Happy Birthday, Alison...

To acampbell:



Happy birthday - I hope you have an excellent year.

Breathing life into a stone...

I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion, whose simple touch
Is powerful to araise King Pippen, nay,
To give great Charlemain a pen in 's hand
And write to her a love-line.


- William Shakespeare, born April 23, 1564 died April 23, 1616, from All's Well That Ends Well Act 2, scene 1, 72–78

Moon Over Soho...

Just finished reading Moon Over Soho, the second book about Peter Grant by Ben Aaronovitch.

Loved it as much as the first, Midnight Riot. Published in the UK as Rivers of London, which is a much more suitable title, but maybe not as catchy for the action-adventure crowd.

The author cut his teeth on writing Doctor Who, so perhaps it's that the same things that appeal to me with Doctor Who appeal to me here: a mix of the mundane, the anomalous, and the fantastical, done with both suspense and humour.

But it isn't just that. I love the style, which I could compare to that of other writers, but its real joy is that it's original still. And Peter Grant. Have I said again how much I like Peter Grant? Smart ass young cop/magician who thinks for himself. It's fun to have jazz as a theme.

I also enjoy Peter's mentor, the long-tie magician who has started to take in strays and who ages backwards, Thomas Nightingale.

I kept wanting to quote bits to someone:

The stairs to the [crime] scene were so narrow that we had to wait for a herd of forensics types to come up before we could go down. There's no such thing as a full-service forensics team. It's very expensive, so you order bits of it up from the Home Office like a Chinese takeout. Judging by the number of noddy suits filing past us Stephanopolis had gone for the suer-deluxe meal for six with extra egg fried rice. I was, I guessed, the fortune cookie.

Or:

I didn't need Nightingale to tell me I'd handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

Or:

Black magic, as defined by Nightingale, was the use of magic in such a way as to cause breach of the peace. I pointed out that a definition like that was so broad as to essentially include any use of magic outside of that authorized by the Folly. Nightingale indicated that re regarded that as a feature, not a bug.