I finished some books this week!
The School of Good and Evil was an interesting one. Another fairytale rewrite; this one is about a school where pupils are raised to be either good - generally princes and princesses - or evil, ie, witches. Sophie and Agatha are from a village from which two children are kidnapped in order to attend the school. Sophie is determined to be the pretty princess, while Agatha only wants to go home, so it's a bit of a shock when Agatha's dropped into the good half of the school and Sophie in the bad. Kind of silly. I think the major flaw is that it ignores every single other fairytale rewrite over the past twenty or so years and assumes we're all starting with some very, very old clichés which it proceeds to subvert. Loses some of the effect when we've seen it done so many times.
Handmaid's Tale I listened to as an audio book. I first read it as a teenager. Atwood is a bit hit and miss for me, but this one I like.
The WAGs Diary is a book I first read in 2007. I really liked it; it's about a WAG, Tracie Martin, who really throws herself into the whole thing. There's a sweet depth to the character; an abusive mother gives her a freudian excuse for throwing herself into the world of Waggishness and it is genuinely funny. I was a little put off the book when I read about some of Alison Kervin's comments on chavs; I began to worry that the joke was, in fact, on me. I'm the mixed-race, bastard result of a teenage pregnancy raised on a council estate by a single mother. My dad's an unemployed drug dealer, and both sides of my family are rife with alcoholism. I'm a bit sensitive to the word 'chav'.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a book I read for my feminist bookclub, which I ended up missing in the end. It explores the trials of raising a daughter in a world full of pretty pink princesses. It touches on a lot of issues in 200 or so pages, which makes it harder to delve into some of them. I do want to write a longer post on the book - probably just flicking through my highlights and writing down why I highlighted them - because it did trigger quite a lot of thoughts.
Incidentally, I missed my feminist meeting because I was in bed with this guy.
We've been dating for about a month. He's sweet, and laughs at my jokes, and reads, and climbs, and has all those muscles that make smart girls stupid. I honestly thought of getting out of bed, then got distracted. I'm not even going to pretend to be sorry.
Finally, Mini-Habits was 125 pages and I read it in one evening. It really didn't need to be that long. Basic premise is, if you set yourself an absurdly simple habit - ie, doing one push-up - you're more likely to actually stick to it in the long run, and even surpass it. This makes sense to me. My rule for learning the guitar, and now, the keyboard, was to practice once a day. No minimum. I could literally pick either instrument up, play one chord, and be done for the day. That made it easy; it wasn't a big commitment or a chore, and 99% of the time I'd surpass that goal. But I didn't have to, so I didn't feel bad on days when I really could only put in the bare minimum. It let me keep it up without ever feeling like a failure. That's the basic argument this book makes. It also points out that decided to do something that feels like a chore - a 30 minute workout, or an hour's piano practice - imposes a huge cost on your willpower, which is finite. Deciding to do single push-up or turn on my keyboard and play one chord costs far less, so you're more likely to actually do it.
Really, that's it. Could have been explained in one blog post. Good idea though.
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