Me
S'up, my name's Rachel, I'm a twenty-two three four! FIVE (ugh how did I get so old) year old medical student DOCTOR, YO. You may offer me your congratulations on having reached this, the highest pinnacle of nerditude. My defining characteristics are a disgusting love of pink (it's stealth ninja, okay - I have a theory. A long one) and a fear of falling down stairs. Don't run with scissors, guys. Otherwise, I write fanfic.

Tags include:
Bandom fic, Harry Potter fic (ETA: I don't write this any more! If you're friending hoping for updates, you're on to a losing streak), Prince of Tennis fic, House MD fic, Entourage fic, Sky High fic, Star Trek fic and Stargate Atlantis fic. There's even the odd original fic shoved in there somewhere.
For fic that's not actually posted on my journal, because I am the ultimate lazyass, try my del links.

My policy from hereon in is friending anyone who comments on THIS HERE POST. While I read my entire flist most every day - look mom, no filters! - I am an indifferent commenter. I also fail at keeping up with who's friended me, despite multiple alerts. That's what happens when you read your email at one am after hours of refreshing assays into the fascinating world of microbiology. Comment here to be added! Or don't! I'm easy. I have pink tights.

The end.

P.S. Feel the need to vent/rant/critique all over my writing? Here's your chance! Anon is on.

Oh yeah, and I love those little lj v-gifts. YES, THIS IS A HINT.

1. Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
2. Sprig Muslin, by Georgette Heyer
3. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen (reread; from now on I'm adding them in JUST BECAUSE I CAN

1. Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig

This book was actually one of my father's Christmas presents to my mother, so I swept through the first three-quarters of it before I thought she'd miss it. As it turns out, it's a book that does well to be read quickly rather than slowly, because the moment I started taking my time over it the story flagged.

It's a first-person narrative from a Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, an Austrian army officer, who on the eve of WWI strikes up an uneven friendship with Edith, the crippled daughter of a local millionaire.

( Spoilers )

2. Sprig Muslin, Georgette Heyer

I should have known better than to pick this up on the recommendation of someone who writes Jane Austen paralit. Still, it was in the house, it wasn't her worst and it took me a day, so no harm done.

The story of rescued waif Amanda and her erstwhile protector Sir Gareth, who meets her on his way to offer marriage to the suitable spinster Lady Hester, is a bait and switch in the style of Cotillion, without Cotillion's masterful diversionary tactics or charming protagonists. Amanda grows more objectionable the further the story goes, because while her schemes are ingenuous her reason for carrying them out is little short of utter silliness. I would have liked more time with Lady Hester; I couldn't find her relations that objectionable when Lady Widmore is so hilarious. There's also the matter Sir Gareth's young relations, who are described in detail at the start then summarily dropped from existence. That's not unusual for Heyer, but it equally makes this, along with its other faults, one of her weaker works.

"Never mind that! He is coming, Hester, to make you an offer!"
"Oh, is he?" she said vaguely, adding, after a thoughtful moment, "Does he want me to sell him one of Juno's pups? I wonder he should not have told me so when we met in town the other day. It is not worth his while to journey all this distance - unless, of course, he first desires to see the pup."

I wish more time had been spent with Hester! There was certainly room for it, if all the blather about rescuing Amanda from her various scrapes was cut down to below the border of annoying.

Werewolves in their Youth, Michael Chabon

I can't say I find divorce as a short-cut theme for the longer one of 'how to irrevocably fuck up your life in all its dimensions' particularly interesting. Every short story in this collection seems to be about marriages and how they suck, but I could be mistaken; it took me a long time to finish all of them, because I find reading short stories a very stop-start process, and also because they were all both boring and creepy. I didn't keep many details in my mind because few of them were worthy of it, which makes writing this ~review~ kind of shaky. I'm slightly freaked out by the elements of paedophilia and rape that litter the backstories of these characters, all of whom I found to be reprehensible caricatures. If this had been the first work of his I'd ever written, it would also be the last.

Round-Up 2011

GOD I AM DISGUSTED. I didn't even make 50. Every year up until now has shown an increase - and 2011, the first full year of work: precipitous drop. WORK SUCKS YOU GUYS.

