So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[JD]

Hurt was the War Doctor in Doctor Who, the voice of Merlin's dragon mentor in the 2008 Merlin TV series, and the title character in Jim Henson's TV series The Storyteller. Also Ollivander the wand maker in Harry Potter and Professor Broom in the Hellboy movies.

I cannot recommend The Storyteller enough if you haven't seen, it's my second favorite non-Muppet Henson production from when Jim was still alive. It's absolutely fantastic, it's nice that it actually picked some different fairy and folktales from the ones you usually see in these kind of adaptations. And it's got a fantastic cast alongisde Hurt and Brian Henson as both the pupeteer and voice of his talking dog, which Gabrielle Anwar, Sean Bean, Brenda Brethyn, Joely Richardson, Miranda Richardson, Alison Doody, and Dawn French, all appearing in episodes. There was also a shorter second season that adaptated Greek Myths with a new Storyteller played by Michael Gambon.
This behind the scenes video gives a nice overview of the two series

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Is anybody here familiar with the Tor Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo? The new adaptation they're showing on Masterpiece has inspired me to finally read the book, and I found the Tor Classics edition on Hoopla, but I noticed that it seems to be a bit shorter than most of the other versions I found, with it at only 608 pages, while the others I found tend to be around 800 to 1000 pages.

 

[bdub76]

Confession: I chased after the book rights for Tor, but couldn’t seal the deal.

That sucks.

Merlin is a great show. It went off the rails a bit with the last season time jump, but all of the other seasons are solid. I would have loved to read novels based on this show.

 

[bdub76]

More than likely, I'll eventually get to the Harry Potter movies. But I was planning to wait until I'd read all the books, and I've only gotten through the first three.

My bookclub reread all of these during lockdown. The one I haven't yet been able to finish is the 5th one. I've read it half way through twice. It really drags. PoA is the best in the series. But I do love Half-Blood Prince.

 

[JD]

After my last post I thought to look on Amazon to see what people said abou the Tor Count of Monte Cristo, and one of the reviews said it is abridged, so I'm gonna look for a different version.

 

[Greg Cox]

Contact is an excellent movie, but it pales next to the novel it's based on, since it had to trim it down so much.

Small World Department: David Hartwell, who launched the Star Trek book line at Pocket Books decades ago, among other things, was hired to trim down the novel for the abridged audiobook, back in the days of cassette tapes.

 

[Christopher]

It did, and there are definitely elements of the novel that I missed -- the message embedded in pi, for instance --

Hmp, that was the part I could've done without.

 

[youngtrek]

Books read in April 2026:

Star Trek: Identity Theft (Gallery Books, 2025) (Greg Cox)

X-Men (By Brian Wood) Vol. 1: Blank Generation (2013) (Brian Wood, David Lopez, et al.) (reprints X-Men #30-35 (2012))*

X-Men (By Brian Wood) Vol. 2: Reckless Abandonment (2013) (Brian Wood, David Lopez, et al.) (reprints X-Men #36-41 (2012-2013))*

Ka-Zar By Mark Waid and Andy Kubert Vol. 1 (2017) (reprints Ka-Zar #1-7 and Tales of the Marvel Universe #1 (1997))*

(* Comics collected editions that I read the equivalent of on Marvel Unlimited digital)


2026 GoodReads Reading Challenge as of end of April: 12 of 75 books read (16%)


— David Young

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Just finished The Robe. In the final chapter, we meet Salome (identified here as in tradition [but not in canon or recognized apocrypha] as Herod's Daughter), here portrayed as an even more bloodthirsty little <female canid> than she is in St. Mark's Gospel.

And the book ends with Diana tossing the titular garment to Marcipor, with instructions to pass it on to "The Big Fisherman," as she intrepidly marches off to her death alongside Marcellus.

 

[Steve Roby]

No one remembers John Hurt in 1984? The version with the Eurythmics soundtrack?

