Two of these I'd read before; Charm School and Flour Babies. I got some Audible credits for my birthday, so I got them. They're only 3-4 hours long each and they're both fairly high on my favourites list.
How Not to be Wrongis non-fiction, about statistics and applied mathematics. Absolutely fascinating.
Pictures or it Didn't Happen is another Audible book. It's, again, 3-4 hours long. Part of the Quick Reads series, and part of Spilling CID. It's a nice little mystery. I found it utterly absorbing.
The final audio book for this week was The Collectors. It's part of His Dark Materials, a short prequel story. It's about half an hour long. I regret listening to it on 3x speed - I feel like I missed something.
Time Trips was a library book, as was How Not to Be Wrong. It's a collection of Dr Who short stories. Not the best introduction to someone who's never read any, like me, but a nice collection. It encouraged me to start watching the series on Netflix.
Honestly, the main thing that was putting me off watching it was not knowing where to start. You can't watch the show from the beginning, and that baffled me. I'm glad I broke through that barrier.
Finally, Killer Takes it All was a book I found at a truck-stop on my birthday trip to Wales. It was fun! A mystery - the second in a series - about a RP gone wrong. A bit of self-conscious jargon and a satisfying twist. Great fun.
Three books this week, 12 August to 19 August; a library book, an audio book, and an old favourite. I used to have a physical copy, but now I own it on Kindle.
First, the audiobook; Around the World in Eighty Days. I recently read Michael Palin's real-life attempt to duplicate the feat, which prompted me to go back to the original.
This House is Haunted was a library book. It reminded me a lot of Henry James' Turn of the Screw.
Finally, Phone Sex. This is the old favourite. I first read it as a teenager, several years ago and I've reread it every few years since. It's the memoir of a phone sex worker, with a few tips for people who want to try it at home, some info about the industry and lots and lots of stories about callers. All very fascinating.
I also enrolled in college this week, so I expect to be busier in future.
The final week! 5th to the 11th of August. Tomorrow, I complete my 26th trip around the sun (or spiral through the universe) and begin the next one.
Cold Comfort Farm I read because Tom likes it, and we watched the mini-series together. I felt like I was missing something, so I decided to read the book as well.
Touched and Not That Kind of Girl were both library books. The former wasn't that great. A mystery about a haunted house and a kidnapping, neither particularly mysterious or compelling.
Not That Kind of Girl I read because of this article. I've never actually seen any of Lena Dunham's work though I have heard of some of the controversy - like the time she portrayed an all white New York and claimed not to see colour. Even her own book portrays her as a spoiled, clueless, narcissist. But none of those things make her a bad person. I like that she's body-positive.
I'm now watching her film, Tiny Furniture, since it's on Netflix. I'd never heard her speak out loud before. She's very whiny and nasal.
I'm glad I learned more about Lena Dunham, since she is such a large part of the current pop-culture landscape. Though my feelings are confused.
Finally, Cocktails is simply a beginner's guide to cocktails. I've been quite into them recently, so I gave it a quick read since it was free on Kindle.
...and that wraps up my 26th year! I read a total of 261 books over these 52 weeks, at an average of 5.05 per week or 0.72 per day. Here's a graph.
I'm going to carry on doing this next year. And I'm going to update my unread pile every month. Here it is currently.
In future months, a blank space will mean I donated it or otherwise got rid of it without reading it while a cross will mean I've read it. New books will be surrounded by a golden circle.
That's a total of 79 books. I've been saying since I was 23 that I was going to get the total down. Ideally to less than ten at a time. Maybe by actually tracking them, so they don't grow while I'm not looking, it'll go better!
Three of these were library books -The Rosie Effect, Ghosts of Heaven and China Dolls.
The Rosie Effect is the sequel to a book I've read previously, The Rosie Project. It's essentially about a more logical Sheldon Cooper having a baby with a less annoying Zooey Deschanel. Ghosts of Heaven was a bit like House of Leaves for beginners. Its major themes are time as a spiral and madness. The introduction says you can read the four sections in any order and thus interpret them differently. I took him at his word and instead of reading 1234 I read 3241. It worked pretty well, and I think I did interpret it slightly differently this way.
China Dolls is about three girls in America throughout WW2. Two are Chinese, one is Japanese masquerading as Chinese. It's pretty interesting.
Skeleton Crew is one I've read before, and I wrote a longer post about it and Creepshow 2here.
Gravity is my favourite Tess Gerritsen novel. It's a medical mystery love story - in space! Apparently it's quite niche and didn't sell well, so she doesn't intend to write any more.
