In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 17/52 and my Unread Pile

10 books this week - 3rd to the 9th of December.  I didn't think I'd read that many!

I vaguely recalled having seen the move of Watership Down as a child, though perhaps I only saw the trailer, or the opening.  I didn't recall anything about the plot though I did recall that it was fucking horrifying.

Reading the book as an adult was no less horrifying, though admittedly it was comforting to be able to tell myself that it was only a tractor and not, in fact, the end of the world.

I'm being facetious there; the events of Watership Down do include the end of some worlds, and clearly came from a time when British children were much hardier, not like soft modern folk.

Girls in Tears is the final book of Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series.  Ellie and her friends are all a little older and now they're having boy trouble and pets are dying and so on.  I cried a little too; not just because my hamster died a few weeks ago, but at the image of Ellie's dad, when she finally confronts him.

I'm sure that if you're interested you'd know this already, but there was a TV series made of the Girls series which you can view here.  It takes several liberties, mostly with Ellie's height, weight and frizziness of hair, the features she dwelled on most.  I didn't actually watch the series because it began around the time I stopped owning a TV, but I'm now watching it in a sidebar and completely failing to recognise the books in it.

Free Speeches was a pamphlet created by various comic writers and artists protesting against restrictions about what can be discussed in comics.  They appear to have won.  The essays made some great points.

I very much enjoyed The Vampire's Mail Order Bride.  It's very silly; it's about a vampire, living semi-openly in a town his family owns, whose mother wants grandbabies so badly that she signs him up to 'Eternadate', a company which sets up month-long dates with wannabe-spouses.

Meanwhile, Delany, who dreams of opening her own sweetshop, accidentally witnesses a mob-hit. She runs straight into the offices of Eternadate where she steals a profile and decides to pretend to be Hugh's blind date so she can hang around in another state for a month or so.

While the book is clichéd in good ways it manages to avoid being clichéd in bad ways.  Delany reveals herself fairly early on, and she and Hugh have an open discussion about it.  At one point, when they're starting to fall for one another, Delany feels jealous, but openly admits to this while acknowledging that she has no claim on Hugh and they have an open and healthy discussion about that.   It's still very silly and romantic, but it's also self aware and firmly tongue-in-cheek, and portrays a pretty healtyh (though very rapid romance).  I read it in the bath with a glass of wine.

A Game for all the Family is a book I actually read (listened to) earlier, back in August.  I'm on a Sophie Hannah kick at the moment, and since I've only listened to it once before the plot had faded from my memory enough for me to want to hear it again.  I quite like Justine, the main character.  She's very forthright.

I wrote a longer post about Only Ever Yours here.

The Age of Miracles is a book that's been on my kindle for quite a while, so I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.  It's set in a universe where the spin of the earth begins to slow.  In tone, it's very like the film Melancholia - the people are more important than the physics.

Speaking of getting around to reading, I had a clear-out recently and removed a lot of books from my unread pile, mostly those which were on last year's list and which I hadn't touched.  My unread pile now stands at 54, which isn't quite my goal of 30 by the end of 2015 but it's pretty close.

Remember, the gold surroundings are books I bought since my birthday, the black crosses are books I've given away without reading them, and the blue crosses are books I've read.

Grinny is a library book.  I read a little about it on TV Tropes - though I can't reveal what without spoilers - and that made me interested enough to reserve it.  It's a children's book, 112 pages, and I read it on the bus.  It was a fun interlude.

The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter is set in a steampunk world where the patent office outlaws any inventions they don't like.  A 'bullet-catcher' is an illusionist or stage magician, and his daughter, in this case, is Elizabeth Barnabas.  Due to the semi-Victorian mores of the society, Elizabeth also poses as her non-existent twin brother, which enables her to work as the equivalent of a private detective.  It's the first in the Gas-Lit Empire series and I'm pretty tempted to pick up the sequels.

Finally, The Bees.  I have been raving over this book.  It's a fictionalisation of the life of a bee, but what's really interesting about it is that none of the actual events are inventions.  Bees really do behave like that.  They don't have an internal narrative about it, as far as we know, and the story's been filtered through a human understanding, but it's still very much just the normal life of a bee.  I'd love to do a full annotation of it, once I've learned more about bees .