If Madame de Villefort offers you a glass a lemonade, say 'No thank you'.

[puddleshark]

A work colleague commenting that they had just finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and wasn't it amazing, prompted me to a re-read. So I spent the week in the company of The Count and Lord Wilmore and Abbé Busoni. What a thundering good read it is.

I have the Penguin Classics version, translated by Robin Buss: perfectly done, you forget you're even reading it in translation.

***

'Let us suppose, Bunter, that you were to be the bearer of a courteous missive to one Mr Norman Urquhart of Woburn Square. Could you, in the short space of time at your disposal, insinuate yourself, snakelike, as it were, into the bosom of the household?'
'If you desire it, my lord, I will endeavour to insinuate myself to your lordship's satisfaction.'

Currently re-reading Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers. I suspect this will start me off on a Lord Peter Wimsey binge.

***

My word, I've got into correspondence with some pretty big boys lately. Dear old Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of course, is a mere child of seventy-eight, but Mr. Wilfred Meynell (who really must be one of the sweetest and kindest old men in the world) must be rising 100...

I have also written letters and cabled madly to two old gentlemen who both died twenty years ago. Which gives a pleasantly necromancical air to the proceedings...

2am insomnia reading, Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell ed. Richard Greene. Letters from the literary scene, from 1910 to 1964.

***

Television:

Gave up on Chinese cyber-crime drama Are you safe? Partly from pacing issues - too many episodes, and it dragged - but mostly because the heavy hand of the Chinese State was all over the writing.

Censorship is one thing. Good dramas can still be written in spite of censorship: people are sneaky.

But censorship in China is becoming more and more strict. And Chinese television seems to be moving more and more from post-production censorship to active state intervention: state-produced dramas, written to state dictates. And I'm not a big fan of worthiness and education in entertainment, to be honest.

***

Re-watched Chinese costume detective drama Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, which is so much fun. (Wang Zhi, with his little pistol in his sleeve!) It could never have been produced now, though: the censors would consider the lead character too effeminate.

***

Currently following four (four!) Korean dramas, though they are all only airing two episodes a week:

One Dollar Lawyer on bilibili.tv. Endearing cheesy & silly eccentric-lawyer-helping-the-poor drama. (Namgoong Min playing another weirdo! I'm such a sucker for Namgoong Min.)

Mental Coach Jegal on viki.com. Athletics dramas aren't usually my thing, but I've been enjoying this, with its abusive coaches, obsessive parents, high level corruption. It's as much about the price of failure as it is about winning. And the writing manages, so far, to be kind, without being unbearably saccharine, and that's a hard trick to pull off.

Love in Contract on viki.com. Romantic comedy. A cool competent young woman who makes a living acting as the "perfect wife" for anyone who needs to produce a perfect wife for whatever occasion, finds herself dividing the week between two "husbands" who live on two floors of the same apartment block. The complexity of the characters, and the sense of hidden histories, makes this rather better than the general run of "two men in pursuit of the same woman" romances.

Bad Prosecutor on viki.com. Action/mystery drama. This one, I'm only watching for the fight scenes. The first two episodes felt like a webtoon that someone had adapted for television without bothering to fill out the characters properly.