the end. Each story seems quite good until the disappointing endings, though, which is all the more frustrating. Smith is good at the retro-Sherlockiana, Robson does a great job with Adrian's character in an unusual situation, and Michalowski likewise has a good handle on the adolescent Peter.
So it's not like it's a bad book or a waste of time. Benny is a great character, and it's nice to hear from Collection characters like Adrian who have had their roles diminished with season 9's format change, such as in Cody Schell's "You Shouldn't Have," where Adrian and Benny crash-land on a planet where it's the height of masculinity to wear flowers. I also really enjoyed Lance Parkin's "Young Benny" tale, "A Game of Soldiers," a brutal and effective story of Benny reluctantly having to play a role in the Dalek Wars when she's accidentally drafted. And Nick Wallace's "Turn the Light On" is creepy and disorienting.
I did find that the resolution to the frame story followed the same pattern as many of the individual stories, in that it ended disappointingly as well: Benny makes a sort of nonsense technobabble deduction to wrap it all up, which undercuts the emotional potential that had been built up in the until-then effective scenes of her interactions with the skulls. It's not the worst Bernice Summerfield anthology (that's either The Dead Man Diaries or Missing Adventures), but it is underwhelming given the quality this range often provides.
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Hardcover, 175 pages Acquired July 2015Published 2009 Read September 2018 |
edited by Mark Clapham
2009's Bernice Summerfield book is another anthology, with a frame story that fleshes out what Benny was doing between deciding to confront Braxiatel at the end of Secret Origins and being captured by a giant robot in Dead and Buried. On a dig, Benny discovers a collection of sentient skulls at the site of a war crime, and ends up telling them stories to pass the time. The stories cover a wide range of her life, but there are essentially three or four clusters: a few from her youth, before she had her graduate degree; a couple from the heyday of the Braxiatel Collection, when it was her and Adrian and Jason; a couple from her freelance on-the-run-from-Brax years; and then a number following on from the end of Secret Origins, as Benny and company plan their next move against Braxiatel and in the meantime have some wacky adventures.
I like the diversity on offer here. It's nice to see a young, inexperienced Benny alongside an older, but more carefree Collection-era Benny alongside her present-day status quo. And Mark Clapham's frame story is suitably atmospheric, additionally raising the kind of issues that work well with Benny as a character: dealing with the consequences of history and memory. But though Bernice Summerfield usually thrives in the anthology format (during the Big Finish era, the weaker books have almost always been the novels), Secret Histories isn't among the best of them. It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but I just felt like a lot of the stories here were weirdly plotted, not really coming to climaxes even when they had a solid foundation.
For example, there's a set of stories built around a common incident, where a mysterious machine shunts Benny, Adrian, and Peter back in time: Benny ends up in 1914 England, where she once again encounters Mycroft Holmes and John Watson; Adrian lands in World War I-era France; and Peter ends up in a vaguely Victorian freakshow. Each of the stories is evocatively written, with a great concept. But each one just kind of stops: in Jim Smith's "A Gallery of Pigeons," Mycroft deduces a time-travel mystery but it's more of intellectual interest than dramatic; in Eddie Robson's "The Firing Squad," a pair of alien time travelers (who I think are meant to be pre-existing characters?) tell Adrian what was going on; and in Mark Michalowksi's "The Illuminated Man"... I don't really know what happened at the end. Each story seems quite good until the disappointing endings, though, which is all the more frustrating. Smith is good at the retro-Sherlockiana, Robson does a great job with Adrian's character in an unusual situation, and Michalowski likewise has a good handle on the adolescent Peter.
So it's not like it's a bad book or a waste of time. Benny is a great character, and it's nice to hear from Collection characters like Adrian who have had their roles diminished with season 9's format change, such as in Cody Schell's "You Shouldn't Have," where Adrian and Benny crash-land on a planet where it's the height of masculinity to wear flowers. I also really enjoyed Lance Parkin's "Young Benny" tale, "A Game of Soldiers," a brutal and effective story of Benny reluctantly having to play a role in the Dalek Wars when she's accidentally drafted. And Nick Wallace's "Turn the Light On" is creepy and disorienting.
I did find that the resolution to the frame story followed the same pattern as many of the individual stories, in that it ended disappointingly as well: Benny makes a sort of nonsense technobabble deduction to wrap it all up, which undercuts the emotional potential that had been built up in the until-then effective scenes of her interactions with the skulls. It's not the worst Bernice Summerfield anthology (that's either The Dead Man Diaries or Missing Adventures), but it is underwhelming given the quality this range often provides.
