Uncle BoBo NEEDS YOU!
Apr. 1st, 2018 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyGosh, my f-list is quiet these days. And so am I, so I can't complain.
I normally find Ferrero Rocher a bit of a let down. I mean, they look fancy, but they never live up to the packaging for me. But! Ferrero Rocher hazelnut mini eggs are good stuff, f-list. They are THE BUSINESS.
I haven't been eating much chocolate recently, so, in news that I suspect is not unrelated to the above, I have the most terrible headache.
When I was little, we went on holiday to Surfers Paradise and my strongest memory of it is of the little restaurant down the street from our hotel. It might have been a fish restaurant? I recall a lot of nautical decor, at any rate, and fisherman's basket on the menu. But what sticks strongest in my mind was the dessert: every time we ate there, I had the ice-cream boat, which was several different coloured squares of ice-cream and wafer arranged like a little boat on a sea of chopped-up jelly. I mean, if you're eight, that is the culinary high point of your life right there.
Anyway, I had a birthday this week and, in a fit of whimsy and nostalgia for the ice-cream boat, I made myself an ice-cream cake. Only, and here's the problem, adult me doesn't really like ice-cream. I don't dislike it, but I'd never think to have a bowl of it for dessert, say. And ice-cream cake is just ice-cream with frozen cream on it. In hindsight, I would have preferred a proper cake instead. Next year.
March books read
* Slade House - David Mitchell (2015) ★ ★ ★
Every nine years someone (or several someones) goes into Slade House and doesn't come out. This book covers five of the nine-year cycles, and it's really good for... three-and-a-half of them? I enjoyed the creepy, mysterious happenings; less so the explanation for them. The character who goes into the house in the final section was potential interesting, but underdeveloped. I found out after finishing the books that she is a character from The Bone Clocks,and, in fact, this book is a companion to that one. So this might have been a higher rating if I'd read that first, but on its own it's underbaked.
* Autumn - Ali Smith (2016) ★ ★ ★
Britain, autumn, 2016: Elisabeth visits her childhood friend, 101-year-old Daniel, in his hospice and reads to him. With the Brexit vote happening in the background, the story jumps back and forth between scenes of Elisabeth and Daniel at other points in their lives, dipping into the life of British pop art painter Pauline Boty and the Christine Keeler scandal. The blurb on the back suggests it will leave you "gasping", which is an exaggeration; it's a gentler book than that, about small rebellions and personal reinventions and quiet rage against the machine.
* The Sinking Admiral - Members of the Detection Club (2016) ★
I rarely give a book one star, because I've become quite good at stopping a book halfway through if I'm not enjoying it, thus weeding out the one star candidates. Not this time, though: even though I didn't like it, something made me keep going. Pure self-flagellation.
This is a story compiled by a group of authors who each took a couple of chapters, and it really shows. The characters are cardboard cut-outs with a variety of unpleasant tics and ages that seem to change from chapter to chapter, the setting is dreary, the book contradicts itself from page to page, and the murderer's motive is unbelievable. Towards the end, there's a meta section in which the characters talk about the rules of detective novels, and maybe — maybe — if the whole book had been that self-aware, it might have been redeemed. I hope the authors' individual novels are better than this.
* The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross - Lisa Tuttle (2017) ★ ★ ★
This was a lot better than its cheap-looking cover suggested it would be. A Victorian-era detective duo, Jasper Jesperson and Di Lane, are engaged to solve the mysterious death of a healthy young man whose last words were about witches, which turns into them also solving a few more mysterious deaths and looking for a missing baby. Despite a brief turn to the mystical (at one point there are actual elves/brownies/fairies), there's a far more earthly solution to the problem. The only real issue I had was with Jesperson and Lane themselves, or rather, their working relationship: this is the second book in a series, and it avoids the problem of rehashing too much of the first book by not rehashing enough of it. All up, it's a well done period mystery, but probably requires reading in order.
* Sheer Folly - Carola Dunn (2009) ★ ★
Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are usually a fun romp through the 1920s, with posh people murdering each other and complaining about the changing times. This one is a hard slog, though: Daisy and her friend Lucy go to Appsworth Hall to do a story on its renovated grotto. Once there, they find themselves in the middle of a terrible house party, which gets even worse when the grotto and an earl are blown up by a gas leak. People wander round the Hall's various rooms and talk at each other without revealing their not-particularly-interesting secrets, and the whole thing just seems a little under-baked.
* Carry On, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse (1925) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is the first Jeeves book, a collection of short stories, beginning, of course, with the fateful first meeting of Jeeves and Wooster. The stories all follow a pattern: Wooster takes up something of which Jeeves disapproves (a moustache, a rakish hat, soft silk shirts for evening wear), one of Wooster's chums has money/aunt/girl problems that can only be solved by Jeeves coming up with an unlikely scheme, in return for which Wooster abandons his latest fad. But the joy of Wodehouse isn't the destination, it's the journey, and even here in the early days, the Jeeves journey is a delight.
