My internet has broken down and I haven’t had a chance to get it fixed yet, thus the lack of updates.

I just thought you might want to know.

Since I can’t really do much else right now (I’m logging in, very briefly, from work to type this. Internetlessness has freed up lots of time for reading, though. Twenty-two books this month so far and still going at it!), I had an idea that I would ask the same question that I asked back in November:

Who reads this blog?

Even if you never, ever comment and plan on never, ever commenting again, won’t you make an exception just this once, so I get a little picture of who reads this. I’m curious sometimes, y’know.

 

Since I’m sick* and way behind on reviews, I’ve realised the only way to catch up is to make them speed reviews and post a whole batch at once.

The Age of Napoleon; Alistair Horne, eng, 235
Interesting, but a little choppily written, and also the author assumes you know certain things and never explains them, while others he explains over and over again.
C

Cold Comfort Farm; Stella Gibbons, eng, 253
Funny, though I accidentally didn’t read the preface, so I wasn’t 100 % how much of it was intentional (all of it, as it turns out, and as I suspected). Flora Poste is kind of annoying, but all right all the same.
For the TBR reading challenge and as part of the BBC Big Read.
B

Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier, eng, 410
A re-read, not as good as I remembered it, but still lovely. Maxim is both wonderful and creepy.
C

Med uppenbar känsla för stil; Stephan Mendel-Enk, swe, 128
Interestingly written about men and what’s considered masculine. References Morrissey at some points, mostly in connection with a man who went berserk and killed people. Lovely… not!
C

Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East; Brian Whitaker, swe, 230
Interesting, scary and occasionally a little bit hopeful.
C

Ingen behöver veta; Christina Wahldén, swe, 139
About male rape and how it does exist, but people find it hard to believe. Kind of a non-ending, but then I suppose that’s sadly the case in most instances of actual male rape also.
C

Ingen grekisk gud, precis; Katarian Kieri, swe, 217
Kind of brilliant tale of a young girl who falls for a teacher. Kind of brilliant mostly because the main character is into Morrissey, but for other reasons also. I was a bit worried where it was going to end, but it’s kind of perfect, really.
B

Sandman: The Kindly Ones; Neil Gaiman et al., eng, 335
I wouldn’t say Sandman is Gaiman at his best, but I do like the stories and so also in this volume. Not my favourite, though.
For the TBR reading challenge.
C

Doctor Who: The Nightmare of Black Island; Mike Tucker, eng, 255
Scary monsters and kiddies with nightmares. I liked it, but not as much as other DW books.
C

Doctor Who: The Art of Destruction; Stephen Cole, eng, 256
Farming in Africa, golden statues and creepy aliens. Good, but not great. Doctor’s always nice, though.
C

Doctor Who: The Price of Paradise; Colin Brake, eng, 255
References Franz Ferdinand and other pop culture a time or two. Not the best of the DW books I’ve read—I don’t much care for Colin Brake’s style of writing it, though I can’t put my finger on the exact reason.
C

Tro, hopp och burnout; Johan Unenge, swe, 228
YA story about a guy who’s really into cars and death metal, who ends up going on a confirmation camp. It’s a decent story, and I was happy to see it didn’t end up quite where I expected it would, but the writing style is very, very choppy and not at all my cup of tea.
For the A-Z reading challenge.
C

Vadå feminist; Lisa Gålmark, swe, 188
Basic guide to feminism. I wasn’t too keen on the writing and didn’t like the book all that much. Mostly it made me a little annoyed with the author, though it did contain sections worth thinking about. It bothers me that there is no question mark in the title.
For the A-Z reading challenge.
D

Homofamiljer; Sara Stenholm & Cecilia Strömberg, swe, 312
About rainbow families and different ways to get one. Interesting, especially the personal stories, but not fab.
C

*Just a cold, but a bad one. I hate colds. And I’ve run out of Kleenex, which means my nose is very, very sore from regular paper towels. Woe.

Torchwood: Something in the Water
by Trevor Baxendale

English
255 pages
BBC Books
ISBN: 978-1-846-07437-0

First line: The Late Bob Strong.

Back cover blurb:
Dr Bob Strong’s GP surgery has been treating a lot of coughs and colds recently, far more than is normal for the time of year. Bob thinks there’s something up but he can’t think what. He seems to have caught it himself, whatever it is—he’s starting to cough badly and there are flecks of blood in his hanky.

Saskia Harden has been found on a number of occasions submerged in ponds or canals but alive and seemingly none the worse for wear. Saskia is not on any files, except in the medical records at Dr Strong’s GP practice.
But Torchwood’s priorities lie elsewhere: investigating ghostly apparitions in South Wales, they have found a dead body. It’s old and in an advanced state of decay. And it is still able to talk.

