beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have been finishing things and then going on to the next thing without writing them up, which today bothered me enough to go fetch the stack back here and write about them.

Doctor Who: Origin Stories
Difficult to give a rating. I think I decided on 3.5/5 stars in the end. The stories vary a lot.
The one about Vastra was very good indeed and I would give it a 5 as a short stand alone.
Same for the one about Kate and her mother and relationship with her father. Covered a lot of significant stuff for the page count.
The rest suffer rather from having to tidy up before they go. ( Read more... )

Glad I read it, not sure I'm happy how much shelf space it will take vs how many pages of it I actually liked.



Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song
I gave this one 5/5. It was going to be 4.5 but when I asked myself what more I would want from River Song published fiction I didn't think of much so I gave it a 5.
It's five shorter stories in one book, and among the Doctor Who running around saving things it manages to hit some strong emotional bits. River and children, or River and predestination paradox. A character that believes they've got a hard deadline. More than one character not recognised as a person by others, just shaped to someone else's design. And where the last story leaves her is also mean, but in a way that underlines canon and how rough it was on her.
I love stories with River, she's such an interesting character, and this set were great.


Big Finish Audio: The Diary of River Song: The Orphan Quartet
Another 5/5
Having said I love River, I am a bit behind on listening to her Big Finish stories. I think to start with I didn't want to run out, and this is the last under this series name. But there's more now with a different name so still some to listen.
These stories had a lot about love and loss and being left behind, not just by the Doctor, but by family, mothers and their children, trying to balance letting go and feeling lost.
I'd have more detail to say if I'd written this right after I listened.
I don't remember much about the Excise Men. I feel like it did a clever plot about forgetting so this might be thematic on my part. It hit me in the feels the least, but it was good plot.
Harvest of the Krotons really worked. I remember loving everything with Jackie and River together. A friendship I would not have thought of but they work, and River has a perspective that's helpful for empty nest Jackie Tyler.
oh hey, free excerpt on Big Finish is this ep https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-diary-of-river-song-harvest-of-the-krotons-excerpt-2925
It seemed to strike a balance between having fun with gossip magazine characters and valuing Jackie's perspective. She's so distinctive for DW she goes great with a lot of characters now I think about it.
Dead Man Talking was powerful stuff, made more so because I didn't guess when it was set until it told me, and then a lot of things clicked like cold water. Strong story.
The Wife of River Song is an excellent story. I particularly liked ( Read more... ) The story covered a lot of strong emotional ground, leaving and being left, not leaving and being called in like River calls the Doctor, lots of echoes and issues and feelings. I do recommend it. Trigger warning though, ( Read more... ).



UNIT Incursions
I listened to this one for the story The Power of River Song. There was not as much River Song in it as I was in the mood for, and I didn't feel like I knew the UNIT characters well enough to get any layers of meaning going.
Picking up the 8th box set in a series as your first listen will do that though.
I gave it 3.5 stars at the time, but it has some good ideas and I'd probably like it better if I was here for the main characters.


The last one I was going to review I can't right now remember if I reviewed it before, and the journal search isn't working for me at the minute. Also I don't think the bit where I fell asleep in the middle was the story's fault. So I'll leave it be. It's more fun telling about the good ones.

Many good ones exist and here are several.

Finished reading Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels.
Matthew Swift is an excellent character and the magic in that book is amazing.
I'd not remmbered the story in much detail but there were bits I'd taken away as truths, like life is magic.

Very excellent book.

I saw one of prokopetz tumblr posts about trying to find the earliest reference to d66 and the trouble it takes to hunt down a particular issue of White Dwarf

and I wondered, which issues do I actually have? they're on the shelf behind the bedroom door so I rarely see them and haven't figured out how to librarything them. but I now have photos, and yep, I have 105 September 1988. 103 might even be when I started buying them, I think the half dozen earlier ones were acquired as back issues. Last one I have is 197, I'm not missing many back to 122. Missing 129; 131; 141; 143; 149; 153; the rest seem continuous. Before that scrappy, I have like 14 issues. 112; 111; 110; 109; 106; 105; 103; 89; 87; 69; 68; 67; 66; 65. I think before 103 is back issues because after that they have all the hallmarks of being in my backpack a lot.