In case anyone is looking for the full list of what I read - I was too lazy to actually make a links list, feeling mostly that I was doing well to even write about the damn books at all - I'll put it here, in bold if I liked it.


The Regency Companion, Sharon Laudermilk and Teresa L. Hamlin
World Without End, Ken Follett
Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, Carolyn Turgeon
The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold
Miles, Mutants and Microbes, Lois McMaster Bujold
Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
Romancing Mr Bridgerton, Julia Quinn
The Brightest Star in the Sky, Marian Keyes
Room, Emma Donoghue
The Perilous Gard, Elizabeth Marie Pope
Before I Fall, Lauren Oliver
A Dance with Dragons, George RR Martin
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
The Final Empire (Mistborn Book One), Brandon Sanderson
Something From Tiffany's, Melissa Hil
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Devilish, Maureen Johnson
Blackout, Connie Willis
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney
Rumble on the Bayou, Jana DeLeon
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean
A Summer to Remember, Mary Balough
The Lady's Not For Burning, Christopher Fry
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennesse Williams
Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare
The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
On Writing, Stephen King
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
All Clear, Connie Willis
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kilmeny of the Orchard, L.M. Montgomery
The Golden Road, L.M. Montgomery
The Story Girl, L.M. Montgomery
Snuff, Terry Pratchett
The Magicians, Lev Grossman
A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness
Rainbow Valley, LM Montgomery
Spoiled, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
Jazz in Love, Neesha Meminger
Werewolves in their Youth, Michael Chabon

... that is a pretty crap ratio, lol. Although, go me for reading a non-fiction book for once.

So it's nearly 2012! I didn't really notice except for how I kept trying to write 1/12/11 instead of 1/1/12 on the blood forms. My brain? Not that quick on the uptake.

Instead of talking about that, I'm going to relate instead my experiences with a certain part of the internet that has been exercising me greatly in the last few days. It is nothing other than the proliferation of blogs belonging to women (I think I can safely say they're ALL women) who write Jane Austen fanfic.

They don't call it Jane Austen fanfic, of course. They call these barques of intrepid genius sequels - and lolariously, each of them refers to their sequel as 'the' sequel. But they ARE fanfic. Unlike fanfic they are generally just bad, at least from the excerpts. (Fanfic has a rollicking bell curve, from HIDEOUS to actual near-on genius. Not so here; everything is painfully average.) I've read two published ones as well, but I actually thought they were rare. MORE FOOL ME. I went looking for Pride and Prejudice fanfic about a year ago and came up empty-handed. Now I know the reason: people have copped that you can charge for it.

What I find oddest about these 'authors' is how weirdly they approach Austen's work. One of them keeps quoting from the novels as if they were factual sets of opinions that Austen had just strung together. I know we all love lambasting authors for being crap with women, POC, rape etc, but when it comes right down to it, unless expressly stated, opinions in a book are the opinions of the characters, not the author. Sure, they might tally closely - or exactly, if you're inclined to self-insertion - but technically they can't be taken as the author's one true stance on ANYTHING.

One hates Fanny Dashwood, and said she fastforwards the first scene in Emma Thompson's version of S&S where Fanny talks John out of giving his sisters any money. Aside from the fact that the scene is superlative, in dialogue, setting, action and acting ... hating the 'evil' characters - whether Fanny, Mrs Norris or Lady Catherine - seems to me to defeat the purpose of liking Austen at all. Anyone could have written Elizabeth and Darcy. It takes an extremely talented connoisseur of human folly to create Mr and Mrs Bennet.

Someone - I think on ferretbrain - said once that Jane Austen hated everyone. I can totally accept this take. I meet a LOT of people in my line of work and I hate most of them. I don't think you can write the way she did without at least a kernel of hardcore bitterness. If she'd been a man in a larger world she might not have the Elizabeths, Elinors or Annes, but I think the secondary characters would have stayed. They make the books for me. It's a shame that modern romance authors of all stripes use the tried-and-tested and utterly boring paths that those heroines trod and don't explore the far more interesting, and numerically more common, motorways of the Mr Collinses of this world.

