Posts
OK - first things first. Should I keep on with the numbering thing, or just call it Books Read: 99 in '08?
Great book. Really. Only problem is it is Book One of Three, and Two & Three remain untranslated. It does stand alone, but I was left wanting more.
From the cover: During the few seconds it takes you to read this sentence, some 700,000,000 ants will be born on earth.
Ants came to this planet long before man - 100,000,000 years before. Since then they have developed one of the most intricate civilizations imaginable - a civilization of great richness & technological brilliance, so near and yet so little known.
Edmond Wells had studied ants for years: he knew of the intrigue and power that existed in the hidden world beneath his cellar. Before he left his apartment to his nephew, Jonathan, he made one thing perfectly clear: Jonathan must never descend beyond the cellar door. But when the family’s dog escapes down the cellar steps, Jonathan has little alternative but to follow. Innocently he enters the highly sophisticated, highly intricate world of the ant, whose struggle for existence forces him to reassess man’s place in today’s every-changing world. It is an experience that will alter his life forever.
Verdict - Amazing - I read this in under a day, picking it up and reading it in every spare moment, until I turned the last page. Shame that the rest have not, as yet, been translated. However, we can hope!
From the cover:
Twenty years ago, four teenagers disappeared in the woods at a summer camp. Two decades later, everything changes…
Paul Copeland’s sister was one of the missing teenagers. Now raising a daughter alone, after the death of his wife, he balances family life with a career as a prosecutor. But when a body is found, the well-buried secrets of the past are threatening everything.
Could the victim be one of the missing teenagers? Could his sister be alive? Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, his mother who abandoned him, and the secrets his parents have been hiding…
Verdict - It’s Harlan Coben - a well crafted, page turner which ultimately seems unreal. I somehow never manage to find the characters in his books (good though they are) ones I can believe in. Something is lacking. That said, I read them all very quickly, I turn the pages because I want to know how the story resolves itself.
So I just finished the forth in the Stephenie Meyers, Breaking Dawn. I enjoyed it, as I have most of the series except for a few minor issues: Ms. Meyers's giddy infatuation with the use of the word "familiar" in book two; and Edward's very poor relationship choices.
The books were ok...the writing enough to keep me connected to the story, and the imagination interesting, and Ms. Meyers even credited one of the best bands in the world with being her...well...muse. (the band's name, Muse, is quite apropos, don't you think?)
Here's the beef:
Shenanigans to all editors who do not do their job!
This is your job, to make sure that there is consistency of character between books. It's your job to point out when there are too many loose ends to end a series. It's your job to suggest different vocabulary, when words get overused. I also expect of you the kind of feedback that says "this is a week way to end a book" or "do you realize that the logical conclusion of the situation you've created is to come back to the very crisis this book revolved around? Do you think that maybe you should do something to rectify that?", or point out any plot holes you may find. I expect you to act in such a way that the books become the best they could be. Seriously. There are many a 700 page book that could be whittled down quite a bit into something better, and more concise. I find you editors are having issues.
Perhaps it was the book I read recently which glorified drug use amongst it's target audience...teenagers.
Perhaps it started with the rampant overuses of adjectives in my beloved Harry Potter books.
Maybe it is friends (such as shush now) that have better unpublished stuff than most of the published things I'm reading.
It could also be my annoyance at reading the same thing from the same author regurgitated 8 times over, in 8 different books.
Who knows? I just know that the average editors are not doing the job they were hired for, and the literary world is suffering as a result.
I know I can't be the only one thus annoyed.
So I just finished the forth in the Stephenie Meyers, Breaking Dawn. I enjoyed it, as I have most of the series except for a few minor issues: Ms. Meyers's giddy infatuation with the use of the word "familiar" in book two; and Edward's very poor relationship choices.
The books were ok...the writing enough to keep me connected to the story, and the imagination interesting, and Ms. Meyers even credited one of the best bands in the world with being her...well...muse. (the band's name, Muse, is quite apropos, don't you think?)
