Posts filed under 'Reviews'
Wasn’t sure whether to post this on Twitter or Facebook, but thought perhaps the blog was just the place and so that way it wouldn’t disappear below a whole load of other posts that quickly!
Renault’s marketing people have - as the title suggests - given a very poor name to their new eco car.
It’s called the Fluence.
Unfortunately if you put an e at the start of that, it sounds like e(f)fluence.
To be fair, an effluence is a flowing out, something being let loose. In my mind it has connotations of a bit of a pong.
He used to say ‘what an obnoxious effluvium’. Quite a vocabulary building lesson for a seven year old.
So, a car called Fluence might be okay if the electricity it uses will eventually come from rotting veg or human poop, but I don’t think their marketing department covered themselves in glory on this occasion.
What is impressive is that it will charge to 80% capacity from a 230v source in 20 minutes. That’s quicker than my phone…
September 20th, 2009
So, who got the latest Guiness Book of Records? More to the point, who’s prepared to own up to it? For years, it seemed to be standard issue that someone, somewhere, would be understanding of small boys’ needs for Facts, and make sure that the latest collection of Useful Information was dispatched. Henceforth, and, indeed, forthwith.
We happened to see a current Guiness Book of Records earlier in the year. Dan quickly checked key info - world’s oldest man, world’s tallest man etc. It’s rather more glossy now, and probably all highly weblinked, which partly defeats the point, in a way. In pre-internet times, that was why you needed the book, with all key info in one place, to be able to ensure that the world was still spinning as before, with the correct number of baked beans in a bathtub, and so on.
So, I didn’t receive the book, though my brother did, and I peeked over at it from time to time. I did however gain a love of facts, particularly offbeat ones which can be brought out as conversational morsels when the need arises. Which is more often than you think - particularly if you are in the company of others who also like facts.
Imagine therefore my happiness in discovering a new fact, courtesy of the Economist, in a book review. The book was all about hedgehogs, and I discovered that not only does North America not have any native hedgehogs (ie all imports), but also that hedgehogs have species-specific fleas. How mindboggling is that?
Sadly, I don’t think these elements are incorporated into Trivial Pursuits (favoured category brown (literature), general preference to avoid all questions on sport), but the flea one should definitely be incorporated into a family version. Small boys everywhere will be in agreement on the importance of knowing about fleas (if not, hopefully, being too closely acquainted with them).
This just leaves me time to pass on my favourite piece of information of this kind: that Sweden imports dust for use in scientific experiments. (I think it has something to do with not weighing things in a vacuum, so you add dust to an experiment so that it simulates normal conditions, or something like that.) Yes, I knew you’d thank me for that one.
I leave it to Robert Louis Stevenson to add his stamp of approval to the value of facts:
“The world is so full of a number of things// I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
January 1st, 2009
Star Wars Monopoly…The festive season is now complete - or at least, the activity while hanging around indoors with people bit. Following Dan’s brainwave for a present for his cousin, who at a tender age has embraced the excitement that is Star Wars, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a set for ourselves too.
So it was lovingly unwrapped and put to use yesterday, having a social for our church small group yesterday. We knew that one of the others was well set for board games, having seen her in action on our June holiday, but were waiting to see what happened for the other group member…who promptly walked off as the highroller of the evening.
Having ticked the review category, I feel I should give you an overview of what it’s like. You get nice little figures as pieces to move round the board, ie familiar characters from the films. Dan noticed that there are five goodies to three baddies, but then I think that’s as it should be, really. You also get currency in credits (I think), rather than pounds, and instead of building houses or hotels, you build colonies (small space ship pieces), working up to star ports (larger space ships - in this case, a Millenium Falcon).
You also get to swap the familiar destinations of London for Star Wars ones. It doesn’t take a lot of thinking through to agree that Yoda’s swamp is the least attractive (or rather, cheapest) location on the board, with the heart of the Empire, Coruscant, as the most expensive. A few elements of the board could have been jazzed up a little, in line with the theme - why not go to a penal colony, rather than jail? Or use a star ship motif, rather than a car, in Free Parking?
But aside from this, there is of course great opportunity to a) listen to Star Wars soundtracks while playing (check), b) swap Star Wars viewing stories (check), c) make noises like the characters when doing well or thwarted (no we didn’t do this, but I’m sure it should be mandatory from now on), etc.
And of course, you can mortgage all your properties, all too swiftly, in keeping with this year’s financial theme, sadly. But if you lose, hey, it’s all in a galaxy far far away…
December 18th, 2008
The season of hibernation continues. Do habits set in more quickly when it’s dark all the time? At any rate, we’re back to a reading aloud at the end of the day habit, and the book we’re on, “Full Tilt”, seems worth a mention, particularly when it contains descriptions of blue skies and heat.
We’re both keen on travel books, in this case the kind where someone else does the travelling and writes about it in a witty way. We have a few stacked up to read, and finally started this one, written by an Irish woman, Dervla Murphy, who decides to cycle to India. As you do. Or in fact, as she planned to do from the age of 10. But, unlike many of us and our early-stated ambitions, she actually sets off to do it, once in her 30s, and with a suitably heroic bike which becomes a second leading lady in the story.
