In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 28th Year, Week 4/52

Three books last week - 3rd to the 9th of September.  All books I'd read before, two audiobooks, and one on Kindle.

Play or Die was the kindle book, and it's one of the few I've actually reviewed on Goodreads. Undercover Economist is a non-fiction work on how economics can explain everyday things, while The Fifth Elephant is the last City Watch book before Night Watch.

A thought occured to me the other day; the City Watch series (or, loop) from Guards! Guards! to Night Watch is a stable time loop, a la Final Fantasy VIII, and it's the story of Vimes becoming a self-made man.  He's first influenced by the original John Keel.  Some of it sticks - he never lets the Beast out - but it's not enough, and he slumps into an alcoholic depression for the next thirty years.  In Guards! Guards! he's inspired by Carrot; he wants to live up to Carrots ideals, and the Watch finally has the power to start being the kind of force he wants it to be.  Vetinari begins to take an interest; begins to use Vimes as another instrument to focus the city how he wants.  Finally, after a few years of those two, Vimes influences his own younger self.  Only once he has reached that point can he move on with his life; his son is born immediately afterwards.

In Which We Discuss the Running Man

A lot of people have sited this as one of their favourite Stephen King  novels.  I can't say I'll be joining them.

Running Man  was a pretty quick read.  Two days, if I recall correctly.  I didn't dislike the book, but reading it more than thirty years after it was published, it did not compare well to more modern books.  Chart Throb  and Dead Famous did the reality TV parody in a way I preferred.  I feel like Play or Die did the hunting human plot better.

I think a big reason why I preferred Play or Die was that it was set in a world closer to mine.  I had a better idea of the options available to the main character, so I could better evaluate her decisions and therefore her resourcefulness and intelligence.  I didn't feel like I could do that with with the Running Man.

Weirdly, wikipedia keeps saying that Running Man is similar to Battle Royale and Hunger Games.  No it isn't, not more so than any other novel.

I've never seen the movie, but I gather it's very different from the book.  James Smythe has, and continues with his excellent Guardian articles here.

Unusually, The Running Man doesn't appear to have any links with other Stephen King novels.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 6/52

So, welcome to the end of my 6th week as a 26-year-old.

Walk Two Moons is something of a sequel to Absolutely Normal Chaos.  It follows Salamanca Hiddle as she traces her mother footsteps - "walk[s] two moons in [her] moccasins" - and tells her grandparents the story of the last few months.  Which she spent in the same town that Absolutely Normal Chaos was set in.

Walk Two Moons is my least favourite of the trilogy, mostly due to one element.  Salamanca Hiddle is part Native American, or Nican Tlaca.  However, her mother referred to herself as 'Indian', and part of Salamanca's character development is to claim that name for herself.  However, fuck off.

I'm Indian.  My father's family came over from Gujerat in the 60s.  I understand that Native American people didn't choose to be called 'Indian' for a time, but there are unfortunate implications all over the place in this scenario.  And I resented it.  Indian is the name for people from India.  Claim your own identity, not mine.

Chasing Redbird on the other hand, is my favourite one of the trilogy, and the first one I read.  I must have been around thirteen.  Zinnia Taylor, in trying to deal with the recent death of her aunt and the more historic death of her cousin, starts trying to uncover a twenty mile trail.  I liked the characters, I liked the plot, I liked how it was played out.  It's loosely connected to the other novels in that Zinnia was once Salamanca's best friend - although Sal doesn't mention Zinny at all - and that Zinny lives in the area Sal remembers with such fondness.

I first read Life and Laughing a couple of years ago.  I like how happy Michael McIntyre is about his life.  Not all the time - he goes through trouble with family, his dad's death, unrequited love, lots of debt, and so on, and then it all works out.  I got it as an audio book because I like his stand-up and thought it would be fun to hear him do all the voices, and to actually hear the joy in his voice.  It was.

I first saw The Illustrated Treasury of Disney Songs at the library.  It has songs from the golden age of Disney, ranging from the early years of Minnie's Yoohoo to the 90s, with vocal lines and the bass and treble lines for piano.  I like it.

Cujo was better than I remembered.  I read it over two or three days, then got through The Running Man in another two.  It was okay.  Short.  I preferred Play or Die.  I'll go into why more in my longer post about that.