One blogger/author wanted Lady Catherine to get her comeuppance in her 'the' sequel. Er, I'm not sure how you could top HAVING HER SUPER-DOOPER ARRANGED MARRIAGE PLANS SCUPPERED. One blogger/author said she followed the plot of Persuasion with utmost pedantry so she could make sure every plot-point tallied in her 'the' sequel. The first line of her blurb? States that Anne Elliot's FATHER was the one who convinced her to give up Wentworth. DING DING, WRONG ANSWER. I'm pretty sure that Anne would have gone ahead with the engagement had she Lady Russell's blessing, but the point is moot; it's Lady Russell that Wentworth despises. He and Anne both see that Sir Walter is nothing more than a blustering nincompoop. This same author 'interviews' Anne Elliot to promote her novel. It was the weirdest and most disturbing thing I've ever read, even allowing for the fact that the woman has no hold on Anne's character whatsoever.

Many of you, like myself, probably adore the multiple adaptations of Jane Austen films, like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and well…Persuasion. Yet, how many of you have the patience to tackle the Napoleonic-Era verbiage novels? Thus came my inspiration to introduce my friends to the magic of Jane’s pen in a language a modern day woman can relate to.

It's not that I have no words. I have MANY words. Most of them are FUCK. The rest are YOU.

I'm pretty sure this can all be blamed on Colin Firth. These women want to self-insert into Jennifer Ehle's shoes so they can see His Wetness up close. That's fair enough, but I'm surprised they don't acknowledge it ... then again, how many people acknowledged that it was Tom Felton that turned them on to Draco Malfoy, not JK's superb and subtle rendering of a bully with a heart of gold (or whatever)? In my case, it was fandom that turned me on to him, but Tom Felton sure did help.

Me? I'd take Mr Bennet any day.

... and in a semi-related note, could Andrew Davies maybe stop writing the scripts to EVERY AUSTEN ADAPTATION EVER? He wasn't bad in P&P, maybe because he stuck pretty much exactly to the book's dialogue, but when he was left loose on S&S his deficits really started to show. I'm about to watch the Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey he wrote and, well, I'm apprehensive. (Also because BILLIE PIPER.)

If I wanted to hire someone to write a website for me, basically to shelve all my fics in complete format in one place plus a comments section, how would I go about it and how much would it cost?

I feel like my fics are shabby at the moment and now that I'm not constantly adding to them like I used to, or chopping and changing journals and archives, I want something permanent. Also ... I don't think I'll ever write fic again, so this would be a nice full stop. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

Jazz in Love, Neesha Meminger

I was really hoping that this wouldn't suck. Spoiler: it did. I don't know why - maybe it's the pervasive Western influence on my life - but I do love stories of children rebelling against strict, traditional upbringings, no matter the source. I loved Bend It Like Beckham because the family weren't vilified, but at the same time they came to learn to accept Jas for who she was - which meant abandoning some of their traditional viewpoints. Meminger loved Bend It Like Beckham too, because most of this story is ripped off from it, right down to the main character's name.

There were serious problems with her writing - I know she's trying to get into the head of a teenager, but there's still no need for triple exclamation marks - and some of the plot points were just ludicrous. The take-home message was 'you don't have to decide when you're seventeen that you love someone or indeed anyone', but it would have been nice if she'd, you know, flagged that at any point along the way. She also called the BBC 'British radio'. Enough said.


Spoiled, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Yes! It's the Fuggirls' book. I had high hopes of finding this entertaining and it was. It was clearly intended to be a semi-parodic take on teen movies with a dash of anti-Paris Hilton thrown in. The plot was a bit lurching and Molly, as a character, was long-suffering to the point where she was almost robotically emotionless, but it was funny. Brick Berlin, in particular, shone as a well-meaning but totally deluded and Hollywood-warped movie star. I have a feeling he's probably the most accurate portrait in the book.

Brooke often thought Brick was a perfect example of why literacy was overrated. He believed anything holistic-sounding as long as more than two posters on a message board agreed with it.

