Unapologetic Reviews

Doctor Who: 10 Days of Christmas is a festive anthology of short Doctor Who stories, all set around Christmas in one way or another. I listened to this as an audiobook , which comes in at around six hours, making it an easy, compact listen. The kind of thing you can dip into over a few evenings in December without any commitment stress. The structure is straightforward. Ten short stories, quick to establish their premise and quick to resolve it. That pacing works well in audio form. None of the stories overstay their welcome, and there is a nice variety of settings. Alien planets , spaceships , strange workplaces, including one story centred around a Christmas factory . On paper, that variety sounds ideal, and in terms of pure Doctor Who flavour, it largely works. The problem is the Christmas element itself. While every story technically includes Christmas, the level of integration varies wildly. In some cases, Christmas is central to the mood and the events. In others, it barely exi...

I listened to the audiobook version. Doctor Who: The Art of Destruction by Stephen Cole is so far the worst Doctor Who book I read / listened to. I keep forgetting about it too, so apparently my brain is trying to erase the memory. In the beginning, the way animals and all sorts of things were turning into gold and then moving was interesting, but when they were crawling around the caves it got quickly boring, and it couldn't recapture my interest. I wondered if it was just because I listened to it and not read it, but looking through the reviews I saw that other people had similar experiences with it. I didn't like Don Warrington 's reading. For some reason his voice annoyed me, and I felt he couldn't capture the Doctor's way of speaking either. He was more successful with the African characters. The characters I can't remember at all. I remember that there was a guy and a woman that were running about, but nothing of them was committed into memory. Overall,...