January reading round-up and ramblings

I reviewed no books at all in January! Go me! I did read 8 books though, so yay for January!

I don't have that much to say about most of the books though, so mini reviews it is! Although at some point I will be writing a review of Tampa, so you can look forward (?) to that.



Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies by Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman writes for the Guardian, and I have been reading occasionally reading her columns for years. I especially enjoy Ask Hadley, which is supposedly a fashion advice column, but is in general quite amusing. My dad likes it, and I don't think he cares at all about fashion, so it's entertaining even if you don't care about the subject. I am sort of weirdly interested in fashion. You would not know this to see how I dress. Haha.

Anyway, I picked up this guide to being a woman (it's basically a collection of little essays about feminism and.. other stuff) because I know I like the way she writes, and it was fine. Nothing particularly mind blowing though. There were some amusing bits, but maybe not as many as I would have liked. If you know you like her, you'll probably enjoy it. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would recommend it necessarily, but you should definitely Ask Hadley a go!



Bird Box by Josh Malerman

The story takes place in a world where there is some kind of creature that makes people go mad and kill themselves and maybe other people when they see it. This means that everyone blindfolds themselves when they go outside to avoid glimpsing it. The book has two different strands, one set in the present day where the main character, Malorie, has two very small children to protect, and has worked up the courage after years of not seeing anyone else to leave her house and try to reach a safe haven that she heard about. The other strand is about the events that led her to this situation, from when strange things started happening up to the present day. I found the book hard to put down while I was reading it, and raced through it. From what I had heard about it though I was expecting it to be terrifying, but I wasn't really scared at any point. This is probably a good thing, because me being scared by things = not sleeping well for a month or so. It was extremely creepy though.

In spite of the lack of scares, I did enjoy it! I'm not sure it'll make my list of best books for this year, but I don't really have anything negative to say about it. If the concept sounds interesting to you then I think it'll be an enjoyable read.



The Cuckoo's Calling by "Robert Galbraith"

Mystery/crime novels are not really my favourite genre, but I had to read this because J K Rowling! As always, I loved the characters, and I think the book had some interesting things to say about fame and its consequences. I am definitely going to be reading the next one (and any others that are released) at some point. Yay! I still don't really get the whole Robert Galbraith thing though. I understand why she started using a pseudonym, and I understand why she would carry on using it, but I don't understand why she is still half pretending that he is a completely different person! Maybe she just enjoys it?



Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

Okay I tried writing a mini review for this one but it got too long so I'm going to expand it into a proper post. Next!









Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

It was Mary Roach. As always, she is very entertaining, and not at all afraid to jump in to whatever she's writing about. If you have read and enjoyed other books by her, or want to read some non-fiction about sex and the science behind it, then I think you'll probably enjoy it.

My favourite Mary Roach is still Stiff though. I think maybe part of me is still too British to enjoy this one as much as I could have, if that makes sense.



Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

I feel like I should have read this years ago. I read a LOT of discworld books when I was in my teens, and I have recently tried and liked Neil Gaiman, so I was pretty sure that I would like this, and I was right! I'm sure anybody who is interested in either of them knows what the book is about by now (and has probably read it already), but if you don't... go read a synopsis somewhere, because I can't think of a good way to summarise it.

If you like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman and haven't read this then you really should. It was very entertaining, silly and made me want to read more Neil Gaiman and go back and revisit all of the discworld books.



Tampa by Alissa Nutting

I am writing a separate post about this. Overall, I liked it (not sure liked is the right word), but also ewww.









The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1) by Rick Riordan

I have been meaning to try the Percy Jackson books for a while (because sometimes you just want something quick, easy, entertaining, and sort of childish and innocent at the same time - or is that just me?), and I quite enjoyed the first one. I definitely needed to read something that was very light after reading Tampa, and it worked really well. It was a bit predictable, and there were some things that didn't make THAT much sense in it, but all in all it was good. I got a set with all of the books in, so I am probably going to read them when I need a break from War and Peace!

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Bye January! I mostly enjoyed you, although I could have done with having a few more work-free days (it's been almost a month now since I actually had a day when I didn't do any work at all. I'm REALLY HOPING that I'll be able to get enough done this week to take this weekend off. I know that some people work that much anyway, but I am definitely someone who needs to have regular time off otherwise I start to lose all motivation and go a bit crazy).

I think that the next few months will be revolving around War and Peace, which I am quite excited about as I am really enjoying it so far! Yay!

