2017 Reading Challenge
I was halfway through the month when I began my challenge, so it's no big surprise that I haven't finished all of my January targets yet. I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I'm about a third of the way through Nights at the Circus. My final goal for January is a poetry bonus, and thanks to my partner Hanna I will be looking at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a collection of the poems of Tupac Shakur.
The Last Dragonslayer is the first book in Jasper Fforde's Jennifer Strange trilogy, and the recent subject of a Sky Christmas special adaptation. It is the story of Jennifer Strange, a foundling working in indentured servitude as the acting manager of a magical talent agency; a job which involves finding respectable work for half a dozen odd sorcerers and supporting twice as many retired former employees in a hotel full of random old enchantments. Some might consider this work enough for a fourteen year old, but when Big Magic starts to brew and big money is offered for a certified vision of when the last dragon is going to die and leave the Dragonlands open for a land grab, she discovers that she is also the last in the long line of Dragonslayers.
So, the thing I couldn't escape listening to The Last Dragonslayer is of course the differences to the adaptation. It's been a while since I'd read it, so many of them passed me by, including a whole subplot about the impending war between Hereford and Brecon once the Dragonlands ceased to be a constant barrier to invasion. Also the quarkbeast is a lot weirder, the sorcerers of Kazam more numerous and less universally benevolent (Lady Mawgan, the only one whose name made it to the TV, is practically a secondary antagonist.)
I went on from there to The Song of the Quarkbeast, book two in the series. With Jennifer still in King Snod's bad books, Kazam faces the prospect of their arch-rivals at Industrial Magic (newly rebranded as iMagic to be more with it) taking over the firm and becoming the sole authorities on magical practice; a state of affairs that would leave them, and in particular their manager the Amazing/All-Powerful Blix, free to gouge the public to their hearts' content. Yet there is more at stake even than the threat of a hostile takeover motivated by a long-standing feud between Blix and absent Kazam manager, the once-Amazing Zambini, as Jennifer stumbles on a sinister plot to abuse the rarest and most remarkable creature in the world in pursuit of ultimate power.
The Song of the Quarkbeast is an odd biscuit, in that it doesn't always gibe with the first book in the series. Much of this is due to small errors which are fixed in version 1.1 (rolling upgrades via website being a feature of all Fforde's books,) but there are still a few things that don't add up; such as the suggestion that the Price brothers are never seen together being dropped without comment, or the fact that suddenly everyone knows that the Mighty Shandar is alive and has a family of hereditary agents, where previously they had wondered who his agent might have been in his day. By their own lights, however, each book is a delight, full of Fforde's quirky charm and delightfully read by Jane Collingwood.
I was halfway through the month when I began my challenge, so it's no big surprise that I haven't finished all of my January targets yet. I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I'm about a third of the way through Nights at the Circus. My final goal for January is a poetry bonus, and thanks to my partner Hanna I will be looking at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a collection of the poems of Tupac Shakur.
So, the thing I couldn't escape listening to The Last Dragonslayer is of course the differences to the adaptation. It's been a while since I'd read it, so many of them passed me by, including a whole subplot about the impending war between Hereford and Brecon once the Dragonlands ceased to be a constant barrier to invasion. Also the quarkbeast is a lot weirder, the sorcerers of Kazam more numerous and less universally benevolent (Lady Mawgan, the only one whose name made it to the TV, is practically a secondary antagonist.)
I went on from there to The Song of the Quarkbeast, book two in the series. With Jennifer still in King Snod's bad books, Kazam faces the prospect of their arch-rivals at Industrial Magic (newly rebranded as iMagic to be more with it) taking over the firm and becoming the sole authorities on magical practice; a state of affairs that would leave them, and in particular their manager the Amazing/All-Powerful Blix, free to gouge the public to their hearts' content. Yet there is more at stake even than the threat of a hostile takeover motivated by a long-standing feud between Blix and absent Kazam manager, the once-Amazing Zambini, as Jennifer stumbles on a sinister plot to abuse the rarest and most remarkable creature in the world in pursuit of ultimate power.The Song of the Quarkbeast is an odd biscuit, in that it doesn't always gibe with the first book in the series. Much of this is due to small errors which are fixed in version 1.1 (rolling upgrades via website being a feature of all Fforde's books,) but there are still a few things that don't add up; such as the suggestion that the Price brothers are never seen together being dropped without comment, or the fact that suddenly everyone knows that the Mighty Shandar is alive and has a family of hereditary agents, where previously they had wondered who his agent might have been in his day. By their own lights, however, each book is a delight, full of Fforde's quirky charm and delightfully read by Jane Collingwood.
Given the constraints of the medium, Body Work is much more straightforward than the average case for Peter Grant, lacking the space for red herrings and side plots. It's got the humour, and the action, and indeed the horror of the original down. Fellow Doctor Who alumnus Andrew Cartmel (he of the Master Plan) gets Aaronovich's style, and the art by Lee Sullivan and Luis Guerrero may not match the pictures in my head exactly, but they'll do and then some (although if I'm honest I always pictured Beverly Brook as a bit more casual, a bit less fetish wear.)
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