Blogosphere Book Circle - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Title: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Author: Jane Austen and Seth grahame-Smith
Published: Quirk Productions 2009

From the back cover:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.  As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet village of Meryton - and the dead are returning to life!   Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menacer, but she's soon distrcted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr Darcy.  What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilised sparring between the two young lovers- and even more violent sparring on the blood soaked battlefield.  Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of teh class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalisim, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.

Well I rather disagree with the sentiment expressed in the last sentence of that blurb.  I am left wondering why anybody would want to change Pride & Prejudice & why he thinks it is better with sword fights & zombies in it.  I suppose I am a classical person & feel that classics should not be ripped off like this.  I don't think it improved the story at all having sword fights & zombies but then maybe Pride & Prejudice is too boring for male readers. Was the author trying to get more people to read a classic?  I don't know, plus having a Readers Discussion Guide at the back really rubbed me the wrong way.   I had to read Pride & Prejudice at school in English & I loved the book then, I loved the way Elizabeth fought with her words.

I really don't like this book & feel quite strongly that someone really shouldn't make money off totally taking someone else's work & just slightly adjusting it like this.  Maybe I don't get it, maybe he really was trying to poke fun at Pride & Prejudice, but why?  I am just glad that I didn't spend money on this book because it just felt like a cheap rip off of a classic & I can't see why it was a New York Times Best seller.

Blogosphere Book Circle - Replenishing the Earth

Title: Replenishing the Earth, The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783 -1939
Author: James Belich

I found this book very heavy going.  It was both heavy to hold & very heavy reading.  So heavy reading that each night I would read about a page & then I was asleep with the book on top of my face.  I had the book for a month from the library but I never got it finished.  I must have got about halfway & then I had to return it again.  I have to say that I didn't check if I could renew it because really I had had enough, I needed some lighter reading. 

This book read like a text book that could possibly used for studying anthropology.  It was kind of interesting how so much of the Western world speaks English & not Dutch or Spanish or French, but really I was never so interested in it that I wanted to carry on reading it.

I gave it a crack but I have to say for the way I read books, entertainment these days, I'm done with serious studying, it really wasn't up my alley.

Blogosphere Book Circle - Novel About my Wife

This book is supposed to be August's reading but all the other books are still on loan to other people, so I decided to charge on ahead & read this book.

Title: Novel About my Wife 
Author: Emily Perkins
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008

From the inside cover:

If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, meticulously shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse just couldn't help but kick back into life.  Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair.

Tom Stone, skinnyish, fortyish, English, is madly in love with his wife Ann, an Australian in self-imposed exile in London.  Expecting their first child, they buy a semi-derelict house in Hackney.  They believe this is their settled future, despite Tom's stalling career and their spiralling money troubles.


But soon Ann becomes convinced she's being shadowed by a local homeless man whose presence seems like a terrible omen.  As her pregnancy progresses she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion.  As their child grows, so too does Tom's sense of an impending, nameless threat.  Their home seems beset with vermin, smells and strange noises.  On the verge of losing the house, Tom makes a decision that he hopes will save their lives.


I found this book to be a very quick & easy read, I really wanted to know what the ending would be.  Unfortunately I got to the end & didn't really like the ending. I felt as though I needed to know what really went wrong, what truely made Ann crack.  I was thinking up reasons all the way through to the end & felt disappointed that we never got told what Ann really suffered from.

It was an interesting story that I really don't think was about Tom's wife at all, it was more about his perceptions of his wife & how he really didn't know her very well at all. 

It was a good read & nice & light compared to the previous book I read.

Blogosphere Book Circle - Bad Science

Title: Bad Science   Author: Ben Godacre  Published: HarperCollinsPublishers
From the back cover: Dr Ben Goldacre dispenses fast and powerful relief from: Scaremongering journalists; pill pushing nutritionists; flaky statistics; evil pharmaceutical corporations

I was a bit daunted at the thought of reading this book.  It sounded like it was going to be a whole of science stuff that I may not understand.  Part of it was but I did read it through the whole way & came away thinking "my goodness could I have now made my son think fish oil is helping him when in fact it isn't?"  That is a scary thought & really the book was very thought provoking.  The way statistics are read & made to interpret what anyone wants them to interpret & then thrown across the world headlines like they are proven facts is also thought provoking. 

Then not days after I had finished reading the book was the headline in the Christchurch Press that the Maori Immersion school - Te Kura... achieved 100% pass rate for all three NCEA levels.  In fact I have just found this excerpt from stuff.co.nz  I have cut & pasted what the first paragraph says:

A Maori-immersion school in Christchurch has recorded a 100 per cent pass rate for all three NCEA levels.
Te Kura Whakapumau Te Reo Tuturu Ki Waitaha's five year 11s (level one), seven year 12s (level two), and two year 13s (level three) passed the 2009 National Certificate of Educational Achievement, results show.

