Running a little late here, so a couple of very short reviews for last week’s stuff.
This week’s book(s): Still Life
Donelly does a sort of celtic horror – the stories are generally set in Scotland, and rooted in (heavily fictionalised) myths and legends about ancient Druids and witchcraft. I still think his first book, Bane, that I read many years ago, is his best, but these three did manage to keep me nicely entertained for a week or so. While his books have common elements – he’s particularly fond of slapping a love story into them, and his works do tend to be written from a default position of of Decent Man looking after Capable-But-Still-In-Need-Of-Rescuing Woman – the books are different enough not not feel entirely like you’ve read the same thing from him before.
I would heartily recommend Bane to anyone, and of these three, I think Still Life was the strongest.
This week’s music: A to Z of Classical Music by Various Artists
Nope, still can’t do it. I do like this stuff, but it completely fails to command even a fraction of my attention. Were I buy classical music in a serious manner, I’d need to buy it, and sit doing nothing but listening to it. Which isn’t unreasonable, except that that’s not how I listen to music – I’m almost always doing something else with music playing, but I do like to be aware of the music, and with this, I’m just not – I might as well be sitting silence. Once in a blue moon, I’ll lie in bed and just listen, but even then, I want something that’s not going to let me drift into thinking about other stuff. I feel like a bit of a philistine, but there you go. Anyway, I’ve always got the jazz collection to prove that I do in fact listen to music for grown ups when the mood takes me.