nocto

I can only presume that this book was either titled for an American audience more familiar with doughnuts than biscuits, or that the alliterative version of the title was considered to be more eye catching everywhere. There's really very little about dunking doughnuts here but there is plenty of other stuff to read

Each chapter of the book delves into a different branch of science approaching it from the point of view of everyday life. If you already have an idea about the branch of science in question then the insights here can seem a bit obvious and predictable. His chapter on statistics which is wrapped up in how to add up your supermarket bill struck me as the weakest in the book but I suspect that is just because I already knew the things he was talking about.

There's a lot here that would make really good fodder for science teachers. I really enjoyed learning things I didn't know about boomerangs and the science of cooking, and even the physics of sex. It's a good entertainingly written book; the split into nine separate questions about everyday life means that on the one hand we never get too deep into science but we never get bored either.

My favourite chapter is the one about boiling eggs which explains why I can never get my eggs to cook in the standard three and a half minutes (time to cook is proportional to the inverse square of the radius - the three and a half minutes is for a rather small egg and i buy the best free range medium eggs i can find - so mine need about five minutes) and that if I was foolhardy enough to boil eggs in methanol I could get perfect eggs every time because the temperature that methanol boils at is between the temperature that the white and the yolk cook at.

Anyway, back to the title story: the main focus of the first chapter is about dunking biscuits in tea, something I'm rather fond of doing. Fisher concludes that to dunk a biscuit properly you have to do it horizontally rather than vertically. The biscuit can then take up to four times as long in the tea before collapsing. A layer of nice plastic-like chocolate on top helps too. I've tried to repeat his experiments and have just one problem. How the bloody hell do you hold a biscuit horizontally in a mug of tea? It might be scientifically sound but it seems to be impossible in practice. Can I sue for compensation for my tea scorched fingers?

Purchased on 12th October 2002.

[Comments taken from a mailing list discussion. They are out of context and do contain spoilers.]

[first christie? comparisons to others?]

Nope, like many other discussers have already said I first read Christie as a young teenager and I've been reading her on and off ever since. There's still a million of her books that I haven't read. Murder on the Orient Express was definitely one of the first (probably the first actually) of her books that I picked up and the unusual plot gripped me and has stayed with me ever since though the details have gone from my mind entirely. I didn't know the twist at the time and I thought the story was wonderfully clever.

[Part I]'s as far as I've got so far. I'm enjoying seeing bits of the story to come revealing themselves to me.

Since it was the first Christie I read it's the one that conceived my notions of her writing so it fits them exactly ;-)

I think it's one of the best. I prefer the Poirot stories to the Miss Marple ones and I like this book, the Roger Ackroyd one and Peril at End House for the way they break the rules of detective fiction.

It's going pretty much as I remembered so far.

The plot twist is the bit that stayed with me most, I remember loving the on the train setting but the characters are all new to me again.

[satire? cozy? the plot?]

To be honest I didn't really feel this book was especially satirical or tongue-in-cheek. It had plenty of humour and the characters were mostly total stereotypes but I didn't see the satire. Perhaps I'm mising something.

I don't think of Christie as a cozy writer either, I think she's writing in a time period before divisions like cozy/hardboiled existed and at the time this book was written she was pretty much making up the rules of the genre herself.

I can't really comment on what I expected of the plot as this read around I knew what the conclusion was. I do remember being spectacularly impressed by the plot as a teenager. The three part structure of the book (crime, interviews, denouement) is exactly what I expect of Christie but I expect that's because I got my ideas of what to expect of Christie from this book as it's not a layout that she always

[realistic characters?]

No, not really, I think most everybody in this book, good guys and bad guys, was a shallow stereotype but I think that it was necessary for them to be so. If the characters had been more three dimensional then to have got the full juries worth into the book would have required a blockbuster brick of a novel, after 200 pages a trick ending pleases the reader but after several hundred more pages I think the book would be denting walls around the world. Plus Christie needs to conceal many details about her characters to have the trick plot work. To flesh these people out without revealing their connections would be pretty much impossible.

I didn't really find as much offensive in this book as I have done in others from the same time period. All of the characters are caricatures, the British as much as any of the other nationalities, no ethnicity seemed to be degraded that much more than any other.

I don't feel they were real enough to imagine them having a life outside the book where I could meet them.

I haven't seen any Poirot films so I can only go on what I gather from the books to imagine Poirot. To me he's very short and small with an oversized head full of little grey cells, a huge twirly moustache and he's very vain and neatly dressed in a very smart three piece suit from Paris. There's not much I like about him as a person but I enjoy his deductive skills all the same.

I don't think he'd be that much different today. He's considered rather odd by his contemporaries anyway so I think he'd just be pretty much as is but even more of an eccentric in today's world.

Purchased on 12th October 2002.

Historical mysteries really aren't a favourite of mine so I'm really surprised to find that I'm adoring this series.

At the beginning of this book I was a little thrown by the setting. I have only read this book's immediate predecessor in this series and that book was set in 1918 in the aftermath of the first world war. This next book in the series is somehow set in the time immediately preceding the war. Linscott soon orientated me in history and now I find I really don't care what she does with the timeline of the series I just want to read some more.

In this story Nell Bray is accused by her cousin, a high ranking naval officer, of misleading his "perfect daughter" who has come to London to study art. Nell of course has done no such thing but is determined to get to the bottom of what has happened to her cousin's daughter.

What I really like about this book is that it manages to make me feel like I'm reading about 1914 without making me feel like I'm reading through the author's research. And there's a damned good and interesting plot to boost.

Purchased on 10th September 2002.

A copy of this book is available on BookMooch.

[Comments taken from a mailing list discussion. They are out of contaxt and contain spoilers.]

[on the characters]

I think the characters were pretty consistent. I thought the time lapse worked well and we got to see how much Munch's life had changed and I thought we came in at a good point (from a story point of view) in Mace and Caroline's life too. Everyone had grown up and changed, moved on, it all seemed pretty realistic to me.

Ellen was an excellent new character and I'm glad to hear that she comes back for me in the future. I was gunning for her to sort her life out, even when she was doing dumb things I thought she was acting like a real person and not a caricature.

[on the plot]

I thought the weakness in this plot was the Romanian and plutonium and spy parts of it, I got all a little lost with what was going on at times, but to be honest I didn't really care, I was too interested in what was going on with Munch and Mace and Ellen to be bothered by not really understanding what was going on on the other side of the plot sometimes. On the whole I thought it was a weaker plot than the first two books but still pretty good. I didn't think the plot bled realism in the way that the character's did, I think that was what was a bit out of kilter for me.

[on the scenes, setting]

Several people mentioned Victor's suicide scene as something that didn't work for them, I loved it and thought it was really funny how dumb Victor was being. I didn't find this side of the plot very realistic so the silliness worked for me.

I can't remember individual scenes now but I thought most everything that Munch and Ellen did was excellently written with tons of tiny details adding up to a real picture of who these people were.

In the first two books I felt that the setting could be nearly anywhere but this one felt more LA specific with the ride down to Mexico and the Olympics coming up.

[overall]

This series is staying pretty much on a level for me, it's changing and each book is different but I'm not finding one book appreciably stronger or weaker than the next and this consistency is a good thing.

I like the ongoing background of drink/drugs rehabilitation and I'm enjoying and finding it illuminating seeing how Munch and her friends cope with it in their own ways.

Overall the series is great and I plan to keep right on with reading it.

Purchased on 15th January 2002.