In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 28th Year, Week 2/52

Four books this week - 20th to 26th August.

I picked up The Girl with all the Gifts after reading an article in a local newspaper, calling for extras to play the zombies. The movie – which was written at the same time as the book – is being filmed near here.

The book was interesting – I loved the method by which they became zombies – but very sad. Since I’m about to begin a genetics degree, Caroline was an interesting character. In her place, would I go that far? Probably not….

Career of Evil is the latest in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling). Not as intriguing as, for instance, Sophie Hannah’s mysteries, but compelling enough. And, again, it does lend some legitimency to picturing Harry Potter the Auror as a hard-boiled detective!

The Last Girlfriend on Earth is one of my favourite short story collections. I’ve read it quite a few times over the last few years, so there’s not a lot to add here. It’s just a really well-written collection based on an interesting idea.

Finally, Men at Arms. It’s a shame about Cuddy, though it does begin to establish Detritus, Angua, and all the other characters who become the backbone of the Watch.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 9/52

Five books this week - 8th to 14th October.  One audiobook, two library books, one reread, and one new Kindle book.

I've mentioned before that The Last Girlfriend on Earth is one of my favourite short story collections.

I watched the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire shortly after I read the book.  I've had the DVD for several years but never actually watched it before.  I've always felt a bit bad about it, so when I spotted the book in the library I decided to go for it.  I liked the book better than the movie; it was dramatic and over the top in a way that was fun and exciting.  The movie toned it down for realism, but that made it somewhat patronising.  And I liked the fact that the book heroine was allowed to actuually be a prostitute while the movie heroine was constantly rescued from that fate.  The movie pushed the virgin-whore dichotomy; the heroine had to be the first and not the second, else she wouldn't be the heroine.  The book let her be both.

Frozen Charlotte is a horror story ostensibly aimed at older teens.  What I found mosty horrifying is the fact that frozen Charlotte dolls aren't fictitious.  The victorians really did make little naked dolls in image of a character who froze to death.  That's weird and macabre.

Mortal Engines is a collection of cyberpunk short stories.  Robot fairy tales.  I quite enjoyed it.

Finally, The Lost Steersman is part four in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series.  I love Kirstein's fiction; she writes such intelligent and rational characters, and I loved the truly alien civilisation in this one.  Speaking of aliens, I have a theory.  Spoilers ahead.

To whit, my theory is that the whole series takes place on an alien planet.  The routine bioform clearance program is intended to clear out the native life forms to allow human beings to terraform the planet.

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.