I think we decided to do one from each range per month, they are staggered by a couple of weeks.
So the next one (The Monsters Inside) is still a couple weeks away.
Although happy to move it forward so we start on the 1st March and everything is simpler - people can always discuss things on a delay, just worried about leaving people behind.
I’ll write up a proper schedule at some point.
Thanks! To be fair, I’m a quick reader - next week I’ll probably catch up with all 3 in the audio club too. I’m not a die-hard audio fan, so it feels like a whole new world to book club haha
And the first fifty Main Range releases are free on Spotify and really cheap on the Big Finish website.
Just finished! This book is the closest thing I can image to perfectly neutral. I feel weird even trying to have opinions about it. The kind of story where I will remember reading it but nothing that happens.
I finally started the audiobook today. I’ve finished Chapter 4. I’m not finding the large supporting cast too hard to keep straight. It’s slower, feels closer to the pace of maybe the McCoy era than Series 1. I liked the call backs to The Unquiet Dead. That the character of the Doctor and Rose is quite recognizable as the characters we see on TV is a testament to the scripts. I’m enjoying the mysteries that are being set up, especially the mysterious Melissa Heart. I will also give it that Nick Briggs is a decent narrator (even if his Ninth Doctor is kinda meh).
In the middle of Chapter 8 now. It’s a decent story, just got through the attack of the clockwork knights. It’s nothing outstanding, but it’s enjoyable and Briggs is a good narrator (even if he can’t do a good Ninth Doctor). Melissa Heart is definitely an interesting character. Though the happy and angry masks reminded me of the part in the Series 3 finale where John Simm is making those faces.
Just finished Chapter 15. Is this an outstanding first of a series? No. Is it an enjoyable Doctor Who story? Yes. I’m enjoying the twists and turns as everything’s revealed, and there’ve been plenty of action sequences to keep it interesting. I’ll admit that it gets off to a slow start, but it does pick up and does whittle down the characters a bit. I’m a little surprised that there weren’t more comments on the cat(s), that seemed to be a big sticking point in a lot of the Goodreads reviews for this. Shade Vassily is a fairly generic villain, but then again, not every villain can a be a Davros or Master. I’ll write up my final thoughts once I’ve finished.
There we go, finished it. It’s good, nothing outstanding, but good. I had a lot of fun with the third act which felt a lot like the finale of Rose. I also liked the jabs at the Doctor being a war criminal when Melissa Heart thinking he was Vassily feeling like they were being analogous to the Doctor’s actions in the Time War. In the end, this was an enjoyable book in the moment, but not one of the true great Doctor Who novels and not one of my favorites.
Gwyneth is the obvious one, but she also befriended the plumber in End of the World.
I started this last night. I’m about 50 pages in. So far so good. I can hear the Ninth and Rose doing the dialogue so far. Will update when complete.
So I finally finished the first book in the Book Club. I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to - it did feel like it could have been a TV story and Rose & the Doctor were characterised consistently with how they would have have appeared in the series thus far (I’ve just finished rewatching Aliens of London/WW3 in the TV club so I’m ignoring anything beyond that). Interesting synergy to have Big Ben so strongly featured in two stories that came out at about the same time. I also enjoyed Rose’s flashback to running along the same part of the Embankment as she did in “Rose” but in a different time period. There were plenty of twists and turns and a few deliberate misdirections along the way to keep us guessing right to the end. The one part I was disappointed about was the lack of actual description of Melissa’s true appearance - we only saw the other characters’ reactions to it.
Can’t say I was really a fan of this book all in all, it was just okay nothing too crazy
6/10 for me
Decided to go with the ninth Doctor Books from the NSA a go, since there are only a few out there, and it’s always fun to join into one of those Clubs.
Sadly this one doesn’t impress. It’s far from being ‘bad’, but if I have to describe it, it would be ‘competent, even if it’s a little flat’. It feels clear that this was written before the Revival really came out and at times it does benefit it, I feel like the Supporting Cast is build up fairly strongly and I can’t lie a Book with Nine that feels like the classic Series has a touch to it. Sadly, Nine feels very generic here and doesn’t feel like his TV Self all that much, and the same can be said for Rose. It’s a decent read and really has an Oddity Status due to it being clearly more inspired of the previous Identity of the Show, sadly it doesn’t engage me all that much. The Story is fine, but a bit cliché. Not as egregious as the Start of the VNAs, but sadly much more boring to discuss than Timewyrm I.
Actually getting a book club badge for reading a book properly this time instead of making a jokey post about K9!
I quite enjoyed this one. There’s quite a few characters to keep track of like others have said, but as the story goes on it does focus in a lot more on who’s important and who’s not, with the extraneous cast getting little to nothing later.
The main thing I really like here though is Freddie. His presence really adds that sense of childlike wonder to the book, you can imagine kids reading this and seeing themselves in him. He’s important, but not in a way that the actually really affects the story, in a way that makes him interesting, but still enough of a blank slate for kids to project themselves onto. And everything with him and Rose in this story is just lovely. I also genuinely couldn’t tell if they were going to kill him off in the end. The book had me believe they might for just a moment.
This era of London is also just such a brilliant setting, and the clockwork motif does just add so much to getting you into the vibe of the setting. The description of the clockwork characters reminded me a lot of The Girl in the Fireplace, and it’s really interesting to see where they’re the same, and where they differ, I like the fact that here they’re very much treated as robot characters rather than just robots. I also really like the descriptions of how London has changed so much in such little time, the moment of Rose running down Embankment and comparing it to Rose, so similar but so different, was really nice, though maybe that’s my londoner bias coming through.
Overall though, while there’s a lot to like, while I enjoyed the twists and turns and the ending set piece, I dont’ think anything really ‘wowed’ me enough to rate it higher than a 7/10