ReaderWriterVille

A week full of work stuff, but mostly moving forward on a number of projects and meeting deadlines, so the next week will be freer.

WORK

I had a bunch of phone meetings which were very productive and pleasant. If you’re going to have lots of admin, it helps to have a minimum of conflict.

I’m bored with writing about work. It’s summer!

READING/WATCHING/LISTENING

I finished Iain M. Banks’s Matter and found it extremely satisfying. It’s a mashup of medieval fantasy, family drama (which of course goes with medieval fantasy), Big Dumb Object SF, and space opera with Banks’s patented Mindships. The ending comes all of a rush, as usual, and there is a ton of exposition, as usual. Some readers dislike this installment of the Culture novels a lot, some love it. I’m in the latter camp. Oh, I alternated reading and listening to the audiobook, which had someone that wasn’t Peter Kenny as the narrator. Sacrilege! He was fine, but I missed Kenny. I hear his voice whenever I read Banks now.

On the watching front, we discovered that our library’s Hoopla (which we can use via Roku on the TV) has a bunch of the original French Inspector Maigret TV shows. They are from 1992 onward, but they feel as if they were made in the 1970s, and they are set in the 1950s, so they feel very vintage and noir. The whole cast is excellent and Bruno Cremer is perfect as Maigret. I haven’t seen Michael Gambon or Rowan Atkinson in the role, but I have trouble believing either can embody the character as well. One nice thing about the language is that it is straightforward enough that I can understand a lot of it (although the subtitles are very good for non-French-speakers). Anyway, I recommend the series if you have access to it and like the novels.