Massive props, too, for using 'fuck' instead of the lameass watered-down swear-words these books always come up with. I never know why. I think teenagers can handle profanity. They use it themselves with such alacrity.

( Spoile(er)d )


Rainbow Valley, LM Montgomery

I thoroughly loved this! It was funny and the characters were charming, particularly Norman and Ellen. I just LOVED their romance. I was horrified by the maltreatment of Mr Meredith's children, though. What started out funny quickly became full-blown neglect, and no one did a damn thing about it. Still, she's back on the side of poking fun at religion. Yay!

"Mr Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New Brunswick where he come from."
Mary is way more like what an orphan servant would be than Anne ever was.

"Fancy!" said Mary. "I saw the main street in Charlottetown once and I thought it was real grand, but I s'pose it's got nothing on heaven."

"We are bringing ourselves up, you know, because there is nobody to do it."
Faith says a variation of this to Mr Meredith about three times and he feels HORRIBLY GUILTY and then does fuck-all about it. What a shit dad.


A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness

OH MY GOD THIS BOOK.

Let's start from the end: her acknowledgements. Somewhere in the middle, when I thought the fucking thing would NEVER END and I wanted proof that it did, I read these. Apparently five people read her book chapter by chapter as she wrote it. My first thought? Wow, she is so lucky that five people would do that. My second thought: wow, her four best friends and her mother HATE HER.

This acknowledgement also recommends that you read a book about Darwin if you want more information on events in the story. What book is this, you ask? Oh, Janet Browne's biography on him. WHO THE FUCK IS JANET BROWNE AND WHY AREN'T YOU SUGGESTING THAT WE JUST. READ. DARWIN?!

I seriously hate this woman, actually, for putting me through this. (Sure, I could have stopped reading - as several people who watched me read it suggested - but how would I know how much I hated it if I didn't? It's Middlemarch all over again.) I hate this book so much I did something I have never in my life done before, even as a child: I DEFACED THE BOOK WITH MY OWN HANDWRITING. The same people who watched me read watched me do this (I've been in day ward; it's very quiet) and I read out a few of my comments for their amusement. It's the only amusement this book afforded, let me TELL YOU.

So basically it's Twilight for smart people. Bella - I mean Diana - is an Oxford/Yale graduate who's written a zillion books and is a PhD. However, her life was empty of any actual feeling or events until she meets Edward I MEAN MATTHEW who is a stark-white turtleneck-wearing shy vampire who is consistently presented and talked about as this fearsomely vicious creature, but as this all happens offscreen and all we ever see him do is be shy and bashful and wear turtlenecks I call bullshit. Diana herself wears nothing but black sweaters and LEGGINGS I KID YOU NOT, not jeggings or leggings under dresses but actually spandex leggings AS CLOTHES, and her hair is a mess, but OF COURSE she's fantasically beautiful.

We spend about 1,700, 453 (okay maybe 200) pages watching them drink wine together because they are SOPHISTICATED ADULTS OKAY and nothing like those Edward and Bella losers except THEY TOTALLY ARE. In fact by comparison Bella and Edward have a healthy, admirable relationship. There's never any question - aside from a token aside to create tension in a tensionless kidnap scene - that they are both SO IN WUV with each other and what keeps them apart is not that they question each other's feelings or motives or the fact that one of them is two billion years old, but a nasty old agreement made a thousand years before. Oh, and did I mention that Diana is a Mary-Sue with the hidden powers of every strand of witchcraft EVER? Oh yeah. That happened.

There are pages and pages and PAGES where nothing actually happens. I bet Harkness is proud of having produced such a monster - at 680-some pages it probably shakes out at over 140,000 words - but only about 40,000 of those are viable, story-related words. The rest are stuffing. And not even nice, yummy turkey stuffing, they're the stuffing that comes out of cheap pillows and smothers you in the FACE.

FOR EXAMPLE, every cup of tea Diana drinks is annotated. Same with every bath or shower she takes. I’m surprised, actually, given Harkness’ fascination with her character’s bodily functions, that we didn’t follow Diana to the bathroom every time she took a dump.

