The Week in Entertainment

DVD: More Blake's Seven. I adore Kerr Avon. And speed chess! Speed chess! Also Children of the Stones, an odd little Brit mini-series starring (coincidentally) Gareth Thomas, pre-Blake.

TV: Torchwood. Okay. Owen's dead, but ... not? How strange. How very strange this show is. But delicious.

Read: a lot this weekend. Finished Liz Williams' wonderful Nine Layers of Sky on Monday, then read Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by the brilliant Alice Munro. "The Spanish Lady" is a story I'll be musing on for a while. Also read four lightweight mystery novels - Sharon Short's Tie Dyed and Dead, and three by Patricia Sprinkle's: Sins of the Father, Death on the Family Tree, and What Are You Wearing To Die?. That last is the last of a series, and I'm glad. I was getting to where I was almost as annoyed with the characters as interested in the plot, and this last book tipped the balance. I know Joe Riddley is supposed to have had a personality change after he got shot in the first book, and that's too bad, because we never knew him before, and I never could stand him (I can't stand a lot of women sleuth's husbands, come to that - Gabe in Earlene Fowler's series is almost as bad as the "supremely irritating Susan Silverman" in the Spenser novels (so it's not just husbands) (and I wish I could remember which reviewer called her that)). At any rate, Joe Riddley actually chains Maclaren to her desk - twice - and Maclaren is barely annoyed about it. Because you have to accept things when you want to stay married, and anyway, Joe Riddley is just doing it for her own good. If I thought this was Sprinkle's attitude, instead of Maclaren's, I'd dump her, fast, but none of her other characters seem to be this willing to be abused, so I'll let it pass. But I wouldn't have read another Maclaren book...

ps - up late due to connectivity problems last night.