Here's the beef:
Shenanigans to all editors who do not do their job!
This is your job, to make sure that there is consistency of character between books. It's your job to point out when there are too many loose ends to end a series. It's your job to suggest different vocabulary, when words get overused. I also expect of you the kind of feedback that says "this is a week way to end a book" or "do you realize that the logical conclusion of the situation you've created is to come back to the very crisis this book revolved around? Do you think that maybe you should do something to rectify that?", or point out any plot holes you may find. I expect you to act in such a way that the books become the best they could be. Seriously. There are many a 700 page book that could be whittled down quite a bit into something better, and more concise. I find you editors are having issues.
Perhaps it was the book I read recently which glorified drug use amongst it's target audience...teenagers.
Perhaps it started with the rampant overuses of adjectives in my beloved Harry Potter books.
Maybe it is friends (such as shush now) that have better unpublished stuff than most of the published things I'm reading.
It could also be my annoyance at reading the same thing from the same author regurgitated 8 times over, in 8 different books.
Who knows? I just know that the average editors are not doing the job they were hired for, and the literary world is suffering as a result.
I know I can't be the only one thus annoyed.
,
Simon Says by Lori Foster
From the cover: What would folks say if they discovered that big blob Kelly had one special talent and it involved food? God’s sick joke, that.
Cooking is Jimmy Kelly’s secret gift. Bullied viciously at school, the kitchen is his haven,
But even he doesn’t know his real secret.
He can’t stop living, until he stops hiding.
Verdict - recommended. A quick and easy read, with enough meat to enjoy.
Working on my quest to read more Hiaasen, I discovered my library only has two other books by him. I picked this one first.
From the cover: Honey Santana - self proclaimed queen of lost causes - has a Plan.
Yes, she may be a single mother, living in a trailer park with her teenage son; she may have just been sacked from her day job for whacking an over-friendly co-worker in the balls with a crab mallet; she may be an obsessive compulsive with an anger-management problem.
But she's determined to set up her own eco-tour business, paddling tourists around the Florida Everglades in ocean kayaks. She's also working on a scheme to rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference and dinner-time telemarketers. But that’s a minor detail - or is it?
The result is a kayaking trip from hell, and an unplanned overnight stay on Dismal Key - one of the Everglades’ Ten Thousand Islands - for Honey, her kayaks and her two ‘guests’: a part-time telephonist who recently foul-mouthed her, and his less-than-enthusiastic mistress.
What Honey doesn’t know is that lurking in the island’s undergrowth is Sammy Tigertail, half-blood Seminole Indian and wholly failed alligator wrestler; and Honey’s deranged co-worker, intent on revenge.
A holiday to die for? In Carl Hiaasen’s universe, anything can happen,…
Verdict - highly recommended. It seems Hiaasen is really, really good at the farce side of things - the coming and going and the goings on - loved this book.
From the cover: When Kate Bush came out of suburban Kent in 1978 with her jaw-droopingly eccentric debut single Wuthering Heights, screeching like a banshee, flapping her arms as though trying to take wing, pulling alarming faces, people either adored or loather her.
One of the former was an American underwear model, Lesley herskovits, who, in spite of his remarkable good looks, reserved his loathing for himself. But the time Kate had taken to keeping fans waiting literally ages between albums, he’d come to view himself as the most repulsively obese man in Britain. Only his disinclination to miss her either alb, specially after waiting more than a decade for it, kept him from leaping off a multi-story tower block.
Biding his time, he found himself a boarding house near Kate’s birthplace that accommodates only fervent Kate fane, befriend its landlady’s anorexic daughter and came up with an audacious scheme to make a fortune intimidating school bullies.
Verdict - recommended. The story is well told (though I did want to shake Lesley more than once!), the sub-plot of talent shows for the Otherwise Challenged and The Price of Fame kept me page turning, and I learnt a good deal about Kate Bush. Only quibble is I disagreed with his summation of her music. Minor quibble, really!
