Knut! Nice to see your pixels here. I shall check it out.
Laura, I'm so pleased you're enjoying the Chanur novels. Isn't Pyanfar the best? I want her to get her own tv series. I really enjoy Cherryh.
In other news, Mely mentioned Gillian Bradshaw's Cromwell-era historical novels on Twitter today; she's the only other person I know who has read them! We decided that Bradshaw is sadly under-rated and underappreciated, given the volume of really solid historical fiction she has produced over her career.
The Smart Bitches have three or four books available on sale every day. Today's included the N.K. Jemison Fifth Season. I check it out every day ... and have found some good books there (also some not so good ones, but at least I didn't pay full price).
Laura, I'm so pleased you're enjoying the Chanur novels. Isn't Pyanfar the best?
She certainly is. The current one, #3 The Kif Strike Back, has been a tougher read for me so far. Maybe because I only seem to get a chance to read late night and there are just an overabundance of competing factions. That said, I might have a bit of a crush on Khym. He's an excellent mate.
I really enjoyed the Chanur novels when they came out; I had a membership in the SF book club, so I got them inexpensively.
I've enjoyed some of the inexpensive e-books I've gotten from the Smart Bitches site (they got me hooked on Talia Hibbert - just finished "Get a Life Chloe Brown", K.J. Charles and a few others). One I finished recently was "Book of Love", which was a nice, quiet romance. No major conflict between the main characters. But it had two people who helped each other change their viewpoint (he'd been told he was stupid, but she kept telling him he wasn't; she'd always believed that she'd never be able to marry someone she actually liked, until she fell for him).
And I got a collection of absolutely bonkers fantasy/romance books - by RJ Blaine. They postulate a world in which magic had gone but came back and now everyone's having to deal with mythical creatures (pixies, whose wing dust gets people high, unicorns, centaurs of various species, lycanthropes of various species, people who can do magic, etc.). And the author seems to have made up a bunch as well. Bonkers, I tell you. Also a fair amount of boinking.
I enjoyed "Get a Life Chloe Brown." I think it was recommended to me on Goodreads for fans of Jasmine Guillory.
Sounds interesting. Maybe I'll add RJ Blaine to the "To Look Into" list.
Good for pretty mindless amusement.
I think that pops up on my "you might like" lists, good to have an opinion beyond that to rely on...
I'm going to park these musings here so that I can, with luck, find them again later. I will not be offended if they are not of interest to anyone else and apologize for cluttering up the board, but it's really very convenient for me and the possibility of dialog about it is pretty enticing.
Anyway.
I've been listening to the BBC Radio Lord Peter Wimsey adaptations that were apparently concurrent with one of the TV adaptations (mostly, Gaudy Night wasn't broadcast until 2010 and the rest were I think early 80s) mostly because while reading Clouds of Witness I had a strong sense memory of hearing one of the lines of dialog that made me remember that I heard some of these come on after Hitchhiker's Guide when I was in high school and that is very likely what prompted me to go looking for Sayers in the library in the first place. Also because I haven't watched the TV adaptations yet and I'm generally interested in judging how adaptations stack up to novels (unless I am too emotionally invested in the novel in question and can't risk the adaptation being terrible, but that isn't true of these).
There were definitely points where hearing the dialog rather than reading it made things clear that had been obscure. As St George says at one point, the family charm does not live on the page. Well, it must to some extent, but between the difficulty on parsing tone in print and 80-100 years of history between publication and me reading it today I can't always interpret the intention behind the words on my own.
They are abridged, of course, and they mostly manage to cut out the bits I don't like while keeping what I do like, so that works out well. There are some of my favorite bits from Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night that didn't make it in, which is too bad, but you can't have everything. Busman's Honeymoon especially benefits, I think. IIRC, it was a play before it was a novel, and I am starting to think that when Sayers made it a novel she just threw in whatever popped into her head without thinking about it very much
So I'm thinking about Busman's Honeymoon and how sometimes when we are in Peter's head he seems very un-Peter-like and that made me think of the Big Lebowski and I have been the seized by the idea that the eventual monograph or thesis or whatever that all this should be leading to will have to include a chapter or so on how the Dude embodies the traditional amateur detective, perhaps especially the gentleman detective. The dressing gown and the bathrobe. The leisure time. Being dragged into the investigation by personal involvement. It's rough but I want to keep it in mind.
and I have been the sized by the idea that the eventual monograph or thesis or whatever that all this should be leading to will have to include a chapter or so on how the Dude embodies the traditional amateur detective, perhaps especially the gentleman detective. The dressing gown and the bathrobe. The leisure time. Being dragged into the investigation by personal involvement. It's rough but I want to keep it in mind.
That's a very interesting take!
