Doctors and Dragons

Books read this week: The Great Hunt 6/10 (Robert Jordan), Confessions of a GP 6/10 (Benjamin Daniels)

The Great Hunt is the second in Robert Jordan's gigantic Wheel of Time series. It's a marked improvement on the first book, as it reads much less like a cheap knock-off of the Lord of the Rings. The characterisation is still a bit lack-lustre, but the plot rolls on quickly enough, and it's interesting enough that I'm willing to start the third book. I also found the description of the damane in the book genuinely disturbing; something of an achievement (and it also makes the people responsible much less sympathetic and more evil than the nebulous Satan-analogue  who is the Big Bad of the series, but doesn't really appear to do much but loom ominously).

That said, I'm not sure how I'm going to get on with the larger cosmology of the Wheel of Time as the series develops; I'm not generally a fan of the idea of cyclical time, of presdestination, or, frankly, of destiny in general; I'm very strongly of the opinion that the world is what we make it; appeals to destiny always seem like a cop-out to me. The only treatment of prophecy in fiction I actually enjoy is Babylon 5, and that's because (due to time travel) it's not prophecy, so much as memory.

First appearances to the contrary Confessions of a GP isn't low-grade 70s porn; it's a fragmentary book, which reads like a series of blog posts, by a locum GP. It's fairly interesting and very entertaining fluff. The main take home message (for me, at least) is simple: targets work. They are something of a blunt instrument, people don't like them, and they complain about them, but if you want to make something better you have to be able to measure how good things are now, and how much better they get. The other thing message I took away is that the BMA is the best trade union in Britain at the moment. If only they would take non-medical members....

I'll be on holiday for the next couple of weeks, so the blog will be on hiatus until I get back.