Now I'm going to write out all my comments with the phrases that provoked them. I'm sorry to have defaced a book but it's THIS book, so I think I'm even. My comments are in bold as I always use inky pens - DEATH TO ALL BIROS - it takes a super speshul technique not to smudge it and I am SUPER SPESHUL LIKE DIANA MY HAIR EVEN LOOKS THAT SHIT RIGHT NOW - and that's what they look like in the book.

( Spoilers, although if you actually want to read this book I am JUDGING YOU SO HARD )

Every time we have a drug rep-sponsored meeting* one of the consultants, who is so old-school he was around when the school was a kindergarden, always asks them to give a 'vaguely promotional talk'. At our Christmas dinner he stood up to give a speech and my intern yelled, "Make it vaguely promotional!" You ... probably had to be there.

*Every other class of worker gets really pissed about our 'free' lunches, which actually involve being inundated with dodgy statistics for ten minutes followed by an hour of teaching. I say, any time you want to pull a thirty-hour shift with no protected breaktime, cold showers and referrals for 'heroin overdoses' (Me: So they ... just took heroin? A&E: No, they took too much heroin. Me: Isn't ANY heroin too much heroin?) at five in the morning, feel free, and then see how much you enjoy uninspired free sandwiches and a cookie! JESUS CHRIST. (It's his birthday soon.)

The point of this was a thought I had about blogs. Blogs are awesome! But they are also relatively new. How did authors give their vaguely self-promotional talks before blogs? Before websites? Did Hemingway do book tours? I have to admit I am puzzled about what I've learned about being a twenty-first century author. I thought you just had to write the book. OH, WHAT INNOCENCE.

Also, I went out last night and did not have a good time. It was another hospital Christmas party, which might have contributed to that, because when I'm around other doctors I feel pretty insignificant. (Which is also why I wear blue polka-dot circle skirts and Barbie pink tights to work.) This post by the Bloggess actually made me feel a lot better. Just because I suck at this and other people don't doesn't mean I suck! I think. IS MATT DAMON MELANCHOLY?

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

OH HOLY FUCK AM I TIRED OF PEOPLE BLEATING ON ABOUT HOW THE 9-5 OFFICE JOB IS, LIKE, THE WORST THING EVER. BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT? IT'S NOT. NOT EVEN CLOSE. IT IS ACTUALLY THE DREAM. THE. DREAM. YOU KNOW WHAT A BAD JOB IS? ONE WHERE YOU HAVE TO WORK EVENINGS, NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS. ONE WHERE YOU ARE IN CONSTANT CONTACT WITH THE PUBLIC, SERVING THEM FOOD, RINGING UP THEIR PURCHASES, CLEANING THEIR TOILETS OR, YOU KNOW, STICKING YOUR FINGERS UP THEIR BUTTS TO SEE IF THEIR FAECES HAVE BLOOD IN THEM. THAT, MY FRIENDS, CONSTITUTES A BAD JOB. SO CAN THE NINE-TO-FIVERS PLEASE SUCK IT THE HELL UP AND JUST BE SO VERY SUPER GRATEFUL THAT THEY HAVE THE BEST TYPE OF JOB GOING? KTHANXBAI.

( Which basically is the subtext for this whole book. )

Snuff, Terry Pratchett

I loved young Sam.

( Spoilers. )

The Story Girl, L.M. Montgomery

This was cute and welcoming, just like pretty much everything of LM's that I've read. However, the story meanders like no one's business, and in fact there is no plot, just excuses for the Story Girl to tell stories. And whoa, she's like Anne without the charm. There seems to be way more religion in this than I remember from other books, or perhaps it's more obvious. I think the first-person perspective also throws me off, because it made it hard to distinguish between the boys for a long time..

The Golden Road, L.M. Montgomery

I love cats, but man did I get hella sick of the travails of Paddy. He's the most hypochondriac cat in the history of literature, not to mention being the only plot-driver. I also get irritated with these vague diagnoses plus premonitions of death in characters. You can't 'look consumptive'. Consumption is TB, and that doesn't just hang around for decades. It's a virulent infection that can kill you even in 2011, let alone 1911. If you caught it as a child or a baby you'd be dead and what's more, you'd know about it while you had it. arlkajsdhf!