Jen reads... Packing For Mars by Mary Roach

This is the second Mary Roach book that I've read. I bought this one for my plane journey back from the UK in February, but ended up not reading any of it because I was distracted by Eleanor and Park. But, as with Stiff, I really enjoyed it.

The book focuses on astronauts, the history of space exploration, and what potential problems there would be if a mission to mars were to take place. 

And I loved all of it. 

Mary Roach is definitely a really entertaining writer. Her sense of humour shows in almost every sentence that she writes, and although she takes the subject completely seriously, she is not afraid to point out the ridiculous and amusing aspects of it. She also asks the really important questions - How do toilets work in space? How would people have sex in space and has anybody already tried it? and so on. 

I ended up annoying the people that I work with and my husband by constantly saying "Ooooh did you know this?!" every time I read a bit, haha. 

I don't really have much else to say about it, but if you are at all interested in space travel and astronauts (I wasn't particularly, but still enjoyed it!), and if you like your non-fiction to entertain you at the same time, then you should definitely read this!

And to end with, a couple (out of hundreds) of quotes that I enjoyed (I read it on my kindle, so no page references):

In a 1960 Civil Aeromedical Research Institute study, squatting on a drop platform caused “severe knee pain” at relatively low G forces. “Apparently the flexor muscles . . . acted as a fulcrum to pry open the knee joint,” the researchers noted with interest and no apparent remorse.

The abdominal organs are packed down into the pelvis like sandbags, the head has sunk down into the shoulders, and I don’t even want to talk about the testicles.

One self-help phobia website helpfully reassures the afflicted that “if you have no plans to travel into space . . . astrophobia may not significantly impact your life.”

I must now go and read all of the other Mary Roach books! (I think there are only two left, BOO!)

Catch-up mini reviews! Part 6 - Non-fiction (2)

Stiff by Mary Roach

If you are at all squeamish, scared of flying (there is a section on how cadavers can help people work out what went wrong in plane crashes. That I read just before getting on a plane, haha), or if the thought of anything to do with dead bodies makes you feel uncomfortable, then DO NOT GO ANYWHERE NEAR THIS BOOK. If like me, however, you have a bit of a morbid side anyway, and are fascinated by anything to do with the human body, then this book is amazing! Mary Roach writes in a really interesting way – although she is obviously taking everything seriously, she is also not afraid to laugh at the more ridiculous aspects of the subjects she is covering and the people she talks to, and it makes the whole book both fascinating and really entertaining. Even though the subject matter theoretically doesn’t bother me, I did find myself fluctuating between laughter and cringing in disgust while reading it, and I had to put it down a few times as it all got a bit much, I still really recommend it, if finding out a lot about what can happen to people's bodies after they die sounds interesting. I’m really glad that I got in on my kindle on a whim while I was at the airport waiting for an 11 hour flight after finding myself unable to concentrate on any of the other books I had bought with me. I am currently in the middle of reading Packing For Mars which is also by Mary Roach, and is also fascinating and keeps on making me laugh.

One caveat to this recommendation maybe is that the book is a bit old, so the information in it may well have been proved to be wrong in the meantime (as happens so often with science), and some of the things that she talks about may have ceased to exist since it was published, but that didn’t really bother me personally.



Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

After reading this book, I think I can say with some confidence that I definitely have introvert tendencies. I’m not sure that I come off like this to people I know (I tried talking to my mum about it and she said “You?! An introvert?! Pfft!”), but some of the stuff that was written in this book about how introverts and extroverts differ really made sense to me, and reading it made me realise that not wanting to go out with friends every night was not some sort of failing on my part, and the fact that I need wind down time after spending time with other people isn’t just me being weird, it’s quite a common thing! I did feel like the book was slightly too harsh on extroverts (by constantly talking about how great introverts are at various things, it seemed to imply that extroverts couldn’t be good at them. I’m not entirely sure that that was the author’s intention, but that is how it came off!), and actually made me feel a bit worse about myself in some parts, as although I would probably mostly identify as an introvert, I’m not sure that that means that I am in possession of all of the amazing qualities that the Susan Cains talks about introverts having. I also think that it was a little bit too long, I think that I might have been happier just reading an essay about it rather than a whole book.

This was actually one of the first books that I bought for my kindle, but it took me almost a year to actually finish it, which is partly because my kindle was telling me that I had loads left when in fact it was mostly endnotes, and because after a certain point I wasn’t sure what more I could get out of reading the rest, although when I actually came back to the book about 11 months after unintentionally not finishing it, I only had one chapter left!



This is turning into a much longer series of posts than I had intended. I think I've been reading too much, haha. Only one more (maybe?) to go though. Woohoo!