In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 28th Year, Week 1/52

10 books last week!  Well, slightly over a week; the 11th to the 19th of August.  This was a leap year, so my birthday was on the Friday not the Thursday.

Six rereads.  I'm reading (listening) to the City Watch books of the Discworld series in order, starting with Night Watch which adds a sad poignancy to the first few.  Poor young Sam.  It's interesting to observe that Sam is a man made by Keel, Carrot, and Vetinari, and then, ultimately, by himself.

How to be Good is one of my favourite of Nick Hornby's novels.  For a man who writes in a genre known as "lad lit" he writes excellent women.  Which kind of indicates that the people who try to gender genres are idiots.  I've also listened to The Upside of Rationality before; it's one of the first audiobooks I ever owned.

I started listening to Yes Please the other day when I walked the Birmingham-Worcester canal, from Birmingham to Worcester.  30 miles.  I also listened to Guards Guards during this trip.  The wisest line in the whole book is "your divorce will be like your marriage".  I've never been married or divorced, but that's certainly true in my experience.

The Silkworm is the second in the Cormoran Strike series.  I got it for Christmas and only just got around to finishing it.  I'm trying to get books off my unread pile before I move so I don't have to carry the bloody things!

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is my favourite of Roald Dahl's works, with some competition from Danny the Champion of the World.  I did notice some interesting similarities with The Great Gatsby.  Henry Sugar is like the Benjamin Button version of Jay Gatz; a playboy who finds a goal, devotes all his time an energy to it, and finds he's a better person with a meaningful existence.  As opposed to starting as poor and ambitious, finding a goal, devoting all your time and energy to it, and becoming a playboy.

Unseemly Science is the second i the Gas Lit Empire series.  I'm re-listening to them all, eventually.

I read Cursed Child in the first hour of my birthday.  Cried five times!

Little Sisters of Eluria has a slightly longer post to come.

Finally, Men Explain Things to Me.  Very short, took about an hour and a half to read.  For my feminist bookclub; definitely good for bringing righteous feminist anger.  The next book is Atlas Shrugged, which I really look forward to discussing!

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 25/52

Six books last week!  That's the 28th January to the 3rd of February.

Three were audio books and relatively short.  Charm School and Flour Babies are both around three hours long and both are books I first read and loved around 11 or 12.  I do love Anne Fine's writing.

I finally finished Adventures in the Dream Trade.  That's a collection of introductions and other bits and pieces by Neil Gaiman, including his online diary of the bits between writing and publishing American Gods, which I'm now rereading.

Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears is a collection of modern fairytales.  There are some particularly good ones in this collection, including my favourite one about a kitsune, which is a lovely word to say.  Kitsune.

About A Boy is a book I first read as a teenager.  This was the audiobook and I love Julian Rhind-Tutt's performance, actually more than that of Hugh Grant in the movie (and not least because I'm a bit of a Green Wing fan).

I've just heard that the book is being taught in secondary schools now, which I love.  I've reread it a few times over the years and I can see it would be an excellent point of discussion for teenagers.

It's weird to think of a book that I love being a 'school book'.  Though, of course, Shakespeare and Dickens et all were all very popular authors, and I do read Dickens novels for fun.

Better Than Before was a useful book.  It's about habits and motivation and so far I'm using two very useful tips.

The first one is the 'tendencies' the author sees people as being split into.

Upholders who are equally motivated by external and internal expectations.
Obligers, who are more motivated by external goals but more likely to let internal goals or expectations lapse.
Questioners, who will not accept a goal or expectation until they have question it and internalised it as acceptable.
Rebels, who defy expectations and find it hard to be motivated by a goal.

I'm definitely an obliger; if I decide to do something I find it very easy to talk myself out of it, whereas if someone else expects me to do something I find it harder to avoid. So the trick for me will be to externalise any habits I decide to do.  I've already done this; I've told my fb friends that if I don't stick to my study schedule for the week then I'm going to put the UKIP logo up as my facebook banner and my PC and phone background.   So far, that threat has been sufficient to get me up at 7am to study between 7:30am - 8:30am because I couldn't manage at any other time in the morning.

The other useful bit is realising that I'm very much a starter.  I LOVE starting new projects.  I love making new blogs, buying new notebooks and pens, making details plans...but I'm a bit meh on actually finishing things.  Knowing that is useful.  It's why my unread pile doesn't go down and why I end up buying books which I later just donate to charity.  Still working on ways to get around it, but at least I understand the issue better now.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 23/52

Six books last week; that is 13th to 20th January.  One audiobook - Liar - and two books which I'd been reading over Christmas.  Three library books.

I enjoyed Liar.  I wasn't quite sure what to make of it afterwards, so I read the TV Tropes page, which helped.  I actually read the book because of Justine Labalestier's blogpost regarding the cover. As a woman of colour - a mixed race woman of colour - seeing mixed race women represented in fiction is important to me.