I'd heard about If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler a couple of times, and it sounded interesting.  The overarching plot is about you, (yes, you reader) reading Italo Calvino's new novel If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler.  However, various shenanigans mean that, instead, you end up reading the beginning of ten different novels, none of which you are able to finish.  Once you have read these novels, the framing text begins to take on elements of them, ie, after reading a detective story, the narrative takes on elements of that.

Finally, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  This was the third Sherlock Holmes book published, following A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four which were both novel-length adventures.  Adventures is a collection of short stories originally published in The Strand magazine, and this collection includes The Speckled Band, The Red-Headed League, and the Adventure of the Copper Beaches, among others.  I first read it when I was somewhere between nine and twelve.  I reread it during quiet moments at work this time round - the entire book is on wikisource along with all the other Sherlock Holmes stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's other works.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read Last Week II

 Oh hey, I guess I am carrying on with this. Jolly good.

I read a lot more books I found on Kind of Book this week.  I think I may have a bit of a problem.  Especially since I bought the Kindle Paperwhite a month early, because I realised I could afford it if I just didn't buy food for a while, and I'm now spending my last food money on books for her (my Kindle's name is Melinda).  It's like some kind of unholy cross between a demon baby and a cocaine addiction.  God love her.

Try-It Diets: Macrobiotics and Raw Food - I bought these because I liked the vegan one.  I downloaded samples first, just to look at the contents pages.  I don't do that with most books, but I always do with cookbooks.  I think because I feel really guilty about having a cookbook which I don't actually cook from.  With my physical cookbooks, I tick off recipes on the contents page as I make them, and write the date and notes down on the pages.  The Kindle and Kobo let me do that with the 'note' function.

Anyway.  I had only the vaguest idea of what macrobiotics were, but from the contents page, I noted several vegetably recipes, and a few that were explicitly titled as vegan, so I figured it was worth a look.  Turns out, macrobiotics is a vegan (possibly vegetarian, can't recall if any dairy or eggs are used) way of balanced cooking, that is mixing food with certain elements with food with opposing elements to create a balanced dish.  Or something.  I skimmed the intro a bit, and then skimmed the recipes once I'd got the gist.  Also, if I didn't have an amazing ability to never get hangovers, I would be hungover right now, so let's go check wikipedia.

A macrobiotic diet (or macrobiotics), from "macro" (long) and "bios, biot-" (life), is a dietary regimen which involves eating grains as a staple food, supplemented with other foods such as local vegetables, and avoiding the use of highly processed or refined foods and most animal products.

They don't write well for their audience in this one.  If the concept behind the Try-It series is to introduce people to new things, then you probably shouldn't throw in terms your audience won't be familiar with without explanation.  I had to google so many terms; shoyu, for instance.  It's soy sauce.  Why not call it by the name your audience are more likely to know it as?  If you were writing a British cookbook, you wouldn't label all the courgettes as zucchinis, would you?

The raw food one I got because raw food is mostly vegan, since you can't really go around eating unprocessed raw meat, eggs or dairy.  Some of the recipes include honey, but that's easy to replace.  The problem I had with it was that at least half the recipes require a dehydrator.

I have no intention of becoming a raw foodist; it doesn't fit my personal morality any better than veganism, so I get no benefits there, and the "science" behind it is utter nonsense (this article is pretty thorough on why, and less ranty than what follows here).  There are studies that prove that all that "live enzyme" bollocks is bollocks.  I stopped going to the Brummie Veggies and Vegans meeting when they had a talk from a raw foodist who went on about how she'd cured her cancer through the diet.  No.  Fuck you.  I'm glad you're in remission, but if it was really just a case of eating raw food don't you think the medical community would be all over that?  If you had a cure for cancer that was simple, cheap, uncopyrightable, and available everywhere, cancer would be cured by now.  Anecdata is not proof.  Some people were always going to go into remission; in order to prove that it was due to a raw food diet, you'd need to get a statistically significant sample size and have all of them go into remission.

My aunt died of leukemia a few weeks ago, I'm testy on the subject.

