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 Books I Read Last Week

Gosh, I have been a busy girl, haven't I?  A lot of this was pure excitement at getting a Kindle Paperwhite.  Anyway, here are some quick notes (and my */5 ratings) on the books I read last week.  I may keep doing this, I may not.  We'll see.

Clovenhoof - a hilarious tale of Satan being kicked out of hell and sent to live in the Midlands.  It helps that I wanted to like it because it was written by a friend of a friend, but it really does stand on its own merits.  I gave it 4/5 stars.  I got it for 99p on the Kindle Store, but it's gone up a bit since then.

Red Dwarf and Better Than Life - the first two Red Dwarf books, written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, who conceived and wrote the TV show.  I found these in my local charity shop, when I went in to donate some other books.  In places, it's like reading a collection of episode summaries.  Elsewhere, it expands on things that were only throw-away lines in the show.

The series is actually a trilogy, but both Grant and Naylor had different ideas about how they wanted it to go, so they each wrote their own ending.  I'll have to track them down one of these days.  I gave the first one 4 stars and the second 5.

The Children of Green Knowe - a children's book that's been in my unread pile for years.  I read it to get it out of the way.  3/5.

In the Red - a non-fiction story of a Scottish woman who got £30,000 into debt and spent a year cutting back to try to pay some of it off.  Since her idea of cutting back is buying a £24 kettle rather than a £50 one, I'm not surprised she was so far in debt.  I like these little slice of life things though.  It reads similarly to Save Karyn or How I Lived on a Pound a Day.  3/5 stars.  This was a library book.

Baked - a short story from the Kindle store that showed up on Kind of Book for 77p.  A love story between a scabby little jam doughnut and a big trollopy eclair (direct quote).  Cute and well written, but a little expensive for the length.  4/5 stars.

Princess - a disturbing psychological thriller, and that's both a direct quote and my opinion.  Another 77p short story, which I bought from my Kindle Device after finishing Who is Sarah Lawson.  Very disturbing.  My grandmother would like it, she loves all those creepy murder shows and magazines.  It reminded me a lot of the Point Horror short stories, particularly John Gordon's Bone Meal from 13 More Tales of Horror.  4/5.

Who is Sarah Lawson - another Kind of Book rec.  62p from the Kindle store.  You can read the full review here.  Short version, interesting but amateurish.  3/5.

The Perfect Escape - a collection of short stories from female light romance writers.  Free on the Kindle Store.  It's designed as an advert for the writers' other books, so it contains a little introduction for each author and a free chapter from those books as well.  The stories are pretty decent, except for one, which isn't actually a story - it's an essay on Ryan Gosling movies, based around how attractive he looks in each one.  Seriously?  3/5.

Try-It Diet: Vegan - a short introduction to veganism.  I was a vegan, but I stopped due to monetary restraints and disordered eating habits.  In short, it hasn't psychological healthy for me to try to be vegan recently.  However, I'm now in a better place, and since I'll be starting work and earning more money soon, I really want to be a vegan again.  I really enjoy it.

I did download the free sample of this first, but, unfortunately, it's so short that it cuts off before you see a single recipe, so I took a 46p gamble and bought it.

There's an entire series of these books, it turns out.  The basic premise is that they give you a meal plan and recipes for two weeks, so you can try out a diet and see if it's for you.  I kind of want to get the Paleo and Gluten-free versions too, just for the sake of an honest comparison.  I was a vegan for two years, and I found that I was able to eat lots of yummy things, that I was more enthusiastic about cooking, and that I could eat whatever I wanted and maintain a weight on my low-side of normal.  Since April, when I decided not to feel guilty and started eating more meat and dairy, I've gained 6lbs, and I just don't feel as well.  So I know that veganism works better for my body than an omnivorous diet does.  I also feel that veganism is the choice that aligns with my morals best, which is why I would like to return to it as long as I don't hurt myself by doing so.

I've known a lot of people who've done very well on Paleo diets (though the idea that it's based on what our ancestors ate is utter bullshit), and I've heard very positive things from people who've cut gluten out of their diets, even if they don't have an allergy.  I would really like to see what happens to my body if I did either of those for six weeks.  But, I'll be honest here, the idea of cooking a ton of meat for that period, like I think I'd need to for the Paleo isn't good.  And gluten-free seems like it would involve lots of ingredients I've never heard of, with scary names.  Which is a silly reason, because so did veganism.  I'll think about it when I start work.

Going back to this book; the recipes were interesting.  Some I'm really interested in trying.  The author has a tendency to rely on egg-replacer, which, fortunately, is easy to make, but still.  I really prefer recipes designed to be vegan from the get-go rather than recipes which are translated from omnivorism.  Also, most of the cake recipes use a "boxed-cake mix".  You can tell that it was written by an American, right?  Though, in fairness, apart from the boxed cake mix, the ingredients are all pretty standard in the UK.

A note for Americans; we can buy boxed cake mixes here, but they're for children.  It's something you'd spend an afternoon making with a child.  It's not something you'd seriously buy and make and serve to adult guests.  So when we see adults using 'recipes' that include boxed cake mixes, we kind of look at you like we would an adult who had stabilizers on their bike.

Anyway, I gave the book 3/5 stars, and I probably will try it at some point.  The majority of the recipes seem to be within my skill level, and only slightly outside of my comfort zone.  Plus, I just remembered that Tesco do a 22p own-brand cake mix, so if that's vegan it might be kind of fun to play around with.