That's one thing Scott Pilgrim's pretty bad at, incidentally.  Dealing with people of colour.  I saw the movie years ago and picked up the graphic novel because it was in the library.  It's not brilliant or particularly well-drawn, though it is slightly less racist than the movie if only because it avoided giving the one Indian character a Bollywood number.  I very much agree with this post on the movie.

I very much enjoyed Funny Girl.  I read it in one night; I didn't mean to, I just didn't want to stop.  It's about the TV industry in the '60s.  It's fictitious but includes real photographs from the decade; if it wasn't fiction the characters would easily slip into reality.

I've been reading American Wife since before Christmas.  The library only had the large print version, which made it a 900 page tome.  I eventually just gave in and bought the damn thing for the Kindle just so I didn't have to lug it around any more.  I enjoyed the book; it's a fictionalisation of the life of a first lady.  It's mostly inspired by Laura Bush, which is fair enough; unless you want to write a total alternate history you'd have to at least loosely base it on of the three women who've held the role over the last twenty years.

Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body is a book on self-experimentation, with specific things that Tim Ferriss has found to work on himself.  It's a pretty interesting read.  The most interesting point he made is that a calorie is literally a unit of energy; people think of it only as something that can be stored (as fat) or converted into work (exercise) but you can also lose it thermodynamically or as matter (ie, shivering and shitting).  Thermodynamics is the easiest one to manage, without indulging in some unhealthy habits.  That's why swimming takes so much energy; you're also letting off heat, since the water's fairly cool.

Finally, Four Past Midnight.  I need to write a longer post about that.

In Which We Discuss Further Chronological Reading Challenges

A little while back, I decided to read everything Lisa Jewell had every written, in the order in which she'd written it. It was quite an interesting experience, and most of it was chronicled on this blog. You can find it through the "Chronological Reading Challenge" tag, which is also on this post. Scroll on down a bit and you'll see it.

Although I had read most of the books before, reading them in this way did give me further insights into them, and into the author. The main thing I noticed was her growing...obsession? Focus?...something - with children. More and more, children became the driving force in her character's lives. Not necessarily the fact of having them, more the consequences of various things connected with them, if that makes sense. For instance; one character's life changes utterly when she becomes pregnant and proceeds to give the child up for adoption. Another has her life change when she accidentally orphans and paralyses a child in a single accident. Yet another has her relationship go off the walls when she accidentally becomes pregnant.

Those events and the novels they appear in aren't in chronological order, as listed above. Generally speaking, things which happen to children get worse and worse as Jewell grows older, and writes more novels.  And, of course, as she has her own children, and presumably, worries and obsesses over all the horrible things that could happen.

However, moving away from Jewell, I am inclined to repeat the experiment. I'm considering doing it with Sheri Tepper, but her bibliography is long, complex, split over many different names, and occasionally out of print.

Excuse me, I must shriek like a fangirl.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Tepper's writing a sequel to Plague of Angels, set to be released this year! Ah!

Ahem.

I just googled Tepper's bibliography, looking for a complete list in chronological order, including those books published under pseudonyms, and spotted that. Now I am happy.

Anyway, her wiki page is probably the most thorough list, and you can see that that would be quite a project. Especially considering that I probably own less than half of them right now, and the library almost definitely doesn't stock many of them. So Tepper wouldn't be a great choice for this project, not until I have lots more money and free time (sadly, the two do not come together).

I do have a fair amount of books to get through at the minute too. I've just started the Mavin Manyshaped trilogy, of the True Game series, and I still haven't read most of my current library books. I need to get through those quick, before my reservations come in. So another CRC would take a while to get off the ground.

At the minute, authors I'm considering include Ben Elton (although I recently gorged myself on his work, so maybe not), Jenny Colgan (I already own most of them, and I know the library has the rest, so that would be easy), Nick Hornby (ditto), Trudi Canavan (a relatively new author, so less of a back catalogue), and Matt Beaumont (would have to buy, since the library is missing a few of them). Maybe Alice Hoffman or Kjartan Poskitt (I'm just looking at my shelves for random inspiration here - those aren't authors I've really considered before, which may actually be a point in their favour). Stephen King would represent many of the same problems as Tepper.  Dahl, maybe?  I don't know.

Any suggestions, comment. It should be open to those people without accounts now.

In Which We Discuss the Last Fortnight

...can I explain why I didn't call?

Alright, I know what I wrote about trying to write something every week. What can I say? I haven't been in much of a blogging mood. Haven't been in much of a film/book mood either, as you can see if you check out my film blog, The Real Ratings.

Come to think of it, what have I been doing?

Anyway.