I normally find Ferrero Rocher a bit of a let down. I mean, they look fancy, but they never live up to the packaging for me. But! Ferrero Rocher hazelnut mini eggs are good stuff, f-list. They are THE BUSINESS.
I haven't been eating much chocolate recently, so, in news that I suspect is not unrelated to the above, I have the most terrible headache.
When I was little, we went on holiday to Surfers Paradise and my strongest memory of it is of the little restaurant down the street from our hotel. It might have been a fish restaurant? I recall a lot of nautical decor, at any rate, and fisherman's basket on the menu. But what sticks strongest in my mind was the dessert: every time we ate there, I had the ice-cream boat, which was several different coloured squares of ice-cream and wafer arranged like a little boat on a sea of chopped-up jelly. I mean, if you're eight, that is the culinary high point of your life right there.
Anyway, I had a birthday this week and, in a fit of whimsy and nostalgia for the ice-cream boat, I made myself an ice-cream cake. Only, and here's the problem, adult me doesn't really like ice-cream. I don't dislike it, but I'd never think to have a bowl of it for dessert, say. And ice-cream cake is just ice-cream with frozen cream on it. In hindsight, I would have preferred a proper cake instead. Next year.
March books read
* Slade House - David Mitchell (2015) ★ ★ ★
Every nine years someone (or several someones) goes into Slade House and doesn't come out. This book covers five of the nine-year cycles, and it's really good for... three-and-a-half of them? I enjoyed the creepy, mysterious happenings; less so the explanation for them. The character who goes into the house in the final section was potential interesting, but underdeveloped. I found out after finishing the books that she is a character from The Bone Clocks,and, in fact, this book is a companion to that one. So this might have been a higher rating if I'd read that first, but on its own it's underbaked.
* Autumn - Ali Smith (2016) ★ ★ ★
Britain, autumn, 2016: Elisabeth visits her childhood friend, 101-year-old Daniel, in his hospice and reads to him. With the Brexit vote happening in the background, the story jumps back and forth between scenes of Elisabeth and Daniel at other points in their lives, dipping into the life of British pop art painter Pauline Boty and the Christine Keeler scandal. The blurb on the back suggests it will leave you "gasping", which is an exaggeration; it's a gentler book than that, about small rebellions and personal reinventions and quiet rage against the machine.
* The Sinking Admiral - Members of the Detection Club (2016) ★
I rarely give a book one star, because I've become quite good at stopping a book halfway through if I'm not enjoying it, thus weeding out the one star candidates. Not this time, though: even though I didn't like it, something made me keep going. Pure self-flagellation.
This is a story compiled by a group of authors who each took a couple of chapters, and it really shows. The characters are cardboard cut-outs with a variety of unpleasant tics and ages that seem to change from chapter to chapter, the setting is dreary, the book contradicts itself from page to page, and the murderer's motive is unbelievable. Towards the end, there's a meta section in which the characters talk about the rules of detective novels, and maybe — maybe — if the whole book had been that self-aware, it might have been redeemed. I hope the authors' individual novels are better than this.
* The Curious Affair of the Witch at Wayside Cross - Lisa Tuttle (2017) ★ ★ ★
This was a lot better than its cheap-looking cover suggested it would be. A Victorian-era detective duo, Jasper Jesperson and Di Lane, are engaged to solve the mysterious death of a healthy young man whose last words were about witches, which turns into them also solving a few more mysterious deaths and looking for a missing baby. Despite a brief turn to the mystical (at one point there are actual elves/brownies/fairies), there's a far more earthly solution to the problem. The only real issue I had was with Jesperson and Lane themselves, or rather, their working relationship: this is the second book in a series, and it avoids the problem of rehashing too much of the first book by not rehashing enough of it. All up, it's a well done period mystery, but probably requires reading in order.
* Sheer Folly - Carola Dunn (2009) ★ ★
Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are usually a fun romp through the 1920s, with posh people murdering each other and complaining about the changing times. This one is a hard slog, though: Daisy and her friend Lucy go to Appsworth Hall to do a story on its renovated grotto. Once there, they find themselves in the middle of a terrible house party, which gets even worse when the grotto and an earl are blown up by a gas leak. People wander round the Hall's various rooms and talk at each other without revealing their not-particularly-interesting secrets, and the whole thing just seems a little under-baked.
* Carry On, Jeeves - PG Wodehouse (1925) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is the first Jeeves book, a collection of short stories, beginning, of course, with the fateful first meeting of Jeeves and Wooster. The stories all follow a pattern: Wooster takes up something of which Jeeves disapproves (a moustache, a rakish hat, soft silk shirts for evening wear), one of Wooster's chums has money/aunt/girl problems that can only be solved by Jeeves coming up with an unlikely scheme, in return for which Wooster abandons his latest fad. But the joy of Wodehouse isn't the destination, it's the journey, and even here in the early days, the Jeeves journey is a delight.