( Spoilers of sadness )

Kilmeny of the Orchard, L.M. Montgomery

Holy hellcats Batman, this was some creepy paedophile-grooming shit. I didn't understand whether L.M. was trying to say God did punish Kilmeny for her mother's sin by giving her this one, cute disability (and also a savant talent at music - with no training! what!) or not. Plus, random hating on Italians. What.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not really a book, per se, but oh well! This read as very emotionally detached. I'm not sure what the word is for separating the reader from the action by using a certain tense, or way of writing, but he does it here (L.M. Montgomery does it all the time). I got the impression you were supposed to hate everyone in the story, including Benjamin. The movie, which I haven't seen, seemed to give it an emotional 'oh noes' side, but he presents it as merely ridiculous. Interesting but not loveable.

All Clear, Connie Willis

I'm so sad about this! I spent the whole book - much as I spent the previous book - waiting for the three characters to stop bumbling about and have the interesting part begin. And it never did. The eternal confusion and roadblocks they experienced were probably quite realistic for the time and place, but as a build-up to the finale it was mind-numbing.

( Clear spoilers )

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

I'm always curious, when books come with taglines like 'a virtuoso performance', as to what the reviewer saw in them that I didn't. 'A virtuoso performance' is to literature and its aspirants what 'a fast-paced page turner that keeps you hooked' is to thrillers and crime novels. What is the gain in putting generic reviews on books? They have never once, in my experience, referred to anything specific about the book, its writing or its events. The only review I've ever seen that made me want to read the book in question was in a Terry Prachett, from a BBC reviewer: "A complete amateur. Doesn't even write in chapters." This at the top of a long list of composite computer-generated 'yay book!' reviews. It was funny. It suggested that the writer also thought it funny and in that case, our senses of humour might match well enough for me to enjoy the book. Success!

Anyway, I didn't think this was a virtuoso performance by any means, nor did the titular goon squad show up anywhere, but it was a lot better than I expected. Egan's background appears to be in short stories and it shows. Every chapter, which was about a different interlinked character, was a self-contained story which dealt with one event in the person's life before detailing exactly what happened to them for the rest of their life in two paragraphs. It wasn't a bad way of writing, but it was rather puzzling. It also omitted a few people, mentioned briefly, who never get their life story finished. I was left wondering what happened to them.

The last chapter was set in the near future in a world post-large scale war with new technology. It seemed to be an anti-facebook screed, where everyone was angry that the government knew their favourite colour. Yes, facebook and co. can release lots of information about you to the world, but a) it's only the information YOU put in and b) everyone works on the assumption that anyone will actually care when, in fact, they usually don't. Facebook itself is a huge movement by many people to make other people give a shit about their daily lives, and failing. This chapter's tone was totally out of kilter with the tone and aim of the rest of the book and really let it down. It should have been cut. I'm guessing the only reason it stayed in was because it contained the book's only reference to goons, and they could have lost the title and the chapter with ease. (The Death of Punk, maybe?)

Working in a peripheral hospital = tenth ring of hell. SO. TIRED.

On Writing, Stephen King

The first half of this book is probably only of interest to those who are bone fide fans of King's and/or are deeply interested in the life stories of writers. The second half was a relief. King spoke at length about how he writes from intuition and doesn't plot. It's always nice to see things you recognise from your own writing. Terry Pratchett said his ideas come from the better writer who lives in his head at night; King feels the stories are fossils that you have to uncover as you write. All this makes sense to me. I don't know how it stands up to other how-to guides in the genre, but because it's Stephen King writing it, I read it, and am far more inclined to give it credence.

The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard

This was ... not a Stoppard masterpiece, let's just say that. It was entertaining and had some interesting things to say about fidelity versus marriage, but perhaps it would have worked better as prose.

The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare

I did the Right Thing and saw a live-action version of this before I read it. (Only by chance, I might add; it's not like Shakespearean theatre companies are lining up to tour the backwaters of Ireland for our education and entertainment.) I was surprised at how much I understood after five or ten minutes of listening in bewilderment; it sunk in, or something, and that was that.

