"Jennie" - Paul Gallico

BLURB:

"Original, humorous, poignant, compassionate, Jennie has become a classic of its kind.

It relates the unforgettable adventures of a small boy changed into a stray cat and befriended by the indomitable Jennie, who initiates him into the lore of London's streets.

The Times Literary Supplement said: 'Jennie has the same simplicity as The Snow Goose; it is, like its forerunner, a family book, and as such deserves the same success.' "

REVIEW:

I showed this blog to a friend at uni today, and she asked me which was my favourite book. I mentioned I hadn't actually reviewed it on here (and so I decided to remedy this immediately), and then proceeded to tell her what the book was about.

Unfortunately, when you try to describe Jennie to other people, this is another example of a really great book with Stoopid Plot syndrome:

"It's about a boy called Peter who sort of turns into a cat...and he meets up with another cat...and they go on all these adventures together."

Sigh.

Even though it sounds ridiculous, this is such a gorgeous story which I have read approximately 14, 753 times. It's one of those rarities that can transcend age boundaries, in my opinion, since children can enjoy the fantastical premise and the adventures of Peter and Jennie, while adults appreciate the gentle storytelling and cat-person references.

And oh man, I am definitely one of these 'cat people'. In fact I think I'm starting to sound like an old woman. Living alone. With fifty cats.

I have a feeling non-cat-people wouldn't appreciate the majority of this book, since it focuses so directly on cat behaviour. The author was a keen cat lover and wrote quite a few books featuring felines and their foibles (other examples include Thomasina and The Silent Miaow). However for cat lovers, it's a real treat to read about Jennie's careful tutelage to the newly-transformed Peter about how to behave like a proper cat - it's full of little moments of recognition, when you realise your cat does everything Jennie describes, to the letter.

It's an older book, with some subtle humour and more than a few lines of thickly accented Scottish speech (och aye) that some people might find difficult to understand, and one particular part of the story nearly always moves me to tears. It's also one of my favourite books.

Go read it. (Unless you're a dog person.)

RATING: Incredibly sweet, warmly told, and generally just a great story. 5 STARS

biotaBOOM - A Blog

URL: http://www.biotaboom.blogspot.com/

BLURB:

"biotaBOOM is a blog about interesting animal stuff. And maybe occasionally plants, although I don't find plants very interesting to be honest. And occasional other related stuff.

"Biota" simply means "living organisms", and "boom" means "boom." You're right, there's no point to the "boom" part. I put it there just for kicks."

REVIEW:

Normally, I would never indulge in such shameless self-promotion as this. If I'd created another blog of some sort, I would probably just leave a little discreet link on the side panel over there -> and wait for people to randomly stumble across it (much like this blog).

Unfortunately, 'biotaBOOM' is not just another case of "I feel like making a blog about [blah]. Cool. I'll do that."

I'm currently enrolled in a subject at uni called Professional Science Communication, in which we learn how to use multimedia to communicate science, basically. We were told to create some kind of 'project' (worth 15% of our final mark) for the last few weeks of semester that involved multimedia and science, so I decided to set up another blog about interesting animal stuff.

BUT. The thing is, part of the marking scheme involves incorporating feedback from other people into the final product.

And I need your feedback!

The main purpose, therefore, of this particular blog entry is to plead for pageviews and comments. I've got a hit counter on the new blog, and it would be seriously extremely wonderful if you, dear reader, could simply take two seconds of your day to click on this link:

http://www.biotaboom.blogspot.com/

Even if you don't leave any comment - even if you don't look at the website at all! - at least that's another 'hit' on the site, so at the end of the day I can say "Well, I had x number of hits on my blog!" And hopefully get more marks, or something.

What would be even better, though, is if you could just read the blog entry/entries that are there, have a brief look at the blog overall, and then leave a quick comment about it. Tell me what you like and what you hate (and why) and I will love you forever and send you an imaginary prize via telepathy for your trouble. I only ask because I need to build up the blog (and the entries), market it a little, and incorporate feedback etc, within the next three weeks. Everything has to be finished by the 15th of October.

RATING: I think this is fairly irrelevant, seeing as it's another one of my own blogs. I'd really love it if YOU could give it some kind of rating though - preferably in the form of a comment on the blog itself!

"The Book Thief" - Markus Zusak

BLURB:

"It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.

So beings a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time."

REVIEW:

I read this one in bits and pieces over a very long period (...well, a long period for me to be stuck on the same book, anyway). It wasn't because the book wasn't engaging enough, but because stupid trivial things such as university and tests and assessments and minor family mishaps kept getting in the way of progress.

But I finally finished it today, and subsequently felt rather depressed. In fact, very depressed.

Of course I know about what happened during the second world war in Nazi Germany, on a sort of 'factual' level. I've seen a movie adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, I've heard about people like Corrie ten Boom, I've read about it on Wikipedia (which of course naturally makes me an expert now), etc etc. But nothing brought home the true horror of actually living there, actually experiencing the full force of human tragedy, as The Book Thief.

