Playing with words

So, sometime last spring, I managed to pimp myself into hockey RPF fandom (I am...easy like that), which revived my dormant sports fan tendencies, so I started actually watching hockey again. Unfortunately, I have terrible timing, and all of this happened right at the end of the playoffs. I did manage to catch the Stanley Cup Finals! And I was home for the summer by then, so I even got to watch them on my parents' nice big screen TV. Now I'm off in grad school and have no television, so I can't watch very much. But! I also now live in a city with an actual NHL team! A pretty good one, at that.

Late Wednesday night, I decided on a whim to check out the student rush tickets my housemate E had mentioned. And it turned out they were selling them online for the preseason (no waiting in line and risking not getting in, very nice), but there was only one home game left. Which was, of course, the next night. Did that stop me? Ha.

Which means that on Thursday, Housemate L and I went to see the Chicago Blackhawks play the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was so much fun! Almost none of the real Hawks or Pens were playing (and by "real" I of course mean the small subset of players whose names or numbers I've learned from fic), but the game was still really cool. And the Pens won, 4-1, which was nice for the home crowd, though I'd have been fine either way. I have some pictures, but I can't figure out how to include them here -- if anyone wants to advise, that would be awesome!

( Fans, players, ogling, miscellaneous thoughts )

I managed to suppress most of my fannish geeking out, so Housemate L didn't think I was too weird. Except when I commented sadly on them still having Talbot jerseys in the souvenir store....

Housemate E, who couldn't make it, texted me before the game "Ogle at Sidney Crosby for me please". I promised I would ogle for both of us, but had to text her after and tell her I was forced to settle for ogling Jordan Staal, since Sid was nowhere to be seen. She responded, "Staal is an acceptable substitute." Housemates: not fannish, but still awesome.

(Also, apparently I do not understand the Dreamwidth posting interface. I hope this works right this time.)

So, I mentioned the possibility of book reviews. Here goes nothing.

While I was home recently, I read The Dead of Winter, the third of Rennie Airth's John Madden mysteries. (No, there is no football anywhere in them. Different John Madden.) The series started out as between-the-wars British mysteries, of the sub-sub-genre in which the detective, like his country, is badly traumatized by the First World War. Unlike most such series, though, there was actual recovery and progress, and this latest one has made it up to World War II.

It's set in a very atmospheric London of 1944, where a young Polish woman is murdered during a blackout. The police investigate, but more people quickly start turning up dead. John Madden, long since retired from Scotland Yard, gets involved in the case because the first victim worked on his farm as a Land Girl.* Feeling that he has somehow failed her, he helps his old partner, Chief Inspector Angus Sinclair, investigate the murders.

The plot is twisty, but perhaps overly-reliant on coincidences. It always kept me interested in the next revelation about the killer, however, and managed to retain some mystery even after the detectives learned his identity. The book is an odd hybrid of suspense and straight-up mystery, and the tension was built quite well. (Note: an excellent, if perhaps cliched, way to make your readers nervous is to introduce a group of innocents who apparently have nothing to do with the mystery midway through the book. Also, leave lots of hints about how isolated or vulnerable they are.) The writing trod the line of mystery and suspense fairly delicately, making me anxious without sacrificing the puzzle aspect of a good mystery, though the guns Chekhov hung on the wall were pretty obvious at times. I like Madden and Sinclair, the two main investigators, as well as several of the minor characters, though a few of them verge on caricatures. Sinclair is somewhat more the focus than in the previous books, but that works well.

Short review: it's a well-written, fairly well-plotted mystery with aspects of suspense and good returning characters.

( A few more thoughts, with spoilers for the book. )

* I forgive Airth for this coincidence, since Madden has only "happened" to encounter two murder cases since retiring from the police force. That's stretching the bounds of plausibility, but not too badly. (Michael Innes, I'm looking at you.)

Hi, everyone. Or "hi, crickets," as the case may be.

This is just an introductory post, but it's also my first post anywhere, so, still a bit exciting. (For me, anyway.) I've been lurking for a while, and will probably mostly continue that pattern. The journal is chiefly to make following other people's posts easier, though I might also post reviews and recommendations of movies, books, fic, etc. (That is to say, babble about cool things I've seen lately.) There probably won't be much about my life here, since I'm a bit paranoid about putting that sort of thing up in even semi-public spaces, but we'll see. For what it's worth, I'm female, a college student at a pretentious East Coast private university, and majoring in computer science. I swing dance, used to do martial arts, and am trying to learn to knit. That's about all I have to say there; make of it what you will.

On the fannish side, I'm fairly omnivorous -- I like television from before I was born (Man from UNCLE, The Avengers, classic Star Trek and Doctor Who), a smattering of movies and more modern television shows (currently reboot Trek and Babylon 5 have most of my attention), and too many books to mention here.

Feel free to stop in and say hi. I don't bite. (Much.)