That’s right! We don’t love the Moomins - we live the Moomins 
9 Likes
Absolutely! We breathe, bleed and live Moomins 
8 Likes
Just finished 73 Yards so moving onto Rogue to complete the Fifteenth Doctor novelisations and have also started Kursaal to continue the EDA’s. A copy of The Highest Science is in the post so I can continue the VNA’s.
14 Likes
Just finished the new Mel book. It got a little better in the second half but still pretty mediocre. 3/5
10 Likes
I’m liking you more and more, @Tian! Perhaps there is a little (Finnish) Moomin living inside you? Perhaps we are distantly related from the time when Sweden and Finland stood together as one glorious European kingdom (215+ years ago, for those of you who wonder)! It’s obvious: you love the Moomins, and I love Swedish TV, movies, music, and culture!
9 Likes
Approved! Maybe we’re also distantly related from the time Sweden and Denmark were almost joined into one kingdom 
We have loads of Moomin stuff - a couple of salad bowls, a jug, a pie tin, a couple of trays, duvet covers & pillowcases, towels - and plasters, of course!
5 Likes
Tryng to drag this back on topic…
Nearly finished The Last Dodo - still lots of fun.
I’m also struggling through the Black Archive on Marco Polo. It’s ridiculously ‘academic’ and has had more than one sentence that has just made me roll my eyes. It’s definitely not helping me appreciate or like Marco Polo - a story I struggle with.
12 Likes
I’m not far from finishing reading The Devil Goblins from Neptune! It’s been an interesting experience. While I think it’s a good and well-written book, I’m having this weird sensation of a lot of things being just a little off or different. Part of it is the clear choice to make the 1970 of this book significantly more different from irl 1970 than Doctor Who normally does, part of it is character stuff like Liz seeming younger / more inexperienced than she comes across in most media surrounding S7 or Mike Yates being aggressively heterosexual (EDIT: or the Doctor seeming weirdly conservative about certain things), but it also just feels like a very different take on Season 7 than the VMAs’ two novels set around the same time. It appears to contradict them in some ways, but also it just feels like it’s written in a very different style, perhaps a more immersive one, and kinda feels distinct from any of the VMAs (which is odd because one of its two writers wrote a VMA which I liked but didn’t find it super similar to this, and the other I’ve only heard people complain about).
It’s also possible that some of this feeling of being different might be a placebo effect of the BBC Books’ formatting being very distinct from that of the Virgin novels. Which is amusing because one of the EDAs not too far down the line is called Placebo Effect. But also The Eight Doctors still felt very Terrance Dicks and quite true to his style as I know it from his VNAs.
9 Likes
I remember not being impressed with Liz, Mike or the Brigadier’s characterisation, but apart from that I can’t remember a single thing from reading Devil Goblins. But from what I’ve read, the PDAs are much more likely to break from the more traditional style of Classic Who than the VMAs. Not always, but more so.
I think Goth Opera is the only truly ‘successful’ pilot to the four major wilderness Who book series. None of the others did it for me.
9 Likes
I listened to Winter Quartet as part of the audiobook collection “Twelfth Doctor Tales.”
All four stories are solid.
I liked the third, “The Sins of Winter,” the most (4/5).
However, in my opinion, the best narrated one is “The Gods of Winter.” Clare Higgins’ voices for the Twelfth Doctor and Clara vividly bring them to life. Brilliant. 
4 Likes
Finished The Devil Goblins from Neptune. Kind of a disappointing ending in terms of which things were actually resolved and how (and the fact that I kinda doubt the things left unresolved here will be picked up again). Just leaves me kinda feeling like, ugh, why does this book even exist. It’s simultaneously better and worse than the VMAs which dealt with Season 7, but refuses to coexist with them, making the whole thing deeply unsatisfying.
The best things in it were the parts in the Soviet Union, the parts dealing with the infiltration of UNIT, the scenes featuring the CIA Control character (voiced by Don Johnson in my head), and the glimpses of day-to-day life in the UK of 1970, all of which were unceremoniously dropped for a plodding “well I guess we’ll just kill all the aliens” ending that resolves none of the interesting bits despite going to great lengths to bring the entire main cast to a location deeply suited for doing so.
At one point I thought a character about whose identity there was some mystery would turn out to be Paul McCartney (this does actually make some sense in context lol). I was wrong, but it would have been a much better and more satisfying reveal than the eventual, extremely anticlimactic and out of nowhere one.
8 Likes
Read The Church on Ruby Road, and it went a long way to reminding me of all the positives in the episode. Honestly, all I could really recall was that horrible musical bit, and frankly I was relieved the book didn’t play the song when I got to that part. Had visions of those annoying musical greeting cards.
12 Likes
At least the Goblin Song is like a symphony compared to There’s aiways a twist in the end…
15 Likes
Fifteen and Ruby’s inexplicable burst of Broadway directly after however is just as confusing and badly written.
"Good to say how diddly-deet you" what does that even mean???
12 Likes
And why did the Goblin band start playing again when the Doctor told them to? And why when doing that would he ask the lead singer without an instrument to start playing? And why did none of the ~200 goblins make a move to try and stop them when they made their intention to steal the Goblin King’s snack abundantly clear in the song?
Answer? Christmas Special Shenanigans 
11 Likes
I honestly have no idea why they chose to write that. I have nothing against nonsensical lyrics, but there’s nonsensical and… That.
8 Likes
Jumping Jehosaphat I’ve made sense of it!
Ruby also sings “I’m 50 miles up in the sky”.
50 miles? In an unpressurized wooden vessel?
It’s altitude sickness! Her human anatomy cannot withstand the lack of oxygen in the stratosphere. Poor Ruby, she’s starved for oxygen and clearly delirious from prolonged exposure.
Case closed 
16 Likes
Not particularly Doctor Who related, but I reread through the entirety of Skin Horse. Makes me sad it’s complete all over again…
4 Likes