25 September 2018
Review: Doctor Who: The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes by Justin Richards
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| Hardcover, 36 pages Published 2016 Acquired February 2017 Read March 2017 |
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle
In 2014, BBC Books reissued 2013's 12 Doctors, 12 Stories as a box set of novellas; in 2016, they did the same thing with 2015's Time Lord Fairy Tales short stories. So, like I did with 12 Doctors, 12 Stories, I am going to read one of them a month, beginning with The Emperor Dalek's New Clothes, which is actually the last one published, being added for this box set release.
It's cute, I guess? The Time Lord Fairy Tales are half the length of the 12 Doctors, 12 Stories novellas, and they're all written by Justin Richards, instead of luminaries of British children's fiction. This one reads how you would imagine a fairy tale written by Terry Nation would read: plucky rebel fighters with goofy space names fighting a Dalek occupation force. The ending didn't go how I expected, to the benefit of what had been a very predictable story. If that's what Richards set out to do, he accomplished it perfectly. It is neat to see Daleks rendered in David Wardle's woodcut-style illustrations, though he depicts the sessile Emperor Dalek from "The Parting of the Ways," which doesn't line up with the mobile one described in the text.
Next Week: The Keys of Marinus crossed with Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday!
24 September 2018
Review: Double Dutch by Sharon M. Draper
I have two new reviews of Doctor Who audio dramas up at Unreality SF: the fifth Doctor and UNIT in The Helliax Rift and the sixth Doctor and Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Iron Bright.
Double Dutch by Sharon M. Draper
This is another Cincinnati-set book, part of my goal to read all the novels set in my hometown. Double Dutch is by Sharon M. Draper, a Cincinnati-area high school teacher; the book's main characters are eighth graders on a local Double Dutch team. Their dream is to qualify for the state competition and then compete in nationals in a year where the national competition is being held in Cincinnati. There's not a lot of local color to be honest: quick mentions of things like the Cincinnati Post are basically it.
Other than that, it's an okay book. Some of the characters are fun, the central dilemmas (a girl who's managed to make it to the eighth grade without being able to read, and a boy whose dad has abandoned him) are interesting, but some of the dialogue is very awkward and a couple of the happenings are incredibly contrived, even melodramatic. The resolution to the bullying subplot grates the most. It is aimed at middle-schoolers, though, so I'm not exactly its target audience.
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| Trade paperback, 183 pages Published 2004 (originally 2002) Acquired December 2014 Read December 2016 |
This is another Cincinnati-set book, part of my goal to read all the novels set in my hometown. Double Dutch is by Sharon M. Draper, a Cincinnati-area high school teacher; the book's main characters are eighth graders on a local Double Dutch team. Their dream is to qualify for the state competition and then compete in nationals in a year where the national competition is being held in Cincinnati. There's not a lot of local color to be honest: quick mentions of things like the Cincinnati Post are basically it.
Other than that, it's an okay book. Some of the characters are fun, the central dilemmas (a girl who's managed to make it to the eighth grade without being able to read, and a boy whose dad has abandoned him) are interesting, but some of the dialogue is very awkward and a couple of the happenings are incredibly contrived, even melodramatic. The resolution to the bullying subplot grates the most. It is aimed at middle-schoolers, though, so I'm not exactly its target audience.
21 September 2018
Reading Roundup Year in Review, 2017/18
With the end of August, a new school year begins and so too does a year in my reading tracking list, which means it's time for me to take stock.
Though I have many other accomplishments in the past year to be proud of, my amount of reading is not one of them. Last year, I set a record for most books read in a single year; this year I set a record for least. Not riding the bus and starting a new job will do that to you, I guess. Since 2003, my per-month average has been 12.8; in a full seven months this year, I fell below that, reading only 10.1 books per month. We'll see what next year brings!
What kinds of books did I read this year? Here's a chart: (I only broke out series/authors if I read more than one of that series/author)
1. This actually includes both science fiction and literature by Wells, but I can't be bothered to separate them back out for the purposes of this report.
2. Nonfiction connected to a particular series or author (e.g., Calvin and Hobbes or H. G. Wells) is included in that series or author's count.
Last year I read over 85 comic books; this year, fewer than 40. Adding in 45 comic books would put me right back in the average range, so a big part of my decrease is that fact that since moving, I haven't resumed my ILL-based comics reading. I am pretty disappointed to realize how little non-genre fiction I am reading these days. Can I blame the Hugos?
