After posting last night about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo I made it through another twenty pages before dropping the book on the coffee table, walking through to the back room and picking Peter Hamilton’s The Dreaming Void from the shelf. It’s a lovely big hardback I picked up from the discount book shop in town before it closed. In the first thirty pages I was already more interested in the characters and the story. Okay, so comparing the stories is probably unfair, but he’s certainly a better author.

So that’s one that I’ve given up on. The other was the game to the right; A Boy and His Blob. Note the age rating on the box. Okay, so the age ratings are for content not difficulty, but this is clearly a game aimed at young children. However, if was the very difficulty that put me off.

The main game is fun to play with simple puzzles, the kind where you wonder for a minute, try something a little left-field and yes, it works. But then you hit the boss battles and suddenly it’s twitch gaming with puzzles that bear little similarity to those of the main levels.

I only made it to the second guardian according to the guide I consulted. Yes, even with the guide telling me what to do (which it’s doubtful I would have figured out) I couldn’t get the timing right. I’m glad to say I’m not the only person who’s found this and most people I talked to about it struggled to recall if they’d played the game through to the end or not.

So what am I doggedly hanging on to? Lost. There’s only a two part finale to go and I’ll be almost glad when it’s over. The final season has been a chore to sit through with the show feeling like it’s treading water. The last two episodes have been no better being alternately an infodump and an episode to drastically reduce the number of characters to worry about in the future.

Two episodes to go and then I think my TV watching schedule is free from US drama. Not that the UK side of things is much more populated as there’s only Doctor Who. More time for other pursuits I guess.

I’m normally one who avoids hype, especially around popular culture. It’s a bad habit of mine as it means I often miss out on some of the good stuff. So I relented and picked this up at the weekend.

So far, it’s borderline awful. The pacing is glacial, the story is spelled out in huge chunks of turgid dialogue and there are vast swathes of pointless background information. At least the first fifty pages could be removed with little subsequent editing.

Fair’s fair, the author died before they were published (AFAIK) so perhaps the publishing house didn’t feel too comfortable editing a dead man’s manuscripts for him. However, I really feel that the hype surrounding the books is more to do with the dead author than the stories themselves.

When I voiced this opinion the other night I was surprised to find a number of people agreeing with me. Where was the universal love for these “amazing” stories? Perhaps those who like them the most rarely read crime fiction. Most people acknowledged that while the story was interesting, the telling was not, even going so far as to suggest that I simply watch the films instead.

I’ll push on for now, but it’s far from a foregone conclusion that I’ll make it to the end.

Of course, I woke up this morning to the sound of howling wind and rain drumming on the window. It hasn’t let up yet so I’ve continued reading Broken Skin and not gone out on my bike.

Last year’s plan to record all the films I watched didn’t work, purely due to laziness on my part, but I’m going to try it again. I’ve watched two of the recent Fopp haul over the last couple of nights.

Bus 174

A decent if overlong and one-sided documentary about a hostage situation in Brazil. The DVD boasts that it contains an extended 132 minute version but I struggled to make it through without my mind wandering. Despite the documentary clearly detailing the hostage taker’s criminal life I always felt they were deifying him in some way. He may not have been the worst criminal on the streets but the fondness for “he never hurt anyone” soundbites start to grate after a while.

The King

Fantastically well acted drama with William Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal. I felt that a lot was missing from the script, not so much leaving plot holes but just parts where you thought that surely some of the characters’ obliviousness to what was happening around them started to stretch belief. Given the nature of the story, perhaps that was meant to be a comment on the issues of faith. I’ll have to listen to the commentary and see if it comes up.