Leaving aside that this is a Play by Shakespeare ! ! !, it was ... pretty damn stupid, when you get right down to it. Oh dear, crazed king Leontes is so consumed by jealousy he puts his wife on trial; yeah, great, but could at least have seen some of his suspicions being fostered first? He literally sees his wife having a chat with his mate Polixenes in front of him and goes apeshit. It's a pretty flimsy premise, is all I'm saying. And as for the big reveal at the end - WTF. WTFFFFF. Was Hermione dead? Is it magic? Was she just chilling with Paulina all that time and playing the ultimate prank? WHAT?

And don't even get me started on the 'as you know Bob' exchange that we got instead of a proper denoument. Couldn't we have cut, oh, ALL of Autolycus' screen time in exchange for ACTUALLY SEEING PLOT?

Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw

For some reason, my (Penguin) version of this contains no apostrophes. NONE. WHY IS THIS. Anyone care to explain?

This Eliza is UNBEARABLY IRRITATING. What is UP with the 'awoowwoowww' sound effects? Who ever makes that noise?! I was amused by Shaw's codicil at the end, explaining in great detail why Eliza and Higgins did NOT get together, but you know what? If you couldn't bear that out in the story itself, if you spent the rest of yor life refuting what people easily picked up in the subtext of what you wrote ... maybe you wrote it wrong? Just sayin'. (Eliza/Higgins forever!)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennesse Williams

As I come to the end of this set of plays, I must reflect that there's something very odd about playwriting as a linguistic art. Books are books, and films attempt to imitate life from what I've seen of them. But plays! Plays! They just stand around and recite speeches. I guess the point is to NOT be naturalistic if you can possibly help it. Or maybe they really are meant to be watched and not read, which is a shame, because when am I ever going to see any of these performed? Never.

I liked the story of Cat and all the characters, I just thought all their dialogue came across as stilted and histrionic. Oh well. f

The Lady's Not For Burning, Christopher Fry

Oh! This was so wonderful. Every line was a gem. Of course, that meant I got slightly blinded by the constant glitter.

ALIZON Our father
God moved many lives to show you to me.
I think that is the way it must have happened.
It was complicated, but very kind.

Of course, it did suffer from the plague of plays - that is, everyone who fell in love did so in the space of five minutes. But what a fall!

A Summer to Remember, Mary Balough

I do not think Regency romances should have sex in them. This deeply-held conviction of mine has only been strengthened by reading so many Regency romances with sex in them, and thus having a moderately bad experience turned into a dreadful one.

This is basically the story of how a 'frigid' woman gets cured with the magical power of a dick. And yes. The author did actually use the word 'frigid', which I'm pretty damn sure was not contemporary in 1815. I won't even go into how this book was a triumph of mediocrity, badly-considered names and wet-tissue thin plot. I'll just leave you with 'frigid' and all the damaging insult that implies.

I didn't mean to tell anyone in my scriptwriting class what I did and, after last week, I was hopeful that in a group of such self-centred individuals it wouldn't even come up. Alas, someone asked me right out and I said 'doctor.' I can't lie for shit. Never could. He added, "Of what?" and like a douche I said 'medicine.'

Man, it's not like I wanted to be uber-mysterious about it or a speshul snowflake, but this shit just seems to infect things. Try as I may, I can't separate myself from me-the-doctor. As soon as everyone knew I brought up a question about the short film we watched that was medically related. In fairness the film was about cancer BUT STILL. It's coming from the part of me that thinks that the only good or worthy or worthwhile or interesting thing about me is that I'm a doctor and so I constantly have to remind people of it, AND ALSO I have nothing to say that doesn't revolve around it because it eats my brain. Not to mention I have paralleling guilt that I hate my job so much and yet I rely on it to define me - not even, to elevate me - as a person.

Oh, and I still haven't done any scriptwriting, or writing of any sort since February. I'm changing hospitals Monday and I'm afraid they'll have a really strict call rota that might tie me into working Thursday nights and so I'll miss the course. It's already become the best part of my week. (It did not have a lot of competition.) Wah wah WAH.