Comments | sam_t: Amazon Recommendations

sam_t

Amazon Recommendations

Jan 07, 2009 09:50

I occasionally browse through the list of things that Amazon seems so keen to recommend to me, although I have yet to buy something based on Amazon's recommendation alone. The strangest one so far this year is a DVD of Outnumbered, Series 1 (a BBC TV Comedy series), which is apparently based on my purchase of a CD of Roxana Panufnik's choral work ( Read more... )

Comments 8

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sam_t January 7 2009, 13:44:15 UTC

Buy or borrow, do you reckon?

coughingbear January 7 2009, 17:41:43 UTC

I like Panufnik's Westminster Mass too, I've got it on a CD of Westminster Cathedral choir. I once heard them do the Sanctus and it was fab.

sam_t January 8 2009, 09:47:05 UTC

I've heard the Westminster Mass performed live in the quire of York Minster. It was an amateur choir, so there were a few wobbles, but it was still a pretty good evening.

Do you like James MacMillan?

coughingbear January 8 2009, 20:03:12 UTC

Yes, I do. I must get some recordings of his work - do you recommend anything in particular?

sam_t January 9 2009, 09:28:34 UTC

I have the Elysian Singers recording of Cantos Sagrados, which I'd definitely recommend, but I've been meaning to get more at some point. brisingamen would be a good person to ask, as well, as I'm pretty sure she's more familiar with his work in general.

lil_shepherd January 8 2009, 06:54:36 UTC

I like a lot of Charlie's work, but he does have a tendency to write great first books in a series and then get boring. Merchant Princes is a pretty typical parallel worlds fantasy with a very tough heroine, but I gave up after book two. Not by any means the best Stross, but decent.

I have a copy of Stealing Light bought cheap on my 'to read' pile.

I prefer the BBC Paul Temple adaptions, if necessary. Very, very lightweight.

The Nightrunner series (or another of her series - I forget, which may tell you something) was also recommended to me by Amazon and by various people as being remarkably slashy. It is. It is also a yawning-making and very average fantasy. Gave up after the second book.

sam_t January 8 2009, 09:54:37 UTC

I've enjoyed Stross's SF but wasn't sure whether the things I enjoyed in them would also be present in this sort of fantasy series. I might see whether I can borrow them from somewhere, although sadly the local library is better at recent SF than recent fantasy.

This was a BBC CD - do you mean that there's a dramatised version? I've found that the BBC seem to have lots of versions of things like Dorothy L. Sayers' novels, and it's difficult sometimes to work out what you're getting. I've got a CD of a dramatised Whose Body that is definitely not the version I remember hearing on the radio, and I've got tapes of other novels being read which seem to be hard to find on CD.

Looks like the Amazon recommendation engine hasn't managed to come up with any winners so far, anyway!

lil_shepherd January 8 2009, 14:54:02 UTC

The Beeb has been producing full cast versions of Paul Temple for 50 years, and been issuing them on audio since the invention of the cassette tape.

http://www.bbcshop.com/bin/venda?ex=co_wizr-locayta&template=wz_locayta&pageno=1&perpage=10&collate=ivtype%3Apdxtgenre%3Abrand%3Aivprice%3Apdxtclassification%3Apdxtlevel&fieldrtype=type&termtextrtype=invt&typertype=exact&typekeywordsearch=keyword&termtextkeywordsearch=paul+temple