The Closest Thing to Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures
by Mike Batt (Bonnier, 2024); audiobook read by Mike Batt (Nine Eight Books, 2024)
An engaging account of Batt’s long career in the volatile world of songwriting, performance and music production. Whereas many autobiographies skew heavily towards the early years and then drop into a perfunctory void, Batt provides even coverage most of the way through.
Where He Can’t Find You
by Darcy Coates (Sourcebooks Fire, 2023)
audiobook read by Reba Buhr (Black Owl Books, 2023)
Dark yet not too gruelling. The protagonists might sound ever-so-slightly young in the audiobook reading, but their personalities emerge strongly and the characterisation is unusually convincing for YA. Reba Buhr’s narration employs an open, honest immediacy in carrying off the speculative horror.
Once Upon a Time in London
dir. Simon Rumley (2019)
Thematically sound overall but the relationships are murky and the shifting dynamics blur into an endless reel of dog-eat-dog gangster violence. While of more interest than the leads, the female characters are less well documented historically and thus, lamentably, have been relegated.
42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams
ed. Kevin Jon Davies (Unbound, 2023)
An unwieldy coffee-table book better suited to selective delving than cover-to-cover consumption. Lesser-known Adams projects are skimmed over, yet the dogged facsimilation of original documents both gobbles up space (especially when paired with typewritten transcripts thereof) and results in some eye-straining arrangements.
Flux
by Jinwoo Chong (Melville House, 2023)
audiobook read by David Lee Huynh (Tantor, 2023)
Suitably twisty in its time travel motifs and displaced narrative perspectives. The human element and the TV show’s formative influence are well integrated. Still, there’s a sense of Chong writing himself artfully into a corner and passing it off as a dénouement.
Arne Dahl: To the Top of the Mountain
dir. Jörgen Bergmark (SVT, 2012 / BBC, 2013) [subtitled]
[originally “Upp till toppen av berget”]
![Miniseries poster: “Arne Dahl: To the Top of the Mountain” dir. Jörgen Bergmark (SVT, 2012 / BBC, 2013) [subtitled] [originally “Upp till toppen av berget”]](https://www.derelictspacesheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Arne-Dahl_To-the-Top-of-the-Mountain.png)
The middle story of Arne Dahl’s first season shifts the focus to second-generation Chilean Swede Jorge Chaves, resulting in a more up-tempo narrative. A-group’s personal lives are better integrated into the investigation, which links a car bombing to a deep-buried paedophilia ring.
Doctor Who: Mind of the Hodiac
by Russell T Davies & Scott Handcock (Big Finish, 2022)
This two-parter is rather too long for what it offers, though the female-centric plot is welcome and Colin Baker is once again a delight. Davies and Handcock capture the Sixth Doctor’s personality, yet (as usual) have him largely superfluous to the resolution.
Black Doves
by Joe Barton (Netflix, 2024)
Standard spy thriller material—the plot builds to a point where let-down and exposition prove inevitable—but elevated by Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, top-notch actors who add depth in the gaps beyond dialogue and direction. Well worth a holiday season binge.
Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
by Steven Moffat; dir. Farren Blackburn (BBC, 2011)
“This hammock has developed a fault.” With his childlike enthusiasms and underlying vulnerability, the Eleventh Doctor is tailor-made for holiday specials. This one is a near-perfect concoction of whimsy, adventure and rousing Christmas miracle. Holly Earl and Matt Smith are both brilliant.
Artemis Fowl
by Eoin Colfer (Viking, 2001); audiobook read by Gerry O’Brien (Puffin, 2013)
The fairy world is imaginatively realised and affords a new set of (magical) parameters within which Colfer can manifest Artemis’s ingenious criminal scheming. O’Brien’s audiobook reading goes some way towards papering over such writerly cracks as blatant tell-don’t-show and one-dimensional, stereotyped characters.