This is the kind of statistics that the author (Ben Goldacre) was talking about.  You need to look behind the statistics & see what is missing.  In the case of the stuff article what was missing was the actual figures of how many are actually in the years classes & how many students in those years did actually sit for the NCEA.  It makes the school look good from the headline (and maybe it is) but you have to wonder whether there are more than 14 students in years 11 through 13.

I never was greatly into maths but this book did open my eyes as to how statistics can be twisted around to suit people's needs.  Then we come back to my fish oil thought.  Have I just started bringing up my children to believe the very tight & slick marketing campaigns of huge corporations.  My children know that McDonald's isn't a great meal to eat, even if a couple of meals are endorsed by Weight Watchers, but medical/vitamin/supplement campaigns are different.  As Goldacre says, just because it sounds pseudo technical it makes us think that they have to be right & that fish oil does help the brain.  I'm worried because James truely seems to believe that fish oil makes him think better.  I agreed at the beginning of the term that the fish oil did seem to help but by the end of term there really was no apparent help from it at all & I suggested to James we stop taking it.  He got very upset & he really does think that fish oil helps him.  I seem to have inadvertantly brought up a child who strongly believes in a product that actually doesn't do him any good, hopefully it doesn't do him any harm.

Yes the book certainly made me think & I have started looking at headlines differently. I found it hard going in places but then just as I was about to give up the next chapter was about something interesting & not as difficult to follow.

It is an interesting book but not one I would recommend as a light bedtime reading, your brain needs to be switched on to read it.  It has opened up my eyes to the twists & turns of statistics & for that I am thankful.  Now I just need to figure out how to deprogramme James from believing that fish oil will fix his brain.

Blogosphere Book Circle - March Book

Title: Access Road   Author: Maurice Gee  Published: Penguin Books 2009
From the back cover:

The old family home in Access Road, where Lionel, Roly and Rowan grew up, is crumbling away - but after more than fifty years Lionel and Roly are back.  Rowan, too, safe in 'upper crusty' Takapuna, is drawn more and more strongly 'out west'.

The past is dangerously alive.  Clyde Buckley, violent as a boy, enigmatic, subterranean as an old man, returns to his childhood territory.  What does he want? What crimes does he hide? And how is Lionel involved?  Rowan must abandon safety if she is to find out...

I confess now that I have never read a Maurice Gee book before this one.  I have no idea what his writing is usually like but I have to say I found this a compelling although dark read.  I love the descriptive phrases he uses & this paragraph in particular  "Clouds hung their bellies over the sea. The water was leaden and the waves slid up the sand like oil.  I beat the rain home by several minutes but couldn't keep it out of the house.  The sound on the iron roof was like a train in a tunnel."

His descriptive writing easily led me to imagine a small town on the outskirts of a large city & really could have been describing any small town in New Zealand.  Maybe that was the pull of the book, it could happen anywhere in New Zealand.  This darkness could actually lurk anywhere in New Zealand.  The next thought from that is, is there a chance that by standing and watching these dark acts as a child, not telling anyone about them, could you really be letting a darker act follow later & therefore could you be partly responsible for that act?   One character in the book clearly thought so & Rowan? Maybe she did to, after she was able to connect the dots, or find the resolve to connect the dots.

I have to say connecting dots has happened a lot to me in the last few years, luckily in nothing like as dark as this.  Maybe that's why I felt a pull in this book, Rowan was discovering what it all meant & I have just been going through that process myself.

It was a good book to read & I enjoyed the descriptive prose that Maurice Gee used.

Book Review - The Bolter

Synopsis (from the book jacket)

On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge's Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know.  Just over fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville  had shocked high society by leaving his multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man. Now, three more husbands later, she was back to help the son whom she had been banned from seeing. 

An inspiration for Nancy Mitford's character The Bolter, painted by William Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a picture of her first love by her bed. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left one husband murdered and branded her the 'high priestess' of White Mischief's bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya. Sackville's life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. Now, Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind Sackville's road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.

I found this a very easy book to read, which was a great surprise because I don't usually read biographies because I find them hard to get into. I found the time period fascinating & I had always thought that they were prim & proper but it would appear that there was an unspoken rule that an affair within a marriage was acceptable as long as it was with another married woman. 

I found myself feeling sadened for Idina that her first husband chose to take that course of action & that really the rest of her life was left trying to find love & inevitably never really finding it. I did feel very sorry for the children of all the different marriages & I can understand why they tried to keep Idina from being mentioned a lot within the family.  I think they never really understood her, & how could they when she was never around for them. 

It was a really interesting read & I ended up thinking that really in some aspects our society is not as bad as we think, it is just it is discussed more these days than it was back in Edwardian England.