Karin Slaughter is one of the very few thriller writers whose work I actually look forward to and buy on, or near, (or occasionally before, as bookstores here seem a little befuddled about embargo dates and English-language books) the official publishing date. I wasn’t a big fan of her last one, Pretty Girls, but the one before that, Cop Town, was a pretty damn good exploration of what it was like to be a woman on the police force in 1970s Atlanta. I heartily recommend […]
Mars is Red, Earth is Blue/Boob jokes are funny, what else is new?
Meet Mark Watney. He is, in his own words, pretty much fucked. Mark is an astronaut on a mission to Mars. On the sixth day of the mission, a sand storm wreaks havoc and Mark is left for dead by the rest of his team, who escape back to earth. Mark, however, wakes up a little later, very hungover, very alive and very, very alone. It’s a nightmare scenario for a professional couch potato like me. There is a reason, however, that Mark is […]
Karma’s a Bitch, but so is Hubris
Here are a few facts about climbing Mount Everest: one in ten people die trying to get up and down the mountain; most fatal accidents happen on the descent; it’ll cost you on average between $30,000 and $80,000 excluding transportation and equipment; and once you get above camp four, you’ll be in something called ‘the Death Zone.’ Among climbers, it is also known as ‘Rainbow Valley’ because of the wide variety of coloured clothing worn by the bodies that lie strewn about. One of these, […]
Michael Bay would hate this book
I chose this book because I got a discount code from Kobo. I got to choose this one from ten titles and I have no idea why I picked it; probably because the rest seemed even more unappetising. I have even less of a clue as to why I picked it up except that I wanted to read something easy and I’m saving Outlander for my upcoming beach holidays. I’m glad I picked it up, though. Spring Tide starts with the murder of a pregnant […]
On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. ‘Tis a silly place.
Fun fact: the ‘doom’ in ‘doomsday book’ has little to do with the word ‘doom’ as in ‘gloom and doom’, but comes from the Latin ‘domus’ or house. I have to admit, though, that it sounds wonderfully creepy, which I suppose is the only reason Connie Willis chose it as the title to her novel as it has nothing to do with the early medieval document. It’s not even set in the same period of time. The year is 2055, the place is Oxford. Historians […]
Break a Leg!
The other day, when I was talking to my hippie-dippy earth-mother anthropologist friend, I told her I’d never expected to become a teacher. She smirked at me and told me it was a great fit: “You like rules and you like stability.” She’s also told me I had a “grown up house” (hers, by her own admission, is a pigsty) and I, in turn, am horrified by her happy-go-lucky attitude of quitting jobs if she doesn’t like them. She lives with her Aryan Jesus-lookalike of […]
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