Tuesday 29 December 2015

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 19/52


I'm surprised I read so much this week - 17th December to 23rd December.  That said, the three Sophie Hannah's are all audiobooks.  I listened to Pictures or It Didn't Happen - a three hour quick read - again before buying a few more credits for the next few books, that is, The Other Half Lives and A Room Swept White.

The Other Half Lives is the first Sophie Hannah book I ever read.  Happily, it's been long enough that I'd forgotten the finer details of the intricate plot.  I'd also forgotten one of the more disturbing details of A Room Swept White - that Hannah implies the scientific community were picking on Andrew Wakefield for disagreeing with them.  That's dangerously inaccurate; Wakefield's claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism was not properly tested or validated.

Memoriam is a graphic novel that I spotted in the library, about a girl who wakes up with no memory.  It was pretty interesting.  Introduction by the author of the Fables series, which tells you something about it.

I read The Dark Half as part of my Stephen King project.  I wrote a longer post about it here.

Finally, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? was the inspiration for the title of a Gilmore girls episode.  I read a bit about the book and it seemed interesting so I picked it up on Kindle.  It's set in the depression and focuses on a dance marathon, in which young couples danced for an hour and fifty minutes at a time with ten minute breaks, the longest lasting pair winning a prize.  It's bleak and miserable, but in a very interesting way.  We know it ends with the main character shooting his partner because the entire story takes place in a flashback as the verdict at his trial is being delivered.  It was great, I enjoyed it.


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