Category: Outlander

Gabaldon's "Drums"—A Non-Review

31/5/2018

The fourth volume in Dr. Gabaldon's "Outlander" series.

This entry is adapted from my review of Drums of Autumn on Goodreads. From scanning other reviews there, it appears to me that a sizable percentage of Outlander series consumers hit the wall in the fourth volume. It's not an easy-breezy read, and it doesn't reward the reader sufficiently for the effort, says this non-reviewer. Most likely, I will plow through the remainder of the series, mostly on the strength of Diana Gabaldon's character depictions and development, and watch Season 4 when it drops in November.

*****

One of the benefits of painstaking accuracy in historical fiction is the richness of the imagery that makes the reader feel there. One of the risks of painstaking accuracy in historical fiction is that the interest level of the plot may suffer in sacrifice to that accuracy.

Dr. Gabaldon's Drums of Autumn is big and sweeping enough to provide ample examples of both the benefit and the risk. Despite its size and scope, I don't have a lot more to say about it.

One downside of this large multi-volume saga, now that I'm four volumes in, is that I'm having trouble remembering what happened in which of the volumes. What, you mean I need to have my copy handy in order to review it, or risk moaning about a sub-optimal plot point that actually happens in Voyager? Do tell!

Nicola Sturgeon IS Bonnie Prince Charlie

12/10/2017

Lotte Verbeek as Gillian Edgars in Starz series

This is not Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. (Photo courtesy outlander.wikia.com)

Yesterday I left work early due to a flare-up of a chronic digestive disorder that either induces or results from sinus pain. No practicing physician has ever been able to explain it, much less treat it successfully. But that isn't the topic of this entry.

After I got home, I soaked, slept a bit, ate lunch (probably still not fully digested the today), watched the latest episode of Outlander a second time, and then channel-surfed a bit. In my surfing, I stumbled across a speech on C-SPAN 2, catching it 20 minutes in, that stirred up no small amount of hope for humanity in me.

The speaker was Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of the Scottish Parliament, leader of the Scottish National Party. It was more than a tad serendipitous that I found this speech after spending an hour with Claire, Jamie, Bree, Roger, and Claire's officemate Dr. Joe Abernathy. In Sturgeon's address to the SNP's annual conference (about 51 minutes), there was just enough of the flavor of Geillis Duncan/Gillian Edgars's "We are Bonnie Prince Charlie!" speech from Outlander episode 2.13 to elicit some knowing giggles.

Geilis Duncan, Meet Geli Tripping: Pynchonian Gabaldon

21/9/2017

This is Volume III in the continuing saga of How My GF Convinced Me to Read the Outlander Series without Trying Very Hard. The first two volumes are here and here.

I will freely admit that the video adaptation on Starz played a big part in getting me to dive into the books three whole years after Kayleen first raved about them to me.

For the record, Voyager, the third novel in Diana Gabaldon's series, was first published in 1994, a little before the Star Trek franchise spawned its series that was also entitled Voyager. In the year following its publication, the book won an honor from Entertainment Weekly for Best Opening Line in a novel. Even if the opening doesn't make you chuckle, know that there are chuckles aplenty, and even a few LOLs, in this sweeping tale.

I Survived "Dragonfly"

16/8/2017

Cover of the hardback edition of Diana Gabaldon's

Drag-On-Fly in Amber

The next feat of literary endurance will be to tackle the third book in the Outlander series, entitled Voyager, preferably before the Season 3 premiere of the Starz Original Series®.

Add me to the pile of readers who think Drag-On Fly would have been better minus 200-300 pages. Normally I don't hold it against an author when the book is full of padding that doesn't advance the narrative, extraneous "character moments," even Moby Dick–style long-winded explanations. The Harry Potter series has some of the best padding I've ever encountered, stuff that would sink the page-to-screen translation like a lead weight—e.g., the subplot involving Hermione's Society for the Preservation of Elvish Welfare.

Gabaldon's extra padding in D in A does us readers the great service of making 18th-century Scotland that much more real, through all the senses, right down to the smells of the malnourished and malprovisioned Jacobite Army. But there's too damn much of it. Nonetheless, that multi-sensory approach is one of the aspects in which the quality of the writing took a quantum jump over the first Outlander volume.

Reading "Outlander" and Not Wussing Out

29/3/2017

I'm reading Outlander and enjoying it. And I'm a guy. So there.

I'm just over 300 pages into the first novel of the series, which weighs in at about 800 pages in paperback.

I'm also concurrently watching on DVD the Starz video adaptations of Diana Gabaldon's best-sellers. Each season covers one of the books; so far, Starz has broadcast its treatments of Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber. The video version of Voyager is due this fall.

Gabaldon's "Drums"—A Non-Review

Nicola Sturgeon IS Bonnie Prince Charlie

Geilis Duncan, Meet Geli Tripping: Pynchonian Gabaldon

I Survived "Dragonfly"

Reading "Outlander" and Not Wussing Out

DBC Sez...

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