Oh wait, I also have 99, I just filed it with the DnD books because I used it for random tiefling features, iirc.

It's not that tumblr or dreamwidth needs to know, it's just prompted me to check so I may as well write it down.

It's just that while I am aware of the linear passage of time it seems weird that things I bought at the newsagent are hard to find. Even if the newsagent in question closed long ago.

My sleep pattern hit the point where I don't get an actual 8 hours for Too Long and my week went all anxiety and tired. But I'm pretty much okay, it'll just be a few days until my sleep is helpful times again.

I picked up the Scholomance trilogy to read when I needed to stay awake for a Task. ... El is wrong about *every*thing. It's not subtle. She confidently asserts something and it'll be wrong over the page. But it doesn't feel like cheating because they're teenagers teaching themselves from a library and she's, like, perma angry stormclouds, so you know she means it, and then we get Fun Surprises.
... many things are made clearer earlier on than we actually knew how to figure at the start. There are not so much clues as just plain showing. But we don't know that yet.
I like the endings because it's just El going Or We Could Just Not Kill People and making it stick.

But I also sort of ran out of steam a couple chapters before the end because I could remember how it ends and the elaborate multi region xover ficish setting in my head got my attention instead.
... it's never going to be a fic until I can think of specific problems and solutions and properly satisfying endings rather than just ways to tangle everyone's problems together into new configurations. And even then it's too many steps from any one canon to be good fic...

The lingering problem with the Scholomance is the math is just... big messy feelings math rather than actually making sense in the family structures we see. It bothers me. You need to compare it to historical ways of life and death and tweak it around a bunch to make it make sense at all.

But the big messy feelings are motivation enough for the huge grand gestures that make the plot go, so it sort of works, unless you get a calculator out.

Good reading for this week though.



... other half read books required too much concentration and like metaphors and layers and subtlety, and I can't even spell subtlety the first half dozen tries, so, I put them back for later.

Monster go boom is easy to follow and satisfying though.
Monster get healed is better.

This is a very good book.
A very good book that required more concentration than I've had on several of the days I tried to read it, since it's made of dense politics and interesting language, but my concentration isn't optimal lately.
( Read more... )

I liked this book very well and gave it five stars.

I'd also like the ability to not check the internet every few minutes, but that I am apparently working on.

9, Jack, and Rose get drawn into an adventure when Jack answers a distress call.

I havent reread these early DW books for ages, so they feel new again.

The only bit of the book I didnt quite like is the title. It says in the back it was named after the title font for this book series, and it is indeed a good title, but it didnt seem to follow from the rest of the story.

But it was a good story. With lots of good Captain Jack bits.

One bit that caught my imagination was when someone asked if he was really a Captain, and he said 'born and bred' (p30), which isnt exactly a fitting answer with our current system. But you can get all sci fi with it and imagine colony ships heading towards the Boeshane Peninsula, each with their own ship Captain, handing down the responsibility through the family. I kind of like the idea that Jack was raised to feel responsible for everyone around him, and a bit in charge. Not sure it fits with John mocking him for it, or 'hey, I worked my way up through the ranks'. Can make it fit if you want though, like nobody taking small boat 'Captains' seriously, or respecting hereditary power, but Jack did work his way up this time.

Another Jack bit is where a 19 year old girl is injured so she looks old and is mostly not responding to stuff going on around her. Jack insists on protecting her and treating her as an injured person, not a lost cause like some of the others think. He says he used to be afraid of dying, or facing death in combat, but now he's afraid of growing old and having to depend on other people, with only his memories to console him.

... which of course gets *bleak* if you figure the Face of Boe is his future, or think about how much retcon took from him. Revisiting season one Jack is just... like watching the boulder start rolling.

The actual plot stuff rolled along proper adventure. Though the author really doesnt respect cold enough. The characters are worried they'll run out of fuel to stay warm, yet they also survive going for a swim in frozen water with just a bit of a hug to get warm. Still, mostly it's sci fi stuff that holds together as sci fi stuff. Or possibly fantasy, given the mention of the 'Arcane Collegiate', which at least makes Pathfinder crossovers easier. ( Read more... )

I liked rereading this one.

