Simple, proven fat-burning trick
Feb. 28th, 2019 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI came into work this morning to find the meeting table piled high with vintage Glomesh purses. So that was fun. Like doing accounting in a disco.
February books read
* The Accident on the A35 - Graeme Macrae Burnet (2017) ★ ★ ★
I read His Bloody Project when it was on the Booker shortlist, and was interested to see what this would be like. Answer: Not as good. The conceit of this book is that it is Burnet's translation of a semi-autobiographical novel by a long-forgotten French author; the novel itself does convincingly sound like a work that has been translated and a pastiche of Georges Simenon. The content of the novel is elliptical: the accident on the A35 leads Chief Inspector Gorski to solve a different crime to the one he starts looking into, while the victim's son also investigates and finds something completely unexpected. It's all very clever and moody and atmospheric, but not particularly interesting.
* The Christmas Star: A Festive Story Collection - Eva Ibbotson (2015) ★ ★ ★
I loved Eva Ibbotson's books as a child, so when I saw this in a second-hand book sale I snaffled it up. It does what it says on the tin: three Christmas stories, two of them in pre-World War I Vienna and one in more contemporary England. Simple but charming.
* The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire - Chloe Hooper (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★
On Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, 400 fires, equivalent in energy to 1,500 atomic bombs, burnt across south-eastern Australia, leading to 180 deaths. This is an examination of just one of the fire areas, in which two fires were lit by an arsonist. The early chapters, giving witness accounts, are devastating: page after page of regular people telling the worst moments in their lives. The later chapters, dealing with the court case, are less gripping; the arsonist isn't really a mind on fire, and his motives remain opaque.
* The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker (2018) ★ ★ ★
This is the story of the fall of Troy, this time told through the Trojan women — or rather, by one Trojan woman: Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus, who is captured by the Greeks and given to Achilles as a slave. Overall I enjoyed this — I started it one evening and finished it the next afternoon — but it does have some frustrations. It's a novel ostensibly about uncovering the silence of the girls that ends up reinforcing the story's male-centric view even more: Achilles and Patroclus are far more developed than any of the other women Briseis encounters in the Greek camp. There are some stylistic quirks as well: changes in viewpoint, anachronistic modern language, occasional odd sections in which Briseis imagines herself being interviewed by her listeners.
February books read
* The Accident on the A35 - Graeme Macrae Burnet (2017) ★ ★ ★
I read His Bloody Project when it was on the Booker shortlist, and was interested to see what this would be like. Answer: Not as good. The conceit of this book is that it is Burnet's translation of a semi-autobiographical novel by a long-forgotten French author; the novel itself does convincingly sound like a work that has been translated and a pastiche of Georges Simenon. The content of the novel is elliptical: the accident on the A35 leads Chief Inspector Gorski to solve a different crime to the one he starts looking into, while the victim's son also investigates and finds something completely unexpected. It's all very clever and moody and atmospheric, but not particularly interesting.
* The Christmas Star: A Festive Story Collection - Eva Ibbotson (2015) ★ ★ ★
I loved Eva Ibbotson's books as a child, so when I saw this in a second-hand book sale I snaffled it up. It does what it says on the tin: three Christmas stories, two of them in pre-World War I Vienna and one in more contemporary England. Simple but charming.
* The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire - Chloe Hooper (2018) ★ ★ ★ ★
On Black Saturday, 7 February 2009, 400 fires, equivalent in energy to 1,500 atomic bombs, burnt across south-eastern Australia, leading to 180 deaths. This is an examination of just one of the fire areas, in which two fires were lit by an arsonist. The early chapters, giving witness accounts, are devastating: page after page of regular people telling the worst moments in their lives. The later chapters, dealing with the court case, are less gripping; the arsonist isn't really a mind on fire, and his motives remain opaque.
* The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker (2018) ★ ★ ★
This is the story of the fall of Troy, this time told through the Trojan women — or rather, by one Trojan woman: Briseis, the Queen of Lyrnessus, who is captured by the Greeks and given to Achilles as a slave. Overall I enjoyed this — I started it one evening and finished it the next afternoon — but it does have some frustrations. It's a novel ostensibly about uncovering the silence of the girls that ends up reinforcing the story's male-centric view even more: Achilles and Patroclus are far more developed than any of the other women Briseis encounters in the Greek camp. There are some stylistic quirks as well: changes in viewpoint, anachronistic modern language, occasional odd sections in which Briseis imagines herself being interviewed by her listeners.