Oh, and then she banged on about how she put some non-organic apples in the fridge and they didn't go off.  No shit, really?  That's what apples do.  They store well in low temperatures.  That's what we've been doing with them for hundreds of years.  It's not weird or disgusting, and even if it was, she didn't even put an organic apple in there to see how they compared under similar conditions.  That's not science, that's cherry-picking evidence to fit your bias.

Anyway.  Point I was making.  Because I see no value in making a point of not-cooking foods, I'm not going to make anything that requires a dehydrator (a machine that basically cooks food at a low temperature for several hours, so as not to "kill the enzymes").  I'm not going to do that.  I'm just going to cook it.

I've seen some really interesting raw desserts which looked yummy, and I'd hoped they'd have some of those and more ideas for simple meals that you can make without cooking.  Oh well.  It was less than a pound, anyway.

I gave both 2/5 stars.

My Big Fake Irish Life - I saw this on amazon months ago, when I first started playing around with my price link.

I should tell you about my price link.  This is my price link.  It will display all Kindle books between 0-99p.  But wait, there's more.  If you change the bolded numbers below and then copypaste the link into the address bar, you can change those 0-99p values.  You can find all the Kindle books reduced to under 20p, or 50p, or whatever.  Or change the second value to 500 to find all the books under £5 or something. Have fun!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_ex_n_1?rh=n%3A341677031%2Cn%3A!341678031%2Cn%3A341689031%2Cp_15%3A-domain%2Cp_36%3A00-99&bbn=341689031&ie=UTF8&qid=1360170055


Anyway, My Big Fake Irish Life.  Saw it on Amazon ages ago, finally got around to buying it.  It's about an actress who is unsuccessful as her dishwater-blonde mid-American self, so decides to reinvent herself as an Irish redhead in order to give herself a unique selling point.  It's laugh-out-loud funny in places, and all the characters are squeeful.  I looked at a few other reviews on goodreads, and one negative review said she felt that the main character spent too long dwelling over whether she should reveal herself or not, and it got repetitive.  I guess it does come up a lot, but, y'know, that's the story.  I didn't find it irritating.  That said, some books - Lisa Jewell's Joy and Vince and Thirty-Nothing come to mind - have a will-they-won't-they storyline that drags on for decades (both within the book, and in the time it feels like it takes to get to where they actually make a decision) and that did my head in.  I didn't find this book similar in that aspect, but I guess I can see why someone would.  I gave it 4/5 stars.  It was happy and silly and generally cheering.

Play or Die - this book was awesome.  I got it for free from Kind of Book, though the price has since gone back up to £3.39.  The description starts with;

Ready to play the game of your life?

Could you stay ahead of a sociopathic hunter being sent your co-ordinates every three hours? Jo Warrington is about to live this nightmare. On a Melbourne city street she is plunged into a game devised by people from the future. Her choices - play or die.

That was intriguing.  But, what I really, really loved about this book was that neither the protagonist nor the antagonist held the idiot ball.  The book pits two intelligent people against each other, and has neither of them do really stupid and illogical things for the sake of plot.  I've been watching a lot of Charmed recently, which seems to take place on a planet made of idiot ball, so I'm utterly thrilled about this.  And it was so much fun to think about what you'd do in Jo's position.  She has $20,000 Australian to play with, due to the rest of the plot, and my first thought was to jump on a plane.  If she managed to do it without tipping off the hunter, she'd have a good 20+ hours in which to sleep, which would be a huge bonus over the five days.  Of course, the hunter could be only a few hours behind her.  And I don't think anyone would read or write the version where the hunter missed the plane.  Anyway, the author points out that the character doesn't have a current passport, which neatly sidesteps that strategy.

The ending is a little bit idealistic, but I needed that at that point.  I wanted it to be.  The author gave us so much awesome action earlier that I'm happy to go with an unlikely happy ending rather than a horrible bleak one.  I gave it 5/5 stars, obviously.

Love in the Fourth Dimension - this was a weird little book.  For much of it, the tone sounds like it's giving us a summary of a more detailed story.  It's a love story with some strange little vignettes and asides.  It deals with some serious issues, like alcoholism, and not everything goes right, but it works out in the end.  I gave it 3/5.

A Blink of the Screen - Collected short stories by Terry Pratchett.  I've read several of them before; The Sea and the Little Fishes, for instance, appears in Legends, and two more show up in Knights of Madness and The Flying Sorcerers.  You can read Theatre of Cruelty - a Discworld story featuring Captain (then Corporal) Carrot - on L-Space.

