Adam's Rib, 1949 - ★★½
Moderately amusing Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film about two lawyers. He's an assistant DA, she's a defence attorney. How could they not end up on two sides of the same case? Could it be about anything other than a woman trying to shoot her philandering husband?
It's pretty good on discussing the law and how it should be applied, though not exactly deep. Enjoyable enough, though.
Evil Under the Sun, 1982 - ★★½
After our recent slow binge of the TV Poirot series, which I don't think I've written about here, a small look at one of the other actors who played the great Belgian detective. To wit, Peter Ustinov.
At first I didn't think I was going to enjoy this. Ustinov isn't David Suchet, and all the other actors seemed to be hamming it up to almost comical levels. But it settled down and/or I adjusted to it. I enjoyed it enough on the whole.
Not a great detective movie, but a pleasant enough one.
I love that today’s Xkcd (probably strictly yesterday’s) celebrates the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired powerstation in such a British way: do all the sums in metric, then convert at the last to inches.
California Suite, 1978 - ★★★
This quadripartite tale of four groups (three couples and one pair of couples) at a Los Angeles hotel on the night of the Oscars is, inevitably, a tale of parts.
We decided to watch in honour of Maggie Smith, who died the other day, and who won an Oscar for her role as an actress nominated for an Oscar. That feels like a sort of irony, but is nothing to do with the film itself.
To my mind we have two good stories — the Maggie Smith/Michael Caine and the Jane Fonda/Alan Alda ones — and two others that vary from farce to racist stereotyping, without adding much to the overall experience.
Which is a shame, because the two good parts are pretty good.
Let my phone update to iOS 18 overnight, and this morning… it’s hard to see the difference.
There wasn’t even a message saying, ‘Your phone was updated…’
Currently reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚
So many editions, and none of them with quite the cover I have: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.
It must be 40, 45 years since I last read this and there are currently a lot of sequels and connected works I want to read, so I thought I’d go back to the source.
Finished reading: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson 📚
If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).
Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.
And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.
I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.
Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.
Books 2024, 18
What's Up, Doc?, 1972 - ★★★★
Fancied watching a screwball comedy. I remember seeing this with my parents when I was a kid. They loved it, and so did I.
Turns out it stands up pretty well. Four people arrive in San Francisco and check into the same hotel. They have identical suitcases. What could possibly go wrong?
Contains what was probably the first car chase I ever saw, and remained the funniest until, I'd guess, I first saw The Blues Brothers.
Finished reading: The Library of the Dead by T. L. Huchu 📚
I saw Tendai (as is his name) interviewed at Worldcon last month. Went along without knowing anything about him or his writing, and the interview was interesting enough that I went and bought this in the dealers' room immediately afterwards. Or maybe the next day, but you get the idea.
It’s the first of the Edinburgh Nights series, which I think is currently at three books with a fourth on the way and a fifth planned. Which means it kind of violates one of my personal guidelines to have bought it, but what the hell, you know?
Anyway, it’s set in an alternative Edinburgh where there’s magic. The time is approximately the present day, because there’s things like smartphones. But our heroine, Ropa, can talk to ghosts, which tend to hang about when they’ve got unfinished business back on the plane of the living.
And a whole lot more happens besides. It’s a pretty bleak environment that she lives in, essentially a shanty town of caravans on the edge of the city, very much hand to mouth. It feels kind of post-apocalypse, but I don’t think there’s been anything quite as disastrous as that, just a slow decline. Not sure, though, there are hints at things. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.
As far as the ‘Don’t start a series that the author hasn’t finished writing’ guideline goes, it’s pretty standalone, thought with plenty of setup for more.
Books 2024, 17
Finished reading: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson 📚
I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.
It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.
Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.
Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.
It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career it over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.
Books 2024, 16
The Death of Stalin, 2017 - ★★
It's a comedy, but I have to say, I find very little humour in it. Especially not the first half.
Certainly there's farce: moving Stalin's body around, all that. But the terror, the killings, the torture, the rape: none of it shown, exactly, but all right there in front of you. It's mostly just too fucking serious for me to laugh at it.
Finished reading: Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson 📚
I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.
We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.1 But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.
Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?
Books 2024, 15
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Not really titular: Brodie’s name doesn’t appear in the title, after all. ↩︎
Finished reading: The Last Dark: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 4 by Stephen Donaldson 📚
When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.
And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.
But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.
Books 2024, 14
Murder on the Orient Express, 1974 - ★★
We've been watching the old Poirot TV series, inspired by me getting the book this film is based on last Christmas. More on the series later, perhaps, but it drops in quality in later seasons, when the production company changes.
And in season 12 it does Murder on the Orient Express and it frankly does quite a bad job of it. Not least in the suddenly-Catholic Poirot's struggle with his conscience.
Having him struggling with his conscience over his decision at the end isn't automatically a bad thing. But in the context of the series, it's just not the same character as earlier.
However, we're talking about the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version here. It's no more than OK. If you didn't know the story maybe it would be better, but I'm not sure. It's quite a stellar cast, and most of the individual parts are played well, but in the end it all just comes out as not very good.
Maybe the source material is to blame. Or more likely, the setting. It's like a bottle episode, in that it almost entirely takes place on the train. That maybe doesn't lend itself well to good cinema.
Finished reading: The Legend of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot 📚
I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.
I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.
Books 2024, 13
Well, I guess that was the last working day of my fifties.
Big Thief were good, if tending toward the prog at times.
At Gunnersbury Park for the PJ Harvey gig.
Took an age to get here, from East London to a long way West. Bar has the worst selection of beers I’ve seen at a festival-like event for years. Red Stripe or Jubel lager with fruit flavours. Trying the peach one atm. It’s not good. I suspect they’ve had to cut it with fruit because it’s piss.
Oh well, Big Thief should be on soon.
Wicked Little Letters, 2023 - ★★★
Billed as s comedy, and based on a true story. It's good, but unfortunately all the funniest moments are in the trailer. So don't watch that if you want the best comedy experience.
It's more drama than comedy, anyway. It's the 1920s in Littlehampton on the the south coast of England, and a woman in her 30s who lives with her parents starts receiving expletive-filled, ranting letters. The whole community is shocked, and who're you going to blame? Obviously the Irish woman who lives next door.
Worth a look.
Finished reading: Against All Things Ending: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3 by Stephen Donaldson 📚
Not going to say much about this here, as I’m already well into the next (and final) volume, and they’re very much a single story.
Books 2024, 12