In books read on May 10, 2003
As expected this was another excellent episode in what's rapidly become one of my favourite series.
It doesn't hurt that I live almost where the book is set; I know the roads and the villages and the scenery and I can pull out my local OS map to find out which bits Booth is inventing and which bits are for real. I'm pretty certain that there is no Withins village though the setting of Withins Moor is definitely there. Now I have to go and find out how much of the history is for real and how much is fictional. But I'll enjoy crawling round the local library sussing that out.
As well as reading this book in the right place I also read it at the right time. The book is set in April/May and features a group of morris dancers very like the ones I've seen performing in Holmfirth this weekend. It's not often that books collide so closely with reality as this! Whilst I love reading books set in places and cultures that are miles away in both time and space there is definitely something to be said for reading close to home too. Well there is when the writer gets everything as bang on as Booth does.
If forced to choose I'd still say Blood on the Tongue was my favourite of the series so far but this is still an excellent book. I love the way the two main characters are devloping and I like the way that their stories stay open ended and we don't get to learn too much about either of them in a single book.
More please.
Purchased on 15th April 2003.
In Uncategorized on May 9, 2003
hoist by my own….
The French used pétard, “a loud discharge of intestinal gas,” for a kind of infernal engine for blasting through the gates of a city. “To be hoist by one’s own petard,” a now proverbial phrase apparently originating with Shakespeare’s Hamlet (around 1604) not long after the word entered English (around 1598), means “to blow oneself up with one’s own bomb, be undone by one’s own devices.” The French noun pet, “fart,” developed regularly from the Latin noun pditum, from the Indo-European root *pezd-, “fart.”
you do learn something new every day.
In Uncategorized on May 8, 2003
neato way to knit round things on two circular needles rather than *&^%*$& double pointed needles that are driving me nuts at the moment.
[found via web-goddess - i'm intrigued by the "knit two socks at once" concept too.]
In Uncategorized on May 8, 2003
if i ever find myself in desperate need of going cross eyed then i think these puzzles will be the place to start the process off.
In Uncategorized on May 7, 2003
a single soldier from pippin fort is up for auction next week:
The show’s creator Gordon Murray burned all of the other foam figures from Trumpton and Camberwick Green after they became worn out.
it seems like sacrilege even if they were his to burn.
update: nobody wanted the poor pippin fort soldier, or at least no one wanted to pay two or three grand for him.
In Uncategorized on May 6, 2003
the periodic table of desserts not only actually makes reasonable quantities of sense as a periodic table but also comes ready equipped complete with its own song (2.3mb mp3).
[cf this entry]
[found via sore eyes]
In Uncategorized on May 6, 2003
argyll socks are actually argyle socks. i was in argyll last week and came across somebody in a book wearing argyle socks and got very confused as a result (well ok, mildly bewildered, mostly at being 300 miles away from my favourite dictionary).
In Uncategorized on May 6, 2003
i just tried this gender test again; two years ago it thought i was male, now it guesses i’m female with 86% confidence. the test has managed to nudge me from the blue and into the pink. the conclusion seems to be based on my preference for a blue bedroom rather than a white bedroom. i actually have a red bedroom and the colour scheme was picked by my boyfriend. make sense of that if you can.
In books read on May 6, 2003
I didn't expect to like this book better than the first one, Blue, but I think I did like it better overall. My comments about Blue read like I didn't like it that much, that's mostly because I was discussing it with a group of other people and sometimes it seems as if we tend to pull out the inadequacies of a book rather than praise the things we enjoyed. At least that's what I seem to end up with at the end. Not being bound by a discussion when I was reading this book meant I was free to enjoy it without trying to think about the whys or what other people might not like in the book.
Outside of the pros and cons of book discussions I think this is a better book anyway. I think Blue McCarron is more level headed in this book, she's less screwed up by lovers, she's less of a bore about her social psychology (even though I did think her explanations of statistics were on very dodgy ground at some points - a thousand to one chance of something happening is not by any means "so unlikely that it just really could not happen") and she did a lot better at not walking herself into dodgy situations (she does walk into them of course, but there's rationale behind the walking, not just cliched 'lone woman decides to check out noises in cellar' type of rationale)
I don't know if Padgett has any plans to write any more books about Blue, or even, given the way this book concludes, if I really want to know what happens to Blue next, but if there is another then I'll be reading it because I like the character, I like the writing and the plot isn't half bad either. These are a couple of books that I would hesitate to recommend to others because I know the reason I enjoyed them is mostly down to finding Blue a highly appealing character where I know others have found her downright annoying. I'm going to check out Padgett's other series that seems to have more widespread appeal and see what I make of that.
Purchased on 1st April 2003.
In Uncategorized on May 5, 2003
more soon…
nocto