Tortured Life is a graphic novel in six parts. I funded it on Kickstarter because I like that company's other work. They write very dark graphic novels.
I've read Skeleton Crew before. It has some of my favourite King stories in it, including Mrs Todd's Shortcut and The Word Processor of the Gods. But this time, one of them stood out to me. It was The Raft which reminded me of something I'd watched as a child, which has both horrified and baffled me, for years. There was something about teenagers on a raft, being eaten by goop. That matched the story. But also something about a Native American chief who scalped people and was also made of wood?
On a hunch, I looked up Creepshow 2. I didn't know for a fact that it existed, but it turned out to be exactly the movie I was vaguely remembering. So I've decided to watch the whole thing via youtube.
It opens with the same character originally played by little Joe King (not kidding) and the Man in the Terrifying Mask. He's delivering the latest issue of Creepshow, the comic the whole of the previous movie was based around. With the most eighties animation you can imagine in the needlessly alarming and lengthy title sequence! Animated Not Kidding seems curiously unperturbed.
This thing opens with almost five minutes of animated titles. This may be why my grandmother let me watch this at the age of five. She was firmly convinced that animation was for children. Thank god she never watched Felix the Cat.
We open with the story I only remember the ending of - Old Chief Woodenhead. There's a little old store in the middle of a desert that used to be a town, with a painted wood Chief standing guard outside.
Then a real life Native American shows up. He wants to make a couple of purchases on credit, and offers the treasures of his tribe as collateral.
Shortly after he leaves, a group of teenagers show up to wreck the place on their way to Hollywood. One of them is a member of the same tribe and quite alarmingly insane. Chief Woodenhead most decidedly does not approve of this and starts moving. Very creakily. He stops only to give a muppet-like shriek before touching up his warpaint and heading off for vengeance. He goes, shoots people, and comes back with Dances-With-Crazy's scalp. I'm sure I remember that bit coming after the bit with the goop and the raft.
Then we go back to the framing story, in which poorly animated Not Kidding has ordered some Venus Fly Trap Bulbs from the adverts in the back of Creepshow. I wonder if anyone involved in the production of this thing knew that Venus Fly Traps grew from seeds? I've got some growing on the windowsill.
Now the Raft. I don't remember the beginning, which is odd, because I definitely saw the bit with the scalp. It has haunted me, mostly because it was a lot scarier in my half-remembered imaginings than in reality. The teenagers are wonderfully eighties; you can tell because their names include LaVerne and Randy.
The goop is also less creepy than imagined from the story or remembered from childhood. It looks more like a lump of prop than the amorphous oily blob in the story. But hey, the teenagers are smoking - how eighties!
The melted flesh effect makes the blob a whole lot creepier, admittedly. I wonder how much of the big guy getting sucked through the raft they're going to show?
...oh, all of it. At least it was quick. How did they get his flesh to bubble like that?
Oh, shame. Randy doesn't get to have sex on screen like he does in the book. But he doesn't stay on the raft to die! He makes a swim for it! Go Randy! Stop looking back and use your arms more!
Randy makes it out and stays half an inch from the edge of the sea while he gloats at the amorphous blob. He almost deserves to be eaten. The goopblob burps afterwards.
Poor animated Not Kidding is being picked on by teenagers. I get the feeling Stephen King knew a lot of dickish teenagers; that or there was just a plethora of them in the eighties.
The third story is The Hitchhiker, and this is one I genuinely don't remember. A lady - who I rather like, despite her being an adulterer and, very quickly, a murderer - runs over a hitchhiker. Who proceeds to start following her. As a ghoooooooost. Or possibly a zombiiiiiiiiie. Oooooooooh.
...this is actually quite spooky when you watch it alone at night. Happily, it very quickly dissolves into ridiculousness.
After the hitchiker gets his revenge, we return to the framing story in which the bullies fail to realised that the Venus Fly Trap Bulb they destroyed was not the first Not Kidding has ordered.
Back to Skeleton Crew, which also includes The Mist. I've seen the movie before so I didn't watch it again. I dont really like the ending of the movie. It ends on a much more downbeat note.
James Smythe's post on the book focuses on three stories; The Jaunt - inspired by The Stars My Destination -, Beachworld, and Survivor Type. I remembered The Jaunt because it's a nice bit of sci-fi horror and Survivor Type because I really rather wished I hadn't read it. It freaked me out and stayed in my head.
I didn't remember The Reaper's Image, which was odd, because that was a very nice snappy bit of horror, which I really quite enjoyed.
The next book is It, which is one of Stephen King's most famous novels but which I've never read before. I bought it awhile ago, on Kindle, when it was reduced.
