A Beauty Betrayed
Mar. 1st, 2017 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyThe glooms have been descending for a while now, which is unfortunate timing as I'm trying to write a couple of job applications. Not a good time to start thinking that I couldn't possibly manage to do any of the things they are asking for. Anyway. I'll get my act together. In the meantime, I've been writing down words to remind to write about things here. So that's what I'll do.
At the supermarket the other day, the woman looking after the self-serve checkouts had an armful of magazines and was handing them out to everyone who passed by. I thought it was the supermarket's monthly recipe magazine, but back home I found that it was something called Crime and Puzzles, which contained reader-submitted true crime stories and crossword puzzles... and the magnificent headline:
HE COOKED ME CHICKEN NUGGETS THEN HE TRIED TO KILL ME
Which is a dreadful waste of chicken nuggets, isn't it?
* * * * *
On 15 February, my mother's elderly friend and former neighbour, Jan, came round. She said, "Do you know what Mike and I did for Valentine's Day? We went out to the funeral home and picked out matching coffins."
* * * * *
Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I received the surprise cat bowl for sending proof of purchasing tins of cat food to Fancy Feast? Well, last week there was another Fancy Feast box on the doorstep. This one said that my name had been drawn in the unclaimed prize draw from that promotion. So now I've got another bowl and a matching cat collar.
* * * * *
Here is a very cute beagle getting distracted while doing a dog trial.
* * * * *
And my cucumbers continue to go crazy. This is last week's crop of thirteen. There's that many again ready to pick now.
* * * * *
And because it's the first of the month, that just leaves:
February books read
* Two by Two - Nicholas Sparks (2016) ★
I have made it this far in life without ever having read a Nicholas Sparks book, although I've seen a couple of the resulting films. When I finished work last year, Jenny/NA gave me a "put your feet up" bag, which contained a lap rug, a big bottle of chocolate peanuts and this book. The rug is Alistair's favourite, the chocolate peanuts were delicious and this book is awful.
This is the story of Russ, who is both dopey and mopey. I thought Sparks wrote romantic novels, but this is the opposite. Russ and Vivian get married at the start of the book, and it's very obvious that they will not be married at the end of the book. A story about the breakdown of a marriage could be interesting, but not this one. It's hard to see why they got married in the first place. They don't like each other. They don't talk to each other. They both make major life decisions without discussing, or even mentioning, them first. It's a relief when Vivian finally leaves. The thing is, it's meant to be a relief, because she's been written as being such an awful person, but Russ is such a lump of wood I couldn't blame her for wanting to leave. She had to be made so horrible to generate sympathy for him. And then she gets worse.
It was shaping up to be a vicious Kramer vs. Kramer custody battle, but then... well, let's say fictional characters don't cough without good reason. So the coughing character finally coughs and inspires everyone to be the best they can be and it all ends reasonably happily. Except for the coughing character, who dies.
* Death in the Rainy Season - Anna Jaquiery (2015) ★ ★ ★
This is apparently the second book of Commandant Morel mysteries, which I didn't know. Not having read the first didn't make a difference, though. Commandant Morel is a French detective whose mother was Khmer, and this book begins with him on holiday in Cambodia, hoping to meet her family. Those plans go awry when a French aid worker is murdered in Phnom Penh, and Morel is roped into the investigation. I liked Morel, and wouldn't object to reading the first book to see what he's like when he's doing his investigating at home in Paris. The main mystery is competently done (I worked out the culprit early on, but not the motive), but there is a secondary crime that Morel sort of stumbles into that gets wrapped up in a rush at the end, which could have been cut out completely to no great loss.
* The Strangler Vine - MJ Carter (2014) ★ ★ ★
This is a modern crack at a ripping yarn. It's set in India in the 1830s, when a naïve young British officer named Avery is sent with an ex-officer called Blake in search of a famous poet who has gone missing... and instead they find betrayal, tigers and the dark side of colonialism. It's a solidly okay book. A bit slow, and bookended by a pointless romance.
* The Winged Histories - Sofia Samatar (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is beautiful. It's worth reading for the prose alone.
This is the story of a failed rebellion in a fantasy kingdom, but very obliquely. It's told in four character studies, each of a woman affected by the rebellion: Tav, a soldier and the leader of the rebellion; Tialon, a priestess of a religion gaining popularity in the kingdom; Seren, a singer in a nomadic tribe; and Siski, a socialite princess. It's about words and songs and meanings, about the role of women and voices lost to history, about families and empires and nationalism.
This was heading towards five stars, right up until late in Siski's section, when a terrible thing that happened to her a teen was revealed, and I realised that I had fundamentally misunderstood the world that had been built. And the truth of it just made me roll my eyes.
* Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz (2016) ★ ★ ★
I wanted to like this more than I did. It's... aggressively okay.
Magpie Murders is a book in a book. The internal Magpie Murders is an unedited manuscript by a famous crime writer called Alan Conway. Conway writes cosy mysteries set in post-war Britain, and his detective is a half-Greek, half-German refugee called Atticus Pünd. We read most of his the manuscript (which is terrible), but just as Pünd is about to gather the suspects together to reveal the killer, Poirot-style, it ends. That's all there is, and we switch back to real life, where Conway's editor is shocked to find that Conway has died suddenly over the weekend. She goes looking for the final chapter and finds herself trying to solve Conway's murder, with all of the characters in the manuscript turning out to be people Conway knew in real life. Which sounds very tricksy, but it's really not as clever as it thinks it is.
