bobblybear

Friday night Chinese takeaway. We will get a Special Curry with chips, special fried rice, crispy chicken in a spicy sauce. I've been looking forward to it all day!

You can never go wrong with a dog book.

I'm about halfway through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I do like these books.

I had a baked potato, smothered in butter, with some cheese and coleslaw. Yummy!

Thanks Andrea. It was a very good read.

Black Swan. Loved it! I didn't actually think I would like it at all which is why it took me so long to watch it.

Paper Towns - John Green Synopsis from Amazon: Who is the real Margo? Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. She has disappeared. Q soon learns that there are clues in her disappearance ...and they are for him. Trailing Margo's disconnected path across the USA, the closer Q gets, the less sure he is of who he is looking for. My Thoughts: This book reminded me a bit of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, only better. Maybe that’s a bit unfair, as I read TPoBaW quite a few years ago, but I remember being very disappointed as I’d expected it to have a significant impact on me (based on reviews and comments). Paper Towns is written through the eyes of Quentin Jacobsen, a teenager about to graduate from high school – and his efforts to find his childhood friend Margo who has intentionally gone missing. Quentin and his friends follow the ‘breadcrumbs’ that Margo has left, in order to find where she has disappeared to. It kept me intrigued from the start. It sagged a tiny bit in the middle, and I wanted the story to move a bit faster, but that was only temporary. It’s not the kind of book that can be rushed as it is very multilayered, and a lot of the subtlety can be missed (and I’m sure I missed a lot of it). It’s more than just a ‘mystery story’; it’s a lesson about seeing and accepting people for who they are and really seeing them as a person, flaws and all. Even though the book is about teenagers, and written through the eyes of one, it’s not necessarily what I would consider YA. I'd never heard of John Green before, but he's written a few books - mostly YA by the sound of things - and seems to be pretty popular, judging by reviews of his books. 9/10

Blue Heaven - C J Box Synopsis from Amazon: THEY WERE RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME, NOW THEY'RE RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES If twelve-year-old Annie hadn't been angry with her mother, she would never have taken her younger brother William on a secret fishing trip deep into the North Idaho woods and they would never have witnessed the execution nor looked straight into the eyes of the four executioners. Now they're running for their lives. They can't go home: the killers know exactly who they are. And where they live. They can't turn to the law: the killers are four respected Los Angeles policemen. There's nowhere for William and Annie to hide. And no one they can trust. Until they meet Jess Rawlins. Rawlins, an old-school rancher, knows something is wrong with the law in Blue Heaven. But he is only one against four men who will stop at nothing to silence their witnesses... My Thoughts: This was a pretty decent, fast-paced thriller. Actually, it was very decent (aside from a pretty weak opening chapter, which nearly had me putting it aside), and I found it very hard to put down. I'd say it was actually one of the better books of it's genre. A lot of these hide-and-seek thrillers often end up with the hero being almost super-human, and just too cool for words. Jess Rawlins is written as just an ordinary guy who sticks by his principles of doing the right thing but in his own way. The book never strays into the territory of the ridiculous, which is why it's so readable through to the end. There are also good doses of suspense, to keep the reader engaged and wanting to know what happens next. 8.5/10

I finished Paper Towns by John Green. I'm now going to start Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm looking forward to entering his world again.

Civilian by Wye Oak.

I read this one a while back but I've just had to browse a few reviews to refresh my memory on it. (I have a terrible habit of forgetting the details of books only a few months after I have read them. ) I now remember the unique words that Florence used - almost her own language. As for the ending, I think it's hinted that

Have just added some semi-recent (a month old) pics to the pets thread.

Some more pictures of Reuben, taken last month so when he was around 7.5 months old: Love these pics. He's gorgeous!!

The Pursuit of Happyness. Really enjoyed it.

A nice cup of tea. I have the day off (Monday as well - four day weekend for me! ), so I'm still sat about in my robe. Bliss!

The Terminator. Can't believe it's nearly 30 years old.

^I'll have a look tonight, and upload them to the pets thread.