As always, I picked the best book of each month as a "Pick of the Month." I fed all twelve of these into Preference Revealer, so here they are ranked from twelfth-best to best:
12. Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
11. Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio
10. Black Bolt: Hard Time by Saladin Ahmed
9. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
8. The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Walta Hernandez
7. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book One by Emil Ferris
6. Terra Ignota, Book III: The Will to Battle: A Narrative of Events of the year 2454 by Ada Palmer
5. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
4. No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Volume 10 by James Roberts, Alex Milne, et al.
2. "The Busiest Man in England": A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect & Victorian Visionary by Kate Colquhoun
And the "Pick of the Year":
1. In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
I'm somewhat skeptical of how this list shook out, to be honest, but In Other Lands is definitely the best book I read all year. The full list of "Picks" going back to 2009 is here.
Lastly, here's my usual graph of my reading trends over time:
I hope I can improve some aspects of this next year... but I am very doubtful!
You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)
Though I have many other accomplishments in the past year to be proud of, my amount of reading is not one of them. Last year, I set a record for most books read in a single year; this year I set a record for least. Not riding the bus and starting a new job will do that to you, I guess. Since 2003, my per-month average has been 12.8; in a full seven months this year, I fell below that, reading only 10.1 books per month. We'll see what next year brings!
What kinds of books did I read this year? Here's a chart: (I only broke out series/authors if I read more than one of that series/author)
| SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR | # OF BOOKS | BOOKS/ MONTH | % OF ALL BOOKS |
| Doctor Who | 15 | 1.3 | 12.4% |
| Star Trek | 10 | 0.8 | 8.3% |
| Media Tie-In Subtotal | 25 | 2.1 | 20.7% |
| The Expanse | 3 | 0.3 | 2.5% |
| H. G. Wells1 | 3 | 0.3 | 2.5% |
| Other SF&F | 35 | 2.9 | 28.9% |
| General SF&F Subtotal | 41 | 3.4 | 33.9% |
| The Transformers | 20 | 1.7 | 16.5% |
| Legion of Super-Heroes | 2 | 0.2 | 1.7% |
| Other DCU Comics | 2 | 0.2 | 1.7% |
| Marvel Comics | 3 | 0.3 | 2.5% |
| Calvin and Hobbes | 3 | 0.3 | 2.5% |
| Brian K. Vaughan | 3 | 0.3 | 2.5% |
| Other Comics | 6 | 0.5 | 5.0% |
| Comics Subtotal | 39 | 3.3 | 32.2% |
| James Bond by Ian Fleming | 2 | 0.2 | 1.7% |
| Victorian Literature | 1 | 0.1 | 0.8% |
| Other Literature | 4 | 0.3 | 3.3% |
| General Literature Subtotal | 7 | 0.6 | 5.8% |
| Other Nonfiction2 | 9 | 0.8 | 7.4% |
1. This actually includes both science fiction and literature by Wells, but I can't be bothered to separate them back out for the purposes of this report.
2. Nonfiction connected to a particular series or author (e.g., Calvin and Hobbes or H. G. Wells) is included in that series or author's count.
Last year I read over 85 comic books; this year, fewer than 40. Adding in 45 comic books would put me right back in the average range, so a big part of my decrease is that fact that since moving, I haven't resumed my ILL-based comics reading. I am pretty disappointed to realize how little non-genre fiction I am reading these days. Can I blame the Hugos?
As always, I picked the best book of each month as a "Pick of the Month." I fed all twelve of these into Preference Revealer, so here they are ranked from twelfth-best to best:
12. Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
11. Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio
10. Black Bolt: Hard Time by Saladin Ahmed
9. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
8. The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Walta Hernandez
7. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book One by Emil Ferris
6. Terra Ignota, Book III: The Will to Battle: A Narrative of Events of the year 2454 by Ada Palmer
5. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
4. No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Volume 10 by James Roberts, Alex Milne, et al.
2. "The Busiest Man in England": A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect & Victorian Visionary by Kate Colquhoun
And the "Pick of the Year":
1. In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan
I'm somewhat skeptical of how this list shook out, to be honest, but In Other Lands is definitely the best book I read all year. The full list of "Picks" going back to 2009 is here.
Lastly, here's my usual graph of my reading trends over time:
I hope I can improve some aspects of this next year... but I am very doubtful!