From the cover:
Hilarious raconteur, hedonistic bon viveur, inexhaustible shaggeur, feather-tongued dandy Russell Brand lives his life as if performing in a Victorian vaudeville. But it hasn’t always been that way. From his troubled childhood in Essex, his addictions to drink, drugs and sex that found him drying-out in clinics all over the world, this flamboyant, hilarious and searinly honest memoir charts the peaks and troughs of his thorny rise to fame, and introduces us to the man behind the hair.
Verdict - It’s OK. I read it because I was curious about him;
you might read it because it is a good memoir of fame and
self-destruction. However, I decided I don’t
like him much, even though if he writes
another memoir, I will read it.
From the cover:
Sean Reilly seems to have his life sorted: gorgeous wife, beautiful house and lucrative career as a voice-over artist. But he craves the sort of romance and affection that he no longer receives from his wife. Why it is, he wonders, that once married, women want men to change and hate it when they don’t? whereas men never want women to change, and hate it when they do.
Luce Ross, ‘caught single’ after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend, is also looking for romance when she means 4ean. She doesn’t want him to change, she wants him the way he is. So could the life of Reilly be sorted after all?
Verdict - It’s OK. I say that even though I read this in under a day, picking it up and reading it in every spare moment, until I turned the last page. However, it is weak in plotting (yes, I know it is a Romantic Comedy, but do their lives have to be so bloody perfect and full of nice things?) and ultimately like eating candy floss instead of a prawn sandwich.
Two Not Finished:The Mel B autobiograpy I gave up after two chapters. If you want to read a Spice Girl's book, read Geri's!
And Peter Carey's Theft? Peter Carey writes great books, but I just could not get to grips with this. If it were mine, it would be on the shelf till I read it. As it is a library book it is going back, five chapters read and interest uninterested.
Favorites this month: Mother Night, Smoke and Mirrors, Child 44
Blue Angel is pleasure.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is practically pleasurable curiosity. (in progress)
When You Are Engulfed in Flames is pleasure.
Which one looks better?
To badly paraphrase.
I am having my head shaved for charity. To help raise £10,000 for Help A London Child.
From the confirmation email -
All of this will happen live on air
with Johnny Vaughan on Capital 95.8’s Breakfast show on Friday 25th July 2008, from an open broadcast at the venue! We will be needing you at
Canary
Wharf from roughly 7am and
throughout they day on. If you need to be in the office by a certain time we
will do our best to accommodate you!
So, guess what. Yes, I am asking for donations. You can give through my JustGiving page. I will take before pictures and, for those who donate, I will make you Friends, and post Friend only pics to prove I really did it. After all, why should you get to see my bald noggin (including the scar from when I fell down the stairs) for nothing? You will see a better photo than the one I took - I shall get BF to take this one, and there will be NO HAIR in the way.
So come on, my Voxy hood - do me proud, please?
EDITED TO ADD - Hey, come on, hood! So far, only Patricia Volonakis Davis, LeendaDLL and Tasha_Tuk have donated so far! Just the price of a cup of coffee, that's all I ask!
If you do not want to donate via my JustGiving page. I will mail you my PayPal account details, and write a cheque on the day.
THIS IS ALL HAPPENING FRIDAY MORNING.
Where
The event will be taking place on the concourse directly outside Canary Wharf underground station (Jubilee line). For directions to canary wharf check out: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/. Please make your way to the station and head to Smollenskys which is immediately outside exit. You won’t miss us - there will be Help a London Child staff (wearing bright pink t-shirts) a King of Shaves bus and Johnny Vaughan and Lisa Snowdon will be presenting the Breakfast Show from a large Capital95.8 bus.
When
The event will start at 6am and all the head shaving should be completed by 11am. It should take approximately 10 minutes for each person to have their head shaved.
SO, anyone who lives in London and is free, I have elected a 10 am slot - I don't work, and it is cheaper to get into London after the rush hour. Come and support me if you can. It will be a laugh!
