something queer going on

Currently reading: I was in the mood for some entertaining nonfiction, so I'm roughly a third of the way through Amy Stewart's The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Created the World's Great Drinks. It's more factual and historical than anecdotal, which I like, and Stewart carefully distinguishes between legend and what's actually known through documents and archaeology about the history of drinks. Also, there are cocktail recipes. The only downside is it's making me want to go out and buy a bunch of high-end spirits and unusual liqueurs.


Recently read: I've been re-reading a lot of Doctor Who novels, specifically the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels. That's why I haven't done a Wednesday reading post in several weeks, because it's hard to talk about them in a general way that isn't all wrapped up with Who fandom, the EDA series as a whole, my headcanon, etc. In summary: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street still annoys me mightily; the plot of Mad Dogs and Englishmen makes more sense on re-read but is still deliriously strange; Hope and Anachrophobia are boring; I skipped Trading Futures because Lance Parkin; The Book of the Still has wonderful moments, and Fitz declaring that his love for the Doctor is "the real thing" will never not be awesome, but someone needs to write fic dealing with the fact that what Carmodi does to Fitz is essentially rape; The Crooked World is the most morally serious book about cartoon characters EVER until it throws it away on the last page; History 101 doesn't do as much as it could with a brilliant premise, but Sasha and Fitz are amazingly slashy; Camera Obscura is even better than I had remembered it being, managing to be both really moving and fannishly squee-inducing (and not only for Who fandom--you can play Spot the Allusion); Time Zero is unnecessarily violent but I can forgive it a lot for sending Fitz and George Williamson on an arctic expedition together; I skipped The Infinity Race because it was terrible enough the first time; and The Domino Effect, while its prose is clumsy, is still a powerful dystopian story and ties back importantly into the Doctor's emotional history in the Earth Arc in a way that I won't specify because it's spoilery.

I've also read Jane Stevenson's London Bridges a fun romp of a crime novel that reminds me a bit of Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar books, only without their unfortunate tendency to have queer characters end up dead. I enjoyed it a lot, though I was a bit disappointed that ( character-related spoilers )
Speaking of confusion, while reading the novel I sometimes wondered if it had been written quite a lot earlier than 2000, when it was published. For one thing, none of the characters, including lawyers and international business people, has a mobile phone, and the existence of mobile phones is never even mentioned. This was noticeable because on a couple of occasions the plot turned on people needing to find and use a public phone--but mobiles were hardly rare in England by 2000, were they? The other reason I wondered is that the homophobia of a minor character seems extremely blatant and aggressive for that time, considering the character is an academic who specializes in classics. I was finishing up my Ph.D. in English in 2000, and while I had heard a few veiled homophobic remarks around the department, and certainly had experienced some right-wing academic backlash disguised as "real old-fashioned scholarship," I don't think I ever encountered or heard about open homophobia from professors. Of course I was at a U.S. university and not a British one, but if anything I'd have thought that would make open homophobia more likely. Anyway, those two things made me wonder if perhaps the novel had been kicking around in manuscript since the late 1980s or early 1990s.


What I'm reading next: I don't know for sure, but I should probably re-read some Jane Austen again or try to finish Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, which I like but keep getting bogged down in. I can't properly write Regency English if I'm not reading it, and I need to be able to write it for That Project.

sineala asked about my favorite Classic Who stories and why I love them. I've divided it up by Doctors, because there was no way I could pick just one or two stories for all of Classic Who. Or even all I've seen of it, which is the Second, Third, Fifth, and Eighth Doctors, most of the Fourth Doctor episodes, and a few of the First and Sixth.

( Second Doctor )

( Third Doctor )

( Fourth Doctor )

( Fifth Doctor )

( Eighth Doctor )

It occurred to me recently that there were, actually, a couple of Eighth Doctor Adventures novels (with Fitz in them) that I hadn't read: the two volumes of Interference by Lawrence Miles. I'm not quite sure why I left what are widely considered to be key books in the series for last . . . except possibly that they are so widely considered the EDAs, and I have a perverse tendency to avoid things that are widely and strongly hyped. Well, there's also the fact that I'm not particularly a Lawrence Miles fan, having greatly disliked both The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and what I've read of his blog posts about Doctor Who.

But eventually it seemed silly to keep on not reading Interference. So I read it.

( A few spoilery reactions under the cut )

I just finished re-reading Mark Michalowski's EDA Halflife. The first time I read it I was fairly new to the EDAs, and I probably should have waited, because it relies on knowing the characters a lot better than I did then. ( spoilers )