^ Yeah, unfortunately there seems to be too many good offers this year.

He's gorgeous! He's just over 8 months old now, so growing quickly. I love him to bits!

For those who are interested, The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals by Wendy Jones is the Kindle Daily Deal. I know it's on a few people's wishlists. I've snapped it up! I've also started Paper Towns by John Green.

From your list, I highly recommend Into The Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes. I read it earlier this year and it just blew me away.

I finished The Stepford Wives. I really loved it - short, snappy and entertaining. It's just what I needed. I'm now reading The Universe Inside You by Brian Clegg. Interesting, but I'm debating whether I should read a fiction along side it. I sometimes tend to struggle when reading non-fiction.

^You may enjoy it; it just wasn't my cup of tea, though the subject matter was interesting.

Pure - Andrew Miller Synopsis from Amazon: Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own. My Thoughts: I got this one mixed up with Pure by Julianna Baggott, but as I had already borrowed it, what the hey. It won the 2011 Costa Book of the Year award, so I thought it'd be worth a read. It started off quite interesting - Jean-Baptise is an engineer hired to move the contents of an overflowing cemetery to another location (which turned out to be a quarry). I got about half way through, when I decided to google the cemetery (les Innocents), and was fascinated to find out that it had actually existed in the past, and as in the book, it's contents were cleared up and moved to a quarry. I really loved certain parts of the book - that food in the houses overlooking the cemetery had absorbed the odor of the dead; the cemetery was eventually used for mass burials with giant pits holding around 1,500 corpses; how these corpses began subsiding into the cellars of the surrounding houses (all sounds ghoulish, yet interesting). However, the other parts of the book - the fictionalised characters and their lives - just didn't interest me at all, and in the end I had to put the book aside unfinished (I got about two-thirds of the way through). If the book had been written as a factual account I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more, and more than likely would have finished it. As it was though, I just wasn't very interested in the characters and I found them a bit silly. But anyway, the book won an award so it must have impressed someone somewhere, just not me. 6.5/10

The Wind Through The Keyhole - Stephen King Synopsis from Amazon: For readers new to The Dark Tower, THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE is a stand-alone novel, and a wonderful introduction to the series. It is a story within a story, which features both the younger and older gunslinger Roland on his quest to find the Dark Tower. Fans of the existing seven books in the series will also delight in discovering what happened to Roland and his ka tet between the time they leave the Emerald City and arrive at the outskirts of Calla Bryn Sturgis. This Russian Doll of a novel, a story within a story, within a story, visits Mid-World's last gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and his ka-tet as a ferocious storm halts their progress along the Path of the Beam. (The novel can be placed between Dark Tower IV and Dark Tower V.) Roland tells a tale from his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt ridden year following his mother's death. Sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape shifter, a "skin man," Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast's most recent slaughter. Roland, himself only a teenager, calms the boy by reciting a story from the Magic Tales of the Eld that his mother used to read to him at bedtime, 'The Wind through the Keyhole'. "A person's never too old for stories," he says to Bill. "Man and boy, girl and woman, we live for them." And stories like these, they live for us. My Thoughts: I'm a fan of The Dark Tower series and Stephen King, so obviously I have to give this one a read. As the product description states, it can be read as a stand-alone novel, as the stories within (and it really is a story within a story within a story) don't really have anything to do with the series, other than a brief bit with Roland and his ka-tet, and Roland as a youngster. It doesn't add anything to the series, and so it doesn't really make sense to review it as part of the series, as it can easily be missed. Having said that, it's a decent story, but not something I would have picked up if not for the Stephen King/Dark Tower connection. My favorite of the series is Wizard and Glass, which is another Roland retrospective, and in my opinion far more interesting than The Wind In The Keyhole (if you can even compare the two). I'd probably only recommend it if you are a fan of the series. I don't think I'd recommend it as a stand-alone novel - even though it doesn't add to the series, it seems almost pointless to read it as a completely separate piece. The brief bit in the beginning with Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and Oy, makes me realise how much I'd really like to re-read the series again. 7/10