You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)
20 September 2018
Review: Belinda by Maria Edgeworth
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| Trade paperback, 500 pages Published 2008 (originally 1801) Acquired and read December 2017 |
'How my eyes have been blinded by her artifice! This last stroke was rather too bold, and has opened them effectually, and now I see a thousand things that escaped me before.' (181)Like The Romance of the Forest, I read this because I was told I might find some female proto-scientists in it; I found less science and less enjoyment in it than Romance of the Forest. The book sort of meanders an uninteresting protagonist through the Pride and Prejudiceesque but slightly more scandalous society of the early nineteenth century. Not much seems to happen, and it does so quite slowly.
19 September 2018
Review: Bernice Summerfield: The Vampire Curse by Mags L. Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard
Recently, I've been catching up on my Bernice Summerfield audio dramas over at Unreality SF; as aficionados will know, those are part of a multi-media narrative that also incorporates prose stories, and I'll be reviewing the prose installments here over the next few weeks.
Bernice Summerfield XII: The Vampire Curse
by Mags L. Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard
The Vampire Curse covers three different encounters with vampires across Bernice Summerfield's lifetime. (She also battle vampires in the New Adventures in Blood Harvest, which would go between the first and second stories in this volume.) The first, Mags Halliday's "The Badblood Diaries," is set during her postgraduate years, before she met the Doctor. She goes on an archaeological expedition which is (of course) attacked by vampires. The whole story is told in the form of a column she's publishing about her adventures, which somewhat strained my credulity, as she's very open about some things I'm not entirely convinced one would reveal to a broad audience. However, Halliday is great at capturing Benny's voice; we've heard a lot of it thanks to the use of her diary throughout her history, and I could easily imagine Lisa Bowerman reading the lines. It's filled with little observations of people that sketch in character very quickly and very well, and also feel very Young Benny. The plot, on the other hand, was a bit too straightforward. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but when it finished I was surprised that was all that had happened.
The second, "Possum Kingdom" by Kelly Hale, actually takes place during Benny's travels with the seventh Doctor, and he even puts in a brief (unnamed, of course) appearance on pp. 98-99. (I'd guess it goes somewhere between Set Piece and Original Sin.) Benny joins a group of time-traveling tourists in order to help track down an ancient, vampiric evil. I didn't entirely understand what was going on, as the story isn't told in order, but I enjoyed Hale's descriptions of Texas. The best part of the story, though, is the time tourism agency; the tour is about vampires, and so there are lots of good jokes about this, like the guy they meet outside Dracula's castle who matter-of-factly claims his uncle came back as a vampire to help with the kids, and the visit to the Edward and Bella Reenactment Society in Forks, Washington. I think it's the most complicated story in the volume, but also the shortest.
The last story, Philip Purser-Hallard's "Predating the Predators," is the best one. Set during series 9 of the audio dramas (probably between The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel and The Diet of Worms), the story is about an academic conference on vampires where the keynote speaker is a vampire. It's told as a collection of documents (shades of Dracula, there), mostly excerpts from the diary of a Jesuit priest and letters from a physics graduate student to his sister. It's funny and clever, as Purser-Hallard explores the sfnal implications of vampires on other planets to good effect. Benny's role isn't terribly huge, but it is significant, and also clever and funny. I really enjoyed reading it.
The whole collection is worth reading even if it is a little uneven. This doesn't reach the heights of some previous Bernice Summerfield three-in-one books like Nobody's Children or Old Friends, but it still shows off the strengths of the format. It's a shame that this would be its last use; from here on out, all the Benny books will be short-story anthologies or novels, nothing in between.
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Hardcover, 218 pages Acquired June 2013Published 2008 Read August 2018 |
by Mags L. Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard
The Vampire Curse covers three different encounters with vampires across Bernice Summerfield's lifetime. (She also battle vampires in the New Adventures in Blood Harvest, which would go between the first and second stories in this volume.) The first, Mags Halliday's "The Badblood Diaries," is set during her postgraduate years, before she met the Doctor. She goes on an archaeological expedition which is (of course) attacked by vampires. The whole story is told in the form of a column she's publishing about her adventures, which somewhat strained my credulity, as she's very open about some things I'm not entirely convinced one would reveal to a broad audience. However, Halliday is great at capturing Benny's voice; we've heard a lot of it thanks to the use of her diary throughout her history, and I could easily imagine Lisa Bowerman reading the lines. It's filled with little observations of people that sketch in character very quickly and very well, and also feel very Young Benny. The plot, on the other hand, was a bit too straightforward. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, but when it finished I was surprised that was all that had happened.