I tried to read this without having a break for sleep etc, which was not wise. But you always want to know what happens next. And it made me feel a lot of stuff, so a lot of staring into space slowed down my expected reading speed compared to the page count. So, want to read the next bit teamed up with trying to deal with the last bit, until sleep had to happen.

This is a good book, dealing with big things. Radicalisation and genocide, it says in the trigger warnings at the front, and a lot of other things as well. The warnings are clear and necessary and you should give a good think to if you're in a place to deal with all that or yoy'll bounce off the book at least.

But it's also a fast paced adventure with a strong point of view character whose personal limitations are why she learns about her world along with the reader, and then breaks out of the constraints she learned. Character growth is primary, big fight scenes are what's happening at the time. It's all vivid and clear, and that's often why I ended up needing a minute before I turned the page.

It even had a good answer to the whole 'why are the teenagers dealing with this' thing. And every time it seems like the math doesnt work out that is in fact a Clue, and the worldbuilding follows through on clues.

This book starts out in such an extreme place it seems difficult to imagine being anywhere close, but it has got plenty to say to the impulse to figure out who is the bad guy and where to punch. It's a strong story.

This leads on from something mentioned in the previous audio and does give Jack the chance to charge to the rescue about it but in a way that leaves Gwen completely out of her own story so that's boring.

I can't think of much to say about this one.
It sort of happens around Jack and to everyone else, and I cant see much to do with character or theme in there.
It didnt feel much like a Torchwood or Doctor Who story, ( Read more... )

At best I feel this could be rewritten with the same ingredients to have actual story in it.

But I like it less the more I think about it.

Which is a bit sad for the last one in a box set.

Read by Tom Price and featuring Andy Davidson, this one has a solid mission statement, that Torchwood is gone and the regular people are left coping with the fallout.
But it kind of didnt work for me. Like, it was not, in fact, fallout from Torchwood's actions that kicked off the first half of the story, or even specifically the rift. And the second half was... ( Read more... )
It wasnt very satisfying. I'd keep a lot of the people bits but swap out everything after they left Cardiff I think.

But it wasnt like it was bad either. Just... left me with that niggly rewrite feeling.

I liked this one. Read by Kai Owen, and also by Rhys Williams, a lot (a lot a lot) of the Torchwood stuff in this is happening around the edges of what Rhys really notices. So huge great alien invasion stuff and entire buildings doing time shifty things are happening, and mostly Rhys notices because it messes with the routes for his lorries.

I liked when the satnav started talking to people, and Rhys hears about it because the drivers say they dont like what it's telling them to do, so you Imagine a lot of stuff, but then later Rhys hears it. ( Read more... )

So you get these big swings in emotion, and if the story was following anyone other than Rhys it would be a very different story emotionally, but because of his angle it's very grounded and keeps dropping funny in the middle of the end of the world.

It's very well told.

GDL reads audiobooks well.

This is such a weird balance of really cute moments with Jack and Ianto and silly gadgets, being all upbeat after the thing with the Daleks, and a really awful alien doing really awful things to people.
( Read more... )
I like the story a lot but it's doing the feelings rollercoaster where all the good bits are about to whip around into another horror bit over and over.

So, very Torchwood.

This audio book was good because it took a simple premise and let it roll until ordinary world turned into horror world. The sort of thing Torchwood is for imho. The alien bit interacting with people until drama happens. It was also good because the ending could be simple too. Sure the story just stops when they won, but this time it makes sense that it would.

It was kind of an action movie through most of the middle, and the opportunity to learn more about Jack whooshed straight by without useful effect, even when the Thing of the story is people start telling all their secrets. If it was fanfic they'd do soooo much more with that bit, but, boring instead.

And the most disappointing bit was Tosh and Ianto got left at base to do a lot of nothing much. And have the correct idea to save the day with, but, not very appearing in this story.

I think Big Finish has spoiled me, I keep expecting character in these stories. Instead, action action action.

Still, did what it set out to do, and nicely read.



Have to say, so far not enjoying the audio book experience. Could be words on a page. Could be an audio adventure. But no, someone is reading me a story and I have to go at their speed all the way through. Not awesome at that.