And what it is saying is ‘Water hag’…

Thoughts: This isn’t the first of the Torchwood books, but it is the first one I’ve read. I liked it well enough, even if I was freaking out a bit due to the fact that I’ve caught a cold (stupid crowded plane cabins) and was consequently hacking up my lungs as I read it. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m reading a book wherein the majority of the characters are suffering from a strange affliction which starts with a tickle in the throat and leads to massive coughing fits, complete with blood and great quantities of green phlegm being expelled, I don’t particularly want to be suffering from a bad cough myself. Not that there are times I would want to be suffering from a bad cough, but y’know, there are degrees of “do not want.”

Apart from the cough coincidence, it was pretty all right. Darker in tone than the Doctor Who books (just like the series is darker and more ‘grown-up’ than DW), but I think I actually prefer the Who books. At least some of them, and possibly not to all of the Torchwood books (time will tell).

My one biggest complaint is that there was much too little of Ianto in this. Ianto Jones is effin’ brilliant, so he deserves more page time than he got here, but what little he did get was pretty snarky, which was nice. I love snarky!Ianto. I also love Jack/Ianto, which there wasn’t much of in this particular book. I am told that there’s more of it in some of the others in the series, though, so I’m not giving up on that yet.

I’m giving this a C rating. Had it had more Jack/Ianto, or just more Ianto, I would have given it a higher rating, most likely, but as it is, a C is just the right one.

Hundår
by Markus Zusak
Original title: The Underdog

For the A-Z reading challenge.

Swedish
128 pages
Richters
ISBN: 91-7130-027-9

First line: Det var medan vi tittade på teve som vi bestämde oss för att råna tandläkaren.

Back cover blurb:
Cameron Wolfe är en ensamvarg och underdog som slår i underläge. Alltid i underläge!
I Hundår berättar han om några månader i sitt liv. Inte för att det hände något särskilt. Bara hans försök att hitta sin väg genom livet. Och några boxningsmatcher på bakgården.

Thoughts: I don’t know if it was because of the translation, my mood at the time, or because Zusak is just not my cup of tea, but I didn’t like this book. I’ve been hearing a lot of good stuff about him, so I think I’ll probably try The Book Thief anyway, though not by buying it. If I’ll read it, I’ll borrow it from the library.

A D grade. It just wasn’t interesting to me.

This morning, when I was on the Amazon.co.uk site to send a gift certificate to Banquo, I sort of strayed onto the other sections of the site. Y’know, where they sell actual books. And, um… now it appears that, oh, nine or so of them are heading this way.

Then my family came to visit (and to bring my cats. It’s a long story) and we went shopping for a bit. Of course, since they had never been to the used book store here, I had to take them. And, um… suddenly I seem to have added another four books to my collection. I don’t understand how these things just happen! ;D

The thing about that book store is that, in addition* to selling new and used books, they also sell movie icon related stuff, most of which is pretty nifty. In other words: not only did I add to my book collection, but I also ended up with six new coasters and a tray, all with old style Hollywood stars on them. (And earlier in the day, I’d found two mugs with Tony the Tiger as he used to be.)

The books I ordered from Amazon.co.uk are:

• Emily of New Moon by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Emily Climbs by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Emily’s Quest by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Generation X by Douglas Coupland
• Torchwood: Another Life by Peter Anghelides
• Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane
• Torchwood: Border Princes by Dan Abnett
• Torchwood: The Twilight Streets by Gary Russell

The first five are all for a Canadian reading challenge I’m about to join, the last four is because of that Who kick I’ve been on/am on.

The four books I got at the book store were:

• A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom
• The Underdog by Markus Zusak
• Tro, hopp och burnout by Johan Unenge
• VadÃ¥ feminist? by Lisa GÃ¥lmark

I’ve been eyeing the first of these four since September, but never got it because it was a tad on the expensive side the first time, the second time because I couldn’t find it, the third time because it was too expensive. Then today I decided I would get it, and now it was half-price! Brilliant that, I thought.

I can use that book, and the other three, for the A-Z reading challenge, which is the biggest reason I got most of them (another reason I got the Zusak one is because I’ve been curious about Zusak for a good while now). They’re all for pretty tricky letters of the alphabet, which makes it all the better. The one, slightly not cool, thing is that the two first are in translation, rather than original. But I hope they’re okay anyway.

*I totally spelled addition** as addiction at first. Freudian slip?
**And there I did it again. Double slip?