I haven’t read a Dean Koontz novel in quite a while. The last one, I believe, was From the Corner of His Eye, and I was not impressed. However, when NetGalley offered a proof of The City, I decided to give him another try. Again, not so impressed, as you might tell from my review. He’s off my list. I did like Linwood Barclay’s new thriller, No Safe House, even though I didn’t read the book to which it is the sequel, and enjoyed Dennis Lehane’s The Drop and Sarah Pinborough’s Murder, as well as JK Rowling’s new one, The Silkworm. I had some issues with the new Robert McCammon, River of Souls. (Reviews at the links).
I read Michael Koryta’s The Prophet last year and really liked it. I’ve been hearing a ton of good things about his new one, Those Who Wish Me Dead, so I picked up a copy at Necon and got him to sign it. The opening chapter is amazing, and the setup has me intrigued, so I’m looking forward to this wilderness adventure with two sociopathic killers (who remind me of the cousins from Breaking Bad, only chattier) in pursuit of a teenage witness who has been placed in a small group of troubled teens for survival training.
I went to Monty Python Live (Mostly) Encore last night with high hopes. I really expected to laugh my butt off. I watched Flying Circus a lot when I was in high school (it’s hard to believe there were only 45 episodes) and I remember seeing Holy Grail for the first time in the dorm cafeteria—reels of film projected on a screen, not video—during my first year at university. We howled at everything, even the moose-themed credits and the sackings. There may have been beer involved.
I was the only person in the theater last night until about 15 minutes before the show started. The grand total was 11. Oh, what it must have been like to be at the O2 amongst 15,000 people. Laughter is contagious, and being with so many other fans enables laughter. Our audience was mostly silent. There were a few chuckles here and there, and I laughed a lot during the dead parrot sketch, which has long been a favorite. I laughed especially at the parts where Cleese messed up and lost the thread of the sketch, which he did here and in the “crunchy frog chocolate” sketch. I could have done without the long orchestral prologues (one per act), though I amused myself by noting that the conductor bore a striking resemblance to Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad. There were a lot of song-and-dance routines, some of which didn’t feature the Pythons at all. If you distilled all the live sketch work, that aspect took up maybe 45 minutes, an hour, tops, out of three hours (including a 30-minute intermission).
I wanted to enjoy it more, but I came away feeling a tad disappointed. I probably would have regretted not seeing it, but I won’t be lining up to buy the inevitable DVD release. Some of the sketches fell flat for me. I like Michael Palin a lot, but the Blackmail sketch just didn’t work at all, and the appearance of Mike Myers for no apparent reason simply baffled me. There are better ways to use cameos, like the one featuring Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking, which was pretty funny. I liked Cleese’s off the cuff remarks about the newspapers that have been bedeviling him lately and Palin’s advice to him across the counter to not waste oxygen on them or give them any publicity, which felt unscripted. It wasn’t dreadful, but at the end of the evening, my butt was still attached. I hadn’t quite managed to laugh it off.
