Reading: The Case of the Gilded Fly

I've enjoyed a couple of Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels in the past, but this one rather left me cold (and it was the second time I'd tried it; the first time I gave up two chapters in). It just felt rather silly; the characters were thin and sometimes rather hard to distinguish, so that I kept having to flip back to the first chapter to remind myself who they were, the plot felt very contrived, and the Oxford setting wasn't well enough realised to give me any sense of the book being set in a place I know. This is Crispin's first novel, so it may just be that he improved significantly between this and the others of his I've read.

Reading: The Atrocity Archives

I bought this years ago, as someone in the book club I used to belong to had chosen it as the book for discussion. And then I never read it, as I never read most of the book club books (that's why I left, in the end). But I was talking to someone at work the other day and they recommended the Laundry books, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I can see it's a good book. Plotty, clever, sympathetic hero. It reminded me a bit of Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant books, except with spy stories and horror rather than police procedurals and fantasy. But, while I'm very familiar with the kind of fantasy and folklore Aaronovitch is riffing off, I've never read Lovecraft and don't particularly want to, and I'm not a computer geek and only did maths as far as GCSE. So while I thought the book was clever, I also felt that I was missing at least half the references and an awfully long way from being the target audience, particularly for the first of the two stories in the book. The second story, 'The Concrete Jungle', was more accessible, but I was rather narked at the way that ( Spoiler. )

So I probably won't read any of the others in the series.