She writes in the 1960s, when the Soviets are being seen to be gathering in around Afghanistan, one of her countries on route, but have not yet got going fully. The Shah is still in place in Iran (or rather, Persia, as she calls it), and hitchhiking is still an option - all to the good for Dervla, if her bike breaks down or the road gets impassable.
Rather nicely, she includes an equipment list in the back of the book, so you can work out how many tubes of sun lotion to take on your next intercontinental trek. She also packs a pistol, literally, and writes about the uses of it in amazingly understated ways (let’s just say, there are still wolves in the woods of central Europe at the time she is passing through).
In some ways, we are happily ploughing through the next set of adventures; at points, we look at each other and say ‘Nutter!’ at the general endeavour. People are often saying how it’s difficult to do travels that others haven’t done - but you would have to ask yourself how many lone women would set out to do that kind of journey now, only a few decades later, even if she’s had the sense to send spare tyres and inner tubes ahead to a certain set of international organisation’s offices.
We have just reached the point where she is entering Afghanistan, and it will be interesting to see how the descriptions compare with the images we have from news stories of recent years. And in our current midwinter torpor, reading about someone casually knocking off 80 mile cycle rides, day after day, brings only admiration.
Meanwhile, Dan looked up Dervla’s name online, and found that she is still trying to do epic cycle rides now, in her 70s, though somewhat hampered by hips and knees not behaving themselves. Once an adventurer, always an adventurer? I suspect we will be looking out for sequels.
December 9th, 2008
Dan’s creating a curry…and I’m free to tap away, and come up with a new blog post.
To be honest, it’s a chance to sum up a lot of what the holiday has been about. Food, reading, and a bit of tinkering around the house.
Food…it’s been a nice opportunity to cook. Admittedly most times of year are good to cook, but staying at home means there’s a bit more time for it. Managed to feed one couple who have entertained us many times, but also a good friend back in Edinburgh from her home in Bangaldesh. Hopefully the start of a bit more hospitality at home this year.
Reading…an opportunity to introduce “The Kitchen God’s Wife”, by Amy Tan, which I’m working my way through. Some books you speed through - this one you don’t. Reading about the Cultural Revolution is sobering stuff, even if the characters are (probably only somewhat) fictionalised.
On the plus side, you can certainly get caught up in the descriptions of the places, the landscape, the names of cities that slowly I’m learning, through hearing them via colleagues who work on programmes with China. Given those all-important Olympics this year, probably no bad time to be learning a bit more about China.
And tinkering…some mine, some from Dan’s mum. A year or so back, we were given his and hers aprons. Although I like a little light kitchen goddessery, I was slightly taken aback to have a) named aprons and b) ones bearing the terms ‘kitchen god’ and ‘kitchen goddess’. Jen kindly aided us to bring the aprons back to a plain state.
So. New year. New aprons. They’re what every respecting god and goddess are wearing.
January 6th, 2008
Just written another post about how to prepare for Christmas. Grant you, it won’t get the turkey bought, or the crackers pulled. But here’s another option.
Back in my teens, I came across a book called “A Formal Feeling”, by the American author Zibby Oneal. The book tells the story of Anne, coming home for Christmas from boarding school. The home she comes to is not quite home - her mother is dead, and a new stepmother is there. Traditions have changed.
Anne struggles with the changes, not just in the home, but in her father and brother, who seem happy with the new arrangements. Slowly, Anne starts to remember that not every Christmas was perfect…
For some reason, perhaps because of the way the book builds up the details of Christmas - choosing the tree, singing carols in the choir, making the adjustment from being at school to being at home all day - it became part of my preparation for Christmas for many years. Somewhat like an advent calendar, I would read a chapter a day, building up the picture of Christmas, building up the picture of Anne, and her mother.
This year, I’m starting late. 17th already. But having lost five different people this year, friends and family, somehow I hope I can use reading this book to reflect on those I want to remember. In some cases, there are shared memories of Christmases, and times after Christmas and into New Year, together. In others, I don’t know how they spent their time.
Christmas is a time of repetition. We start a way of doing things, and soon build up our own traditions, that are almost easier to keep than to question. But Christmas soon turns to New Year, and new beginnings, even if we don’t want the resolutions that might go with them.
Somehow, I trust that reading this book will help me remember the repetitions, and look for new beginnings too. And, like Anne, that it will help me tease out what I think I remember, and what else was part of those relationships.
Perhaps, one of the best presents is being able to accept life as we and others have lived it, good and bad, cut short or lived longer. The title of the book comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, which ends:
“This is the Hour of Lead-
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snow-
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go-”
December 17th, 2007
Book clubs. Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?
Your choice. Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them. But there is something good about seeing what others think - memories of class discussions in English Lit classes. To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips. (Or maybe not. Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)
It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well - a kind of book club of one, if you like. Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc - why not regular books too?
Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves - and film and music collections too - to show off your favoured artistes. I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.
Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath. Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath. Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water. Books it has to be.
So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year. As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.
I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think. I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction. It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).
So far, so good. But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”. Less cheerful. The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind - and the same man who himself has no personal smell.
Other reviewers have called his work Gothic. You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical - and even illogical - conclusions. This is where the book gets its power - there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.
Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story. The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant - their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil. Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society. But as those around him perish - and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid - there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not. As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.
In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction. Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end. There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.
Enough thoughts for now. But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise. The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others. Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it - online - I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”
December 5th, 2007