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!

Catch-up mini reviews! Part 4 - Non-fiction (1)

I was only going to do one non-fiction post, but I ended up rambling about all of the books too much, so I split it up instead. Yay!


Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

I LOVED this book. Really really loved it. I had never heard of Dear Sugar or the Rumpus before reading this, and I’m kind of sad that I hadn’t as I’m sure that a few years ago when I wasn't particularly happy I would have really appreciated reading them! As it is, pretty much none of the advice columns in the book were particularly relevant to anything that I'm struggling with now, but in spite of that I found all of the advice interesting, and really nicely written, and I think that almost anybody could read this and get something out of it (even if, like me, it’s just a feeling that were any of these things to happen to you, you would be much better emotionally and mentally prepared!). I really wish that this book had been around when I was a teenager, as I really could have done with some of the advice then (although I wasn't really open to listening to other people at that time anyway, so it probably wouldn't have helped much, hehe). 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

I really wanted to love this book. I really did. As I wrote above, I REALLY enjoyed Tiny Beautiful Things, but in the end I think that I just wasn’t at the right place in my life to get much out of this. I found the bits about actually walking the trail really interesting, but I think that that kind of experience was much better covered by Bill Bryson in A Walk in the Woods… and I know that this shows a huge lack of empathy on my part, but I just ended up screaming in my head “AHH STOP BEING SUCH AN IDIOT!” a lot of the time… I think that had I read this when I was a teenager, or even 5 or 6 years ago I would have loved it, but I’m just not in that place at the moment, and I found it hard to find sympathy for the author while reading it. That isn’t to say that I don't understand and feel sympathy on some level, obviously a lot of messed up and not very nice things happened to her, but... I'm just not sure that I needed to read about her dealing with it in so much detail. This was obviously something that she had to go through in order to become the awesome person that she is today (or that she comes of as in Tiny Beautiful Things!) but I would have been much more interested in something that focused on the big picture of how she is now, and not a book that focuses so narrowly on one particular experience. I didn't hate it, but then I didn't feel particularly moved afterwards, and although it kept me reading, I'm not sure that I took anything away from it at all. Sigh!

Jen reads… The Know-It-All

One of the things that I've realised as I get older is how little of all of the knowledge in the world I will ever know. Once I left university there was very little pressure to learn anything new. In fact, I would say that I was probably in the minority as I kept on actively studying after leaving (Yay Japanese I love you), but I feel like I’ve slowly become more ignorant about a lot of things which I probably should know about. My mind is full of useless knowledge about, for example, Buffy though. Buffy <3

Ahem, anyway, I’ve made a few attempts to sort of patch over holes in my knowledge by reading stuff, asking my husband who knows a LOT about lots of things I know nothing about – how the stock market works, for example, and generally being interested in stuff that I actively ignored when I was younger.. but to be honest, without anybody to push me into learning about things, or an interesting book about the subject, there are a lot of things that I will probably never know about. I think that a lot of people who are my age probably feel like that.

The author of these books, A. J. Jacobs felt that way too. It is one of the reasons that he gives for starting the project that the book is about: reading the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Obviously this whole premise means that the book is a little bit dated now, as I don’t think that they even make print copies of it anymore. But, it’s an interesting idea! The book is full of interesting little facts, and the sort of self-deprecating humour that I prefer in my books. It also deals with the authors struggles to start a family with his wife, which as a married woman who is approaching her late 20s (late 20s is from 28 ish right?? I still have at least half a year to go, right??), is an area that seems much more relevant to me than it would have done a few years ago.

It also speaks to the side of me that used to spend hours on Encarta when I was little reading about... elephants and stuff. Because elephants are awesome.

The Know-It-All is ideal for pre-sleep reading, mainly because of the layout. Each letter of the alphabet is a chapter, and the chapters are split up into little segments – sometimes just a few lines long, sometimes a few pages – for words starting with that letter. This means that you can read for just a few minutes and be at a good place to stop. That is exactly what I want before I sleep, as I hate stopping in the middle of something. It also meant that I stretched this book out over a few weeks, which also made it more enjoyable!

I would recommend it for anybody who is looking for a light but interesting read.