I decided to have a break from podcasts. A month or so. The accelerating shitshow in America has contaminated all of my current affairs feeds and started to leak into my fitness pods, too. There’s a weird right-wing tilt to most fitness content. Especially strength training. Maybe it’s all the rugged individualism - or an attachment to the mythology, at least. Either way, all the sidequests in service of Elon Musk and the Orange God King were distracting me from all the advice about hitting my deadlift PR. So. A break. Possibly until after the next US civil war has been settled.
I still had to fill in those empty hours, however. So I opened my Audible app for the first time in a while and saw that many moons ago, I’d grabbed Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. I’d already seen the TV series, of course, and that’d been good enough to put me off listening to the original text. How could it match up?
But it did. And in many ways, it’s better. I’ve been listening in short bursts, doing one-off household chores, and for longer stints, usually in the car. I’ve been struck, in retrospect, by how faithfully the showrunners adapted the series from the book. Not much of an air gap at all. And the characters are so vividly drawn in both media forms that I don’t have to go to the trouble of imagining them for myself. That’s most agreeable.
I guess I’d been resisting listening because I already knew how everything turned out. But honestly, the writing is good enough that it doesn’t matter. John Le Carre, by way of, well, Mick Herron. I think he’s earned that now. He’s got a lovely turn of phrase and is a dab hand with misdirection.
Also I’m feeling much better, not yelling at those weight-lifting pod bros.
The TV show is so good I also wondered how the books would stack up, and my TBR pile of shame is so great that not adding Slow Horses The Novel to it didn't seem to be a huge loss. I'm glad to hear that my assumption on that was erroneous, and I have now added it to my TBR list.
I'm addicted to the books and have unfortunately run out of them (there are 8 main ones) and am now chasing down all the novellas that fill in the backgrounds of various minor characters. So good.
I was listening to the wireless the other day and they were positing that a lot (not all) of the muscle bros lean right wing and misogynist and is part of the increasing problem of violence against women especially in schools which the algorithm is gaming.
The TV show is so good I also wondered how the books would stack up, and my TBR pile of shame is so great that not adding Slow Horses The Novel to it didn't seem to be a huge loss. I'm glad to hear that my assumption on that was erroneous, and I have now added it to my TBR list.
I'm addicted to the books and have unfortunately run out of them (there are 8 main ones) and am now chasing down all the novellas that fill in the backgrounds of various minor characters. So good.
I was listening to the wireless the other day and they were positing that a lot (not all) of the muscle bros lean right wing and misogynist and is part of the increasing problem of violence against women especially in schools which the algorithm is gaming.
Always a delight to discover an author in an another format.
Yes I hear they made Felafel into a movie.
LOL