A metaphor from Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree has stuck with me. Namely, that reading is a lot like eating. Sometimes, you're in the mood for something heavy - a big, three course meal, for instance. Or maybe something light, or something new, or something familiar, or something like fast food which you know isn't the best thing to eat, but which is trashily enjoyable anyway (Twilight, for instance).

Well, for the past few days or so, I've been leaning more towards familiar tastes. Comforting tastes. Things which are the literary equivalent of my scalloped potatoes recipe - personal, and familiar, and, to abandon the food metaphor, snuggly and worn, like comfy old slippers.

That's why I reread Helen Dunne's Light as a Feather. It's one of those chick-lit novels (I have a not-so-secret addiction to the damn things) that I picked up in a charity shop for about 50p, several years back.

Plotwise, it's not the most inventive thing ever. It's about a woman, Orla Kennedy, who decides to set up a diet chatroom/support group, to help her lose weight for her best friend's wedding. That information should help you classify the book slightly better - it's from the Irish side of the family, and it's about weight issues.

I don't mean that to sound derogatory, just informative. Generally speaking, Irish chick-lit (I intend to keep using that term; I don't find it derogatory or offensive, and the same goes for 'comic' rather than graphic novel) has a unique kind of style. That's not to say that every Irish writer writes like that, or that no writer of any other nationality can - it's just a trend I've noticed. And now I'm going to stop being so PC and just list a few examples; Marian Keyes, for instance, especially with things like Watermelon. Tina Reilly, although without dealing with the heavy issues that Is This Love? discusses. Like Cecilia Ahern, only nothing like so sad as PS - I Love You. In tone though, the book is mostly like Arabella Weir's Does My Bum Look Big in This?, only without so much harping on about self-hatred and Catholic guilt.

...all right, there is a bit of Catholic guilt.

While we're on the subject, American chick-lit is slightly different as well. For instance, the weight issues tend to be a bit more...well, more. I'm mostly thinking of Liza Palmer's Conversations With the Fat Girl, although, oddly, Jane Green's Jemima J has something of the same tone (incidentally, Green is English, with an America-sized ego. No, I did not accidentally leave off the 'n').

Anyway, my point is that in English or Irish chick-lit about weight issues, the women tend to be anything from a sixteen to an eighteen. In American novels, they tend to be rather larger than that.

That said, a lot of my English and Irish chick-lit was picked up in charity shops, and a lot of it dates from the early nineties. So perhaps it's more a sign of the times than of geography.

To contradict myself slightly on the craving-familiarity thing, I also read Jeremy de Quidt's The Toymaker the other day. It was a spur-of-the-moment choice in the library. They had all these glossy new paperbacks on a little shelf near the door, and that one looked interesting (as did Cliff McNish's Savannah Grey, although I haven't read that one yet).

The cover, for a start, was as creepy as hell. See that terrifying little doll?  Shame she doesn't get more screentime, really.

Although the book dealt with some fairly mature themes (such as revenge, murder and organ-theft), you can still tell that it's a young adult novel. Part of that impression comes from the ilustrations throughout, but a lot of it is in the tone. There just seems to be something different about young adult novels, a lack of something to get your teeth into. And, oh look, we're back to the foor metaphor. And I've just realised I haven't eaten today.

Right, had a banana. Where was I?

The Toymaker. It's pretty interesting, and absorbing, but also downright creepy. It reminded me a lot of Philip Pullman's Clockwork. It's a book aimed at young adults, with all the blood left in, which is interesting if you're prepared for it (as you should be after looking at that cover).


Finally, at the moment, I'm rereading Miranda Austin's Phone Sex. I'm fairly sure I've mentioned that before. It's just so readable and fun.

It's essentially the memoirs of a phone-sex girl, mostly anecdotes, but with a few other things, all of it completely absorbing (and not just because it's about sex. I don't think, anyway).

I am starving. More later, maybe.

In Which We Discuss Last Week

I've decided to make the effort to write a weekly column (well, post, really) on what I've been reading.

Mostly, this was inspired by reading Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, which I have, irritatingly enough, misplaced twenty pages from the end. How annoying is that?

The Polysyllabic Spree is a reprint of columns Hornby wrote for American literature magazine, The Believer. At the beginning of each one he lists the books he read that month and the books he bought, before going on to write down his thoughts on them.

It's kind of odd that I enjoyed the columns, despite Hornby and I having very different tastes. I like most of his books, sure - About A Boy, High Fidelity, and How to be Good come to mind - but, for instance, I've never gotten along with Dickens, which is one of his favourites. I also love sci-fi, which Hornby just cannot understand (really, he says that himself). In fact, I'm now determined to go check out Iain M. Banks' work at the library, based solely on a few paragraphs of Hornby's bafflement. Not at the fact of his bafflement, but because the bits he described seemed really, really interesting, and not baffling at all.