Anyway... I read a couple of mystery novels from the Regency/Napoleonic era, one by Ashley Gardner from the Captain Lacey series, one by C.S. Harris from the much darker Sebastian St. Cyr series. I've read a lot more of the former and may keep with them. The St. Cyr books... well, the dialogue's a bit too modern-sounding, and there are hints of fantasy content. I like my mysteries to be mysteries.

So, naturally, now I'm reading a Shirley Jackson collection.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

So, naturally, now I'm reading a Shirley Jackson collection.

I'm still convinced that she had to have been at least a little bit (ahem) "stoned," when she wrote "The Lottery."

 

[John Clark]

No one remembers John Hurt in 1984? The version with the Eurythmics soundtrack?

Yep, still got it on VHS - though the means to rewatch it are iffy at the moment.

Just finished The Dance of Time by Eric Flint/David Drake (again)

 

[ace2k]

Started Imbalance today.

 

[Greg Cox]

Crime & Punctuation: A Deadly Edits Mystery by Kaitlyn Dunnett.

Stumbled onto this at the library today. A freelance editor gets sucked into solving a mystery, with the clues hidden in the manuscript she's editing?

Okay, I have to check this out.

 

[bdub76]

Read Gramma by Stephen King from Skeleton Crew at lunch today.

I had watched the adaptation not that long ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramma_(The_Twilight_Zone)

The story was a good one.

 

[JD]

Since today is May 4th, I decided to take short break from The Children of Kings, and I'm reading the digital collection of the Star Wars: Forces of Destiny comic miniseries, which I borrowed from Amazon Prime Reading a few months back.

 

[Denise]

Anyway... I read a couple of mystery novels from the Regency/Napoleonic era, one by Ashley Gardner from the Captain Lacey series, one by C.S. Harris from the much darker Sebastian St. Cyr series. I've read a lot more of the former and may keep with them. The St. Cyr books... well, the dialogue's a bit too modern-sounding, and there are hints of fantasy content. I like my mysteries to be mysteries.

So, naturally, now I'm reading a Shirley Jackson collection.

I love C. S. Harris. I had dinner with her and a few others at a writer's conference we were both attending in Thibodaux, Louisiana. She's a cat lover/rescuer and historian, and just an all around nice person. I was sorry when she had to leave her New Orleans home, but I totally understood it, having run from hurricanes myself (and lucky enough that we didn't have much damage--just a few trees down).

I also read the Captain Lacey series. She also has a series featuring a Roman gladiator who has retired and is now called in to solve the occasional mystery.

 

[Tosk]

No one remembers John Hurt in 1984? The version with the Eurythmics soundtrack?

Personally I prefer the other score, but I do like the song Sex Crime.

 

[USS Firefly]

Finally a new Dresden files! So finally I could start with 12 months. I hope we don't have to wait this long for a new Dresden files book.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Since today is May 4th . . .

So it was. This year, the significance completely escaped me; I spent the first weekday of my vacation visiting the Intel Museum, in Santa Clara, and the Hiller Aviation Museum, in San Carlos. (As I was walking back to the Caltrain station, it occurred to me to wonder how the Hiller Flying Platform managed to not respond to Newton's Third Law by spinning uncontrollably like a single-rotor helicopter that's lost its tail rotor.

Be that as it may, I'm 78 pages (out of 153 + appendix and endnotes) into The Rev'd Jordan Ware's The Ultimate Quest. Most of the religious references are already familiar to me (being pan-denominiational with a strong Episcopalian streak), but a fair number of the fantasy, RPG, and general geekdom allusions aren't quite so familiar, and I'm 50 pages (out of 74) into the February issue of Model Railroader.

@Greg Cox, your anthology is next. Didn't notice at first that it's not just a first edition, but a numbered first edition. The only other book I have with that distinction is Miracle of Music, a late-1970s history of Hollywood Bowl.

 

[Denise]

Just finished A Day of Judgement by Charles Todd.