If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dabbling in popular science books about cognitive psychology (I have a Bachelor of Science in Psychology back in my murky past, but I never had as much fun studying the subject formally as I have had reading about the results of various specialist areas presented for a general audience), it’s that our minds are out to screw us. Our body is a little more reliable, at least before we outlive our evolutionary usefulness, but there’s a couple of areas where it too will happily sabotage us (and then there’s areas where mind and body together act against us — see research on weight loss and gain). Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been reading parenting books to give myself the illusion I am slightly more in control and prepared for giving birth, and some of the advice and language to do with interacting with your toddler or child (I read ahead) was repeatedly striking me as very familiar.
At first I thought it was from my days working in an office and doing various communication courses, but then, in my browsing through the ‘other people who looked at this book bought…’ suggestions, I came across a book to do with keeping your relationship happy once you have a baby, and from there (it being a lazy browsing day) I fell right into the self-help relationship field. And then I knew, from having read a few of these sorts of books some ten or more years ago and skimread others more recently, why the parenting books seemed a bit familiar. Read the rest of this entry »
I fully understand people’s resistance to ebooks beyond the logistics (DRM, device-locked, geographic restrictions, price) and their attachment to paper books, and the first part of this argument is valid…but the second? Smudges? Really?
like this one, which features a quote from The Truth (as well as much needed perspective).
The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen but Now Prize is for aspiring novelists older than 18 living in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth who have not had a book published. The winner will receive a publishing contract with Transworld plus a big advance. Entries close at the end of the year.
From Sir pTerry: “In short, the story must be theoretically possible on some version of the past, present or future of a planet Earth.”
You can read more at the Terry Pratchett website.
I received the following question the other day:
Does a historical fiction novel have to have a murder in the storyline?
My answer
No, not at all -– think of the historical timing as the setting. The plot can still be anything that works within the confines of that setting –- romance, family melodrama, spy thriller, mystery (without murder), or indeed murder mystery (or police procedural), or any other plotline you care to use.
Anyone got anything to add?
Title: A Tapestry of Spells
Author: Lynn Kurland
Year of publication: 2010
Genre: Fantasy
My rating: 2.5 stars or D
This is the first failure of my new reading policy: it sailed past my 50-page test, but with about 100 pages to go, I was weighing up whether to bother finishing it. I did, and I regret it: this should have been a DNF.
It starts out promisingly enough. Read the rest of this entry »
Title: Resistance
Author: Owen Sheers
Year of publication: 2007
Genre: Literary alternate history
My rating: 4 stars or B
Just days after news of the invasion came crackling through on Maggie’s wireless…the men, lit by a hunter’s moon, met at William’s milking shed and slipped out of the valley. Moving in single file they walked through the higher fields and up over Hatterall ridge; an ellipsis of seven dark shapes decreasing over the hill’s shoulder, shortening to a last full stop and then nothing, just the blank page of the empty slope.”
Resistance is set in a 1944 where the D-Day landings have failed and the German have invaded Britain. A young woman in a remote Welsh border valley, Sarah, wakes to find her husband gone. She soon discovers that all seven of the men in the valley have disappeared, leaving their wives and children behind, with circumstantial evidence to suggest they’ve become resistance agents (as per real plans laid in 1940). When a small German patrol appears on a mysterious mission and becomes (deliberately) trapped in the valley for winter, the women must come to an accommodation with the enemy to keep their farms running and their sheep alive through the harsh weather.
I admit to a certain impatience with this book for the first third Read the rest of this entry »
Title: Wicked Gentlemen
Author: Ginn Hale
Year of publication: 2007
Genre: Steampunk romance
My rating: 4.5 stars or A-
I pick my way through relatively little-known books in the hope of finding gems like this one. Wicked Gentlemen is two novellas that work as one. In the first, Mr Sykes and the Firefly, we are introduced in the first person to narrator Belimai Sykes, who is a Prodigal, descendant of fallen angels who came out of hell three hundred ago for redemption on Earth. He’s a bit of a tortured soul (literally), what with his addiction to ophorium and his self-destructive tendencies. Then he’s hired to find a missing high-society wife by her husband, and more importantly, her brother, Captain William Harper of the Inquisition, the religious-based police force. In the course of solving the mystery, Belimai and Harper become prickly ‘drunk fuck’ lovers.
The second novella, Captain Harper and the Sixty Second Circle, picks up about two months after the first, Read the rest of this entry »
