cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2007-01-02 10:41 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2007-01-02 10:41 pm
Entry tags:
Something I had just about scraped through
First completed book of the New Year. I have an appalling backlog (booklog?) to get through as well, but I'm currently ignoring that.
In his Dalziel & Pascoe series; dry, laconic, well-written, and consistently unexpected plotting. This one completely fooled me, and it's probably just as well I can't explain why without spoilers, because I was so totally drawn in that it's just embarrassing. All done fairly, too; no cuts away while the detective explains something, or guilty person's pov ("tonight I followed them again. Little do they know their vengeance lurks so close!" etc etc) with deliberate name/gender omissions. I fell into the heffalump trap all by myself.
This is about book 7 or so, I think; I'm having some trouble tracking down the middle ones, after getting from A Clubbable Woman to A Pinch of Snuff without much trouble and only, I think, one omission. Then, there's an out-of-print gap until the more recent ones. I've already jumped forward once (to On Beulah Height) and regretted missing out on that much backstory, so no matter how much Arms and the Woman tempts me, it's back to mostly in sequence reading.
I also (re)watched Labyrinth at the moment, which is coming under the heading of research. It, and Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock (which is much more overt about it), are very useful frameworks for thinking about fantasy, sexuality and the fifteen year old girl.
In his Dalziel & Pascoe series; dry, laconic, well-written, and consistently unexpected plotting. This one completely fooled me, and it's probably just as well I can't explain why without spoilers, because I was so totally drawn in that it's just embarrassing. All done fairly, too; no cuts away while the detective explains something, or guilty person's pov ("tonight I followed them again. Little do they know their vengeance lurks so close!" etc etc) with deliberate name/gender omissions. I fell into the heffalump trap all by myself.
This is about book 7 or so, I think; I'm having some trouble tracking down the middle ones, after getting from A Clubbable Woman to A Pinch of Snuff without much trouble and only, I think, one omission. Then, there's an out-of-print gap until the more recent ones. I've already jumped forward once (to On Beulah Height) and regretted missing out on that much backstory, so no matter how much Arms and the Woman tempts me, it's back to mostly in sequence reading.
I also (re)watched Labyrinth at the moment, which is coming under the heading of research. It, and Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock (which is much more overt about it), are very useful frameworks for thinking about fantasy, sexuality and the fifteen year old girl.