It made me feel a little sad reading this.  I know it's made to - cash in on?  Commemorate?  Less mercenary, less happy.  Anyway, something to do with Pratchett's alzheimers and his continued loss of focus and impeding death.  And being reminded of that was sad.

I really liked The High Meggas, the story which was the origin of The Long Earth, Pratchett's collaborative novel with Stephen Baxter.  I didn't really have any idea of what The Long Earth was about before that, but now I'm really excited to get my hands on it.  This was a library book, and I gave it 4/5 stars.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth - I loved this book.  It's a collection of short stories around the concept of love.  The author decided write about how different situations feel, rather than trying to literally describe them, and it works really well.  The best example of this is one where the main character's ex-girlfriend's new partner turns out to be literally Hitler - and no one else has a problem with it.  There's one about a whingy goat who's been "friend-zoned" - the character never uses that term, but his attitude is the same as the sort of people who complain about the fact that they have a good friend who doesn't want to sleep with them.  The stories are all pretty short and surreal, but with an underlying truth to them.  Another Kind of Book - it's currently reduced to £1.  Gogogo.  5/5.

I didn't get anything off my unread pile this week.  Stupid sexy Kindle.

Note:  I couldn't tag as thoroughly as I would like here, because of the 200 character limit.

In Which We Discuss Kind of Book and Sarah Lawson's Identity

I recently found Kind of Book via facebook. They're a site which gathers together ten Kindle books which are heavily discounted below their normal price; most are under a £1, and generally 2-3 will be free.

They are the devil.

Over the past few days I've been downloading most of the free ones and a few others that looked interesting.    Yesterday, that included Play or Die (which I mentioned on Twitter, and which is still free at the time of writing) and Who is Sarah Lawson, which was discounted to 62p.  Both sounded fascinating.

So far, I'm two thirds of the way through Who is Sarah Lawson.  It's about a woman who returns home from work to find her house occupied by total strangers who insist that she doesn't live there, and that she is the husband's sister who suffers from memory loss ever since 'the accident'.  I love the premise, and I'd love to see what Sophie Hannah would do with it.

There may be spoilers for the first two thirds of Who is Sarah Lawson below.

The first third focuses on Rowena Shaw, the aforementioned woman.  Her actions sometimes seem illogical to me, and she seems to miss several obvious things.  Although she hires a private detective, and takes steps to  prove her identity, she doesn't once consider having a DNA test done to discover whether or not Andy actually is her brother or not, which seems like a really obvious way to poke a hole in his story.  At one point, she finds a bottle of Rowena Shaw's pills in her brother's bathroom.  She calls her doctor, and though he is out of town, the receptionist comments on her changing her name from Rowena Shaw to Sarah Lawson.  Instead of paying attention to the fact that here is somebody who acknowledges a suspicious connection between Rowena and Sarah, and who has records to prove it, Rowena simply hangs up and throws the bottle of pills away in disgust because the receptionist calls her Sarah, and she can't bring herself to use that name.

The second third focuses on Owen, Rowena's ex-fiance, focusing on a point before the books starts when he and Rowena were still together.  His actions make no sense either.  When the real Sarah Lawson begins stalking him and imagining that they're together, he doesn't tell Rowena about it.  Even when he does, he doesn't tell her everything.  He never goes to the police, either.  Sure, at first, it's the kind of thing where you aren't quite sure.  Like when you get an odd vibe about someone, but everything they do has a plausible explanation, and you sound really vain and paranoid when you try to explain it.  But, it very quickly goes beyond that point, and still Owen doesn't do or say anything.  I guess it's possible that someone would act that way in real life, but it still seems pretty implausible, and at this point the story doesn't seem to hang together.  There also seem to be some strange discrepancies between Rowena and Owen's accounts, and that bugged me until it occured to me that maybe the 'Rowena' we've been hearing from actually is Sarah.  If that does turn out to be the case, the book will make a whole lot more sense.  K. J. Rabane won't have shot her story-telling load way too soon, the inaccuracies make sense, and even  Rowena's thing with the receptionist will hang together.  The detective not suggesting a DNA test will still seem a little off though.  But we'll see.