The second, "Possum Kingdom" by Kelly Hale, actually takes place during Benny's travels with the seventh Doctor, and he even puts in a brief (unnamed, of course) appearance on pp. 98-99. (I'd guess it goes somewhere between Set Piece and Original Sin.) Benny joins a group of time-traveling tourists in order to help track down an ancient, vampiric evil. I didn't entirely understand what was going on, as the story isn't told in order, but I enjoyed Hale's descriptions of Texas. The best part of the story, though, is the time tourism agency; the tour is about vampires, and so there are lots of good jokes about this, like the guy they meet outside Dracula's castle who matter-of-factly claims his uncle came back as a vampire to help with the kids, and the visit to the Edward and Bella Reenactment Society in Forks, Washington. I think it's the most complicated story in the volume, but also the shortest.
The last story, Philip Purser-Hallard's "Predating the Predators," is the best one. Set during series 9 of the audio dramas (probably between The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel and The Diet of Worms), the story is about an academic conference on vampires where the keynote speaker is a vampire. It's told as a collection of documents (shades of Dracula, there), mostly excerpts from the diary of a Jesuit priest and letters from a physics graduate student to his sister. It's funny and clever, as Purser-Hallard explores the sfnal implications of vampires on other planets to good effect. Benny's role isn't terribly huge, but it is significant, and also clever and funny. I really enjoyed reading it.
The whole collection is worth reading even if it is a little uneven. This doesn't reach the heights of some previous Bernice Summerfield three-in-one books like Nobody's Children or Old Friends, but it still shows off the strengths of the format. It's a shame that this would be its last use; from here on out, all the Benny books will be short-story anthologies or novels, nothing in between.
18 September 2018
Review: The Transformers: Primacy by Chris Metzen, Flint Dille, and Livio Ramondelli
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| Comic PDF eBook, n.pag. Published 2015 (contents: 2014) Acquired November 2016 Read August 2018 |
Story by Chris Metzen and Flint Dille
Art by Livio Ramondelli
Lettering by Tom B. Long
I was surprised at how much I liked Monstrosity. Similarly, I was surprised at how much I did not like Primacy. I didn't dislike it; I just didn't find much particularly likeable about it. While the first two parts of this trilogy, Autocracy and Monstrosity, captured some of that prequel energy, making you excited to see those raw, early moments in Transformers history, Primacy feels too much like the kind of Transformers stories you've seen a million times. Megatron has an evil plan, Optimus Prime angsts about something but wins anyway, rinse, repeat. This is set millions of years before the majority of IDW's work, but would slot into it just fine, which is disappointing. A prequel should capture something different about an ongoing story, but Primacy is too much of the same old thing.
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| Here it was the interaction of naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys that miraculously brought forth sentient beings. from The Transformers: Primacy #1 |
17 September 2018
Review: Secret History of Ireland: Invasions by C. Thomas Smith
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Trade paperback, 100 pages
Acquired December 2017Published 2017
Read June 2018
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by C. Thomas Smith
Did Téthur take a nasty fall, break a bone, get wounded? A wound that in those ancient times turned septic fast leading to a painful death. Or was Téthur ridding to within an inch of his life by eighteen young women who had bugger all to do of an evening and had yet to invent Ann Summers? Anything is possible. Though I should mention here that as a student of history, I don't know if I buy the whole idea of death by sex. For one thing, these stories have been passed down to us by monks, so sex, if the cause, would have been mentioned many times and in increasingly vulgar detail. And, sexual aids for women have existed for quite some time. [LONG DIGRESSION ABOUT SEX TOYS OMITTED] It is also possible that he ate a bad oyster or choked to death on a hazelnut with no one to offer the Heimlich manoeuvre as they were too busy diddling themselves stupid. You pay your money and you take your chance. (22-3)The whole book is like that, unfortunately, just a long, unfunny, poorly written synopsis of Irish prehistory. The only good thing I can say about the book is that it made me want to read about these stories in the hand of a competent author. I got the book as a present, and I can only conclude the gift giver was the author in disguise, or the gift giver completely lacks the ability to discern good from bad.
The book has 100 numbered pages, but the actual "novel" runs only 79 of them. That's still about 74 too many.
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