Oh, I've just spotted Hornby's latest book, Juliet, Naked on the pile at the end of my bed. That was one of the books I bought at the airport at New Years, on my way to Aberdeen.

Speaking of books I bought at New Years, I finally read that one by Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind. I found it absolutely fascinating, and finished it over two days. I really couldn't put it down.

Tricks of the Mind is basically about whatever Derren Brown felt like writing. It's aimed towards the general public, and contains a little information on his life, but a lot more information on memory tricks. Did you know, for instance, that in 2004, the final score of the FA Cup Final was Manchester United 3, Millwall 0? I am never going to forget that, after reading the following paragraph;

'04: M3, Millwall 0. Whore: mum, wall 0. Let's convert 'Millwall' into 'wall' to seperate it from the other Ms. Who's that whore? Why it's my own mother (God forgive me), stood against a wall, making nothing at all.

...makes me crack up everytime.

What he's done there is convert the information into words and formed those into an interesting image that you won't want to forget. '4' becomes 'whore' because it rhymes, while '3', using a slightly different number system, becomes an 'm' sound (because an m has three prongs). 'Man U' become M, Millwall is wall. The nil score isn't converted, because we can use it as it is.

That's only a very short overview of that system, but you had to know that much to understand that paragraph, which is the single funniest thing I've read all year.

The book also covers a little about hypnotism, and some of Derren Brown's feelings on mystics and mediums (he disapproves) among other things. It's fascinating if you're the sort of person who likes to know how things work (I only recently realised that some people don't - they're happy to enjoy something without identifying all the peices. How very odd).

I was hoping that that book would last me for the four hour bus journey down to Southampton, but since I finished it so quickly, I got started on the next one - rereading Maureen McCormick's Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (incidentally, I managed to finish that on my journey down to the bus stop).

Maureen McCormick played the original Marcia Brady, and that's all most people know about her. I admit, I wanted the book simply because she was my favourite character. I didn't even realise she played Judy in Teen Angel, and I loved that show.

McCormick's a very interesting person, too. I think I would like to be her friend. I like how candid she is about her attraction to men, and the frank way in which she discusses her past drug problems. She still looks beautiful, too.

I like biographies. I'm not always in the mood for them, but it's always interesting reading about people's lives.

Maureen McCormick did a cameo on Scrubs in 2003. I use a screenshot of that as one of my usericons on livejournal, but you can see the whole clip here, lucky blog readers.



I wonder what it was like for her, after being haunted by Marcia for so many years to say on TV "my name is Maureen McCormick", and then to be shushed? It doesn't seem to have been a big deal for her, but I find that it kind of sums up the influence Marcia has had on McCormick's public life.

In Which We Discuss the Devil that is WHSmith

So, I'm back in Aberdeen.

I was very good about packing books into my hand luggage. I'm staying for five days, so I was quite restrained and brought some of my library books - The Bachman Books, 'Salem's Lot - I'm on a King kick at the moment - The Telling, and The United States of Europe. Oh, and a copy of Y Tywysog Bach and a Welsh dictionary. The Little Prince is a book I find very useful for languages, incidentally, as it's been translated into so many. I've bought copies in Latin and Spanish, for friends who are studying those.

So, yes I was quite restrained. Until I got to the WHSmith in the airport, and noticed that they had everything on 4 for 3.

I didn't intend to buy anything. I was just going to look.

I started in the biography section. I enjoy biographies - people are fascinating. However, I did turn my nose up at Cheryl Cole's. I don't believe she's had enough life to justify one really. In all honesty though, I must confess that I simply dislike her.

Anyway, then I picked up Confessions of a City Girl, the book of the column. In this case, the column in question is City Girl, from thelondonpaper. It's the memoirs of a female merchant banker. Since I really liked I Don't Know How She Does It, and Trixie Trader, I had a look at a few random pages. The writing style seemed like it would be absorbing and readable, so I picked it up.

Then I noticed Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind next to it. Although I don't expect to find out any of his secrets, I do find the man quite watchable, and a skim of the pages looks like he'll be readable too. And I had to make up four, didn't I?

I went over to the chart's display then. Found Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, which, I gather from another quick page skim, discusses the science shown in the media, including a chapter on Gillian McKeith. It looked interesting, and I suspect it will be good for debates and bits of random trivia.

My final choice was Nick Hornby's latest effort, Juliet, Naked. I enjoyed his other books, and I'd been looking at it in the last WHSmith I passed ( there was one at the train station, one before security, and then another one after), so that was that.

...and then I picked up a magazine, too.

...and a copy of Confessions of a Working Girl in the third WHSmith.

Godammit.

Oh, I know I still had two reviews and a conclusion to write about the Lisa Jewell thing. I lost interest, and forgot what I was going to say.