(no subject)

Reasons not to get the US edition of anything: There's nothing jars quite like a Scotsman in a Neil Gaiman book apparently thinking the word 'sidewalk'.

The free ebook of Neverwhere has already told me it has enough newness, compared to the TV, for it to be worth buying. I'll get one next time I'm in town.

(no subject)

I am reading Neverwhere. And I am finding it interesting, the ways the TV series was better than the book, and vice versa. The book, of course, has a higher budget for locations and effects, and can have people look precisely like their symbolism says they should. Some of the characters are shifting appearance in my head, others are not. All of them still have the same voices. But the book also sometimes takes too many words, or keeps going over things that the insightful got the first time. 'Personal physical services' is a funny once, but it gets old quickly. And the ratspeaker girl's story could have worked better with more of it left out. Novels can take as many words as they want - must take many, to count as a novel. TV has to pare it small. Both have strengths. Is interesting.

Of course the things I *meant* to read today were the books on screenwriting I got from Norwich yesterday. But I'm learning some of the same things this way too.

Neverwhere format thought

Comics are better at angels than live action can be. Something about how they're pared down to the essentials really suits the idea of angels. Words are okay, but pin things down so much. Angels dance on pins perhaps, but they don't so much be fixed down by them. Too much at once for little words. Or solid and particular flesh and blood.