Archive.is link..

Personally, I always used to carry a paperback with me and would read in the odd moments that this writer seems to recall as being so dull and soul destroying. I still do carry e-books on my phone of course and use them in exactly the same way - but also with the option of doomscrolling, of course.

As for TV, I was never one for TV - or radio - as background noise. With fiends, I had a bit of reputation of going round and turning such things off when I entered the room, so that we could talk without distraction. I would ask them first, of course.

The Shannara series by Terry Brooks has a reputation as being an homage to LotR, and they are quite enjoyable.

Waaay back, this was what I turned to after reading LotR. He had only published the first then and it was what made me understand the difference between good writing and bad. It gave me nothing else other than that lesson and certainly didn’t scratch the itch that I had for something like LotR. In fact nothing did and I found it best to look for something completely different that was good in it’s own right rather than poor imitations.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy short stories, for all the reasons that you give.

I grew up on the classic fantasy tales: Conan, Fafhred and the Grey Mouser, the Dying Earth tales, and all of Dunsany, Clarke Ashton Smith etc etc as well as Lovecraft, Poe and M R James and the rest.

As well as focusing on a single mood or concept, as you suggest, short stories - particularly the more literary ones - are great as single character studies, or dealing with particular interactions in a way that isolates and brings them to the forefront simply by being given a beginning and end.

feels a lot like Columbo.

It is very conciously like Columbo - even down to the font of the titles I think. I see it as 3 parts Columbo, 1 part The Fugitive and 1 part Knives Out. There are a couple of wonky episodes but I enjoyed it a lot overall - especially the penultimate one.

Another BF listener here - I really liked Walker and McGann on screen in Annika too.

Otherwise, my SO and I have the Ted Lasso finale lined up. The third season (yes, I know, but I agree with the Americans that there is a distinction between series and season) has been a necessary conclusion to the material in the previous two, but not without some fun moments.

And - in terms of other UK TV - we are just on to season two of Jam and Jerusalem which I totally missed at the time but am enjoying now.

Otherwise, in non-UK shows, Drops of God and Shrinking are the clear highlights in our lineup at the moment.

Some that I have enjoyed:

• A Spy Among Friends
• Slow Horses
• The Ipcress File (both the recent TV show and the 1965 film are great)
• Traitors (2019)
• The Night Manager
• London Spy
• The Game (2014)
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (both the TV show from 1979 and the 2011 film are great)
• Smiley’s People

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

You can’t get a lot cooler than that.

It’s not quite there yet where I am, but I am certainly hoping to a bit later this summer from time to time. I have hopes of WFH (…From Hammock) at some stage, now that I have garden that is suitable.

Yes - -for certain values of SF. Nobody is going to call the MCU hard SF, and superheroes are a fairly clear genre of their own, but in the broadest sense that genre certainly feels like it fits into the overall category of SF.

My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake - which I am (or have been) reading week by week along with the TrueLit sub on reddit. It would be a profoundly different experience to read it without the analysis and discussion going on there, so that is something…

Otherwise, I am reading The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, which is engaging and entertaining, as was her The Hollow Places which I read immediately before. I am also dipping into a collection of the Para Handy tales by Neil Munro, which are a cosy - if stereotypical and patronising - glimpse into another time and pace of life.

I have just returned from a couple of weeks away during which I finished an anthology of Clarke Ashton Smith short fantasy tales (all about the atmosphere: story and worldbuilding are very much secondary and character scarcely features); Haldor Laxness’s The Atom Station (a sparse look at the clash of modern - written in 1948 - and traditional Icelandic values); and Blackwood’s The Willows (an extrapolation of the original idea of “panic” - as several of this other tales are).