At the supermarket the other day, the woman looking after the self-serve checkouts had an armful of magazines and was handing them out to everyone who passed by. I thought it was the supermarket's monthly recipe magazine, but back home I found that it was something called Crime and Puzzles, which contained reader-submitted true crime stories and crossword puzzles... and the magnificent headline:
HE COOKED ME CHICKEN NUGGETS THEN HE TRIED TO KILL ME
Which is a dreadful waste of chicken nuggets, isn't it?
On 15 February, my mother's elderly friend and former neighbour, Jan, came round. She said, "Do you know what Mike and I did for Valentine's Day? We went out to the funeral home and picked out matching coffins."
Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I received the surprise cat bowl for sending proof of purchasing tins of cat food to Fancy Feast? Well, last week there was another Fancy Feast box on the doorstep. This one said that my name had been drawn in the unclaimed prize draw from that promotion. So now I've got another bowl and a matching cat collar.
Here is a very cute beagle getting distracted while doing a dog trial.
And my cucumbers continue to go crazy. This is last week's crop of thirteen. There's that many again ready to pick now.
And because it's the first of the month, that just leaves:
February books read
* Two by Two - Nicholas Sparks (2016) ★
I have made it this far in life without ever having read a Nicholas Sparks book, although I've seen a couple of the resulting films. When I finished work last year, Jenny/NA gave me a "put your feet up" bag, which contained a lap rug, a big bottle of chocolate peanuts and this book. The rug is Alistair's favourite, the chocolate peanuts were delicious and this book is awful.
This is the story of Russ, who is both dopey and mopey. I thought Sparks wrote romantic novels, but this is the opposite. Russ and Vivian get married at the start of the book, and it's very obvious that they will not be married at the end of the book. A story about the breakdown of a marriage could be interesting, but not this one. It's hard to see why they got married in the first place. They don't like each other. They don't talk to each other. They both make major life decisions without discussing, or even mentioning, them first. It's a relief when Vivian finally leaves. The thing is, it's meant to be a relief, because she's been written as being such an awful person, but Russ is such a lump of wood I couldn't blame her for wanting to leave. She had to be made so horrible to generate sympathy for him. And then she gets worse.
It was shaping up to be a vicious Kramer vs. Kramer custody battle, but then... well, let's say fictional characters don't cough without good reason. So the coughing character finally coughs and inspires everyone to be the best they can be and it all ends reasonably happily. Except for the coughing character, who dies.
* Death in the Rainy Season - Anna Jaquiery (2015) ★ ★ ★
This is apparently the second book of Commandant Morel mysteries, which I didn't know. Not having read the first didn't make a difference, though. Commandant Morel is a French detective whose mother was Khmer, and this book begins with him on holiday in Cambodia, hoping to meet her family. Those plans go awry when a French aid worker is murdered in Phnom Penh, and Morel is roped into the investigation. I liked Morel, and wouldn't object to reading the first book to see what he's like when he's doing his investigating at home in Paris. The main mystery is competently done (I worked out the culprit early on, but not the motive), but there is a secondary crime that Morel sort of stumbles into that gets wrapped up in a rush at the end, which could have been cut out completely to no great loss.
* The Strangler Vine - MJ Carter (2014) ★ ★ ★
This is a modern crack at a ripping yarn. It's set in India in the 1830s, when a naïve young British officer named Avery is sent with an ex-officer called Blake in search of a famous poet who has gone missing... and instead they find betrayal, tigers and the dark side of colonialism. It's a solidly okay book. A bit slow, and bookended by a pointless romance.
* The Winged Histories - Sofia Samatar (2016) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is beautiful. It's worth reading for the prose alone.
This is the story of a failed rebellion in a fantasy kingdom, but very obliquely. It's told in four character studies, each of a woman affected by the rebellion: Tav, a soldier and the leader of the rebellion; Tialon, a priestess of a religion gaining popularity in the kingdom; Seren, a singer in a nomadic tribe; and Siski, a socialite princess. It's about words and songs and meanings, about the role of women and voices lost to history, about families and empires and nationalism.
This was heading towards five stars, right up until late in Siski's section, when a terrible thing that happened to her a teen was revealed, and I realised that I had fundamentally misunderstood the world that had been built. And the truth of it just made me roll my eyes.
* Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz (2016) ★ ★ ★
I wanted to like this more than I did. It's... aggressively okay.
Magpie Murders is a book in a book. The internal Magpie Murders is an unedited manuscript by a famous crime writer called Alan Conway. Conway writes cosy mysteries set in post-war Britain, and his detective is a half-Greek, half-German refugee called Atticus Pünd. We read most of his the manuscript (which is terrible), but just as Pünd is about to gather the suspects together to reveal the killer, Poirot-style, it ends. That's all there is, and we switch back to real life, where Conway's editor is shocked to find that Conway has died suddenly over the weekend. She goes looking for the final chapter and finds herself trying to solve Conway's murder, with all of the characters in the manuscript turning out to be people Conway knew in real life. Which sounds very tricksy, but it's really not as clever as it thinks it is.