At first I thought it was the weirdest book I've ever read. I mean, for starters, it's narrated by Death. Secondly, the prose is bizarre. I felt like I was swinging wildly between hating the pretentiousness and loving the richness with which Zusak describes the most ordinary things. Everything is personified and metaphoralised (..."metaphoralised"?...oh well) beyond belief. Houses "crouch nervously", for example, or pimples "gather in peer groups". Only, imagine this continuing throughout the entire book, on every page. Also, there were a couple of things that weren't explicitly spelled out, which mystified me a bit, and I wish they'd been made more obvious.

Once the book really got going, though, I quite enjoyed the reading experience as a whole. A lot of careful thought and imagination has been poured into this story, which I like. The characters were interesting, if occasionally a little unbelievable. And it definitely highlighted the despair of living in Nazi Germany.

What a horrible time in human history.

RATING: Incredibly haunting, and well worth a read - but probably only once. 4 STARS

"Nineteen Minutes" - Jodi Picoult

BLURB:

"Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens - until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone, inside and out.

The daughter of the judge sitting on the case should be the state's best witness - but with her boyfriend dead and her childhood friend charged with murder, she's struggling to remember what happened in front of her own eyes....

Number one bestselling author Jodi Picoult brings us her hardest-hitting and most involving novel yet. NINETEEN MINUTES asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else - and whether a person is ever whom they seem to be..."

REVIEW:

If you want a truly uplifting, joyous, warm, inspiring read - do not read Nineteen Minutes.

I borrowed it from the library on a whim, mainly to see why everyone was raving about Jodi Picoult. And once I started reading it, I found out why. To me, it was utterly engrossing, and as 'un-put-downable' as any thriller. It was also very, very moving and emotionally powerful. However I don't think I'll be reading any more books by Picoult after this.

Why? Because it was so profoundly sad.

Nineteen Minutes is incredibly depressing, but I think that's because it seems so real. You can imagine, with great clarity, every single one of the scenes in this book. You can imagine how each of the characters feel, how they act, how they think, what they look like. In fact Picoult paints characters so real, so vivid, that I found myself thinking about them long after I'd actually put down the book on any given day.

Occasionally, it did veer a little too widely into slightly sappy sentimental territory, and at times it felt as though the author was putting in all these clever metaphors just for the sake of writing something that had a 'deep' hidden meaning to it, just because she could. "The rain came down so they couldn't see each other clearly". Oh, and it's like a reflection of their relationship too! Wow. That's profound.

On the whole, it was one of those books that just stays with you for ages, making you think, and it does call you to question who the real victims are in various situations.

RATING: Riveting. Depressing. And haunting. 4 STARS

"Size 12 Is Not Fat" - Meg Cabot

BLURB:

"HEATHER WELLS ROCKS!
Or, at least, she did. That was before she left the pop-idol life behind after she gained a dress size or two—and lost a boyfriend, a recording contract, and her life savings (when Mom took the money and ran off to Argentina). Now that the glamour and glory days of endless mall appearances are in the past, Heather's perfectly happy with her new size 12 shape (the average for the American woman!) and her new job as an assistant dorm director at one of New York's top colleges. That is, until the dead body of a female student from Heather's residence hall is discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft. The cops and the college president are ready to chalk the death off as an accident, the result of reckless youthful mischief. But Heather knows teenage girls . . . and girls do not elevator surf. Yet no one wants to listen—not the police, her colleagues, or the P.I. who owns the brownstone where she lives—even when more students start turning up dead in equally ordinary and subtly sinister ways. So Heather makes the decision to take on yet another new career: as spunky girl detective! But her new job comes with few benefits, no cheering crowds, and lots of liabilities, some of them potentially fatal. And nothing ticks off a killer more than a portly ex-pop star who's sticking her nose where it doesn't belong . . . "

REVIEW:

After being a dedicated Meg Cabot fan through my teens, and then being less-than-impressed by her short story in Prom Nights from Hell, I decided this adult chick-lit offering was her last chance to win me back. Her last chance to impress.

Well, I didn't completely hate it - but I definitely didn't love it. In fact, 'Size 12 Is Not Fat' ended up being annoying more than anything else.

The protagonist, Heather, really started to grate after a few chapters. Despite the book's implication that she is, in fact, smarter than she thinks, I didn't buy it. I mean, she's ditzy. She's completely obsessed about her size. She makes an enormous deal about minor occurences ("she looks like a showerer, not a bather". Who gives a damn, honestly?). She's just...ugh. Rather than warming to the stereotypical chick-lit-heroine-with-whom-women-can-identify, I found her incredibly frustrating and just wanted to slap her by the end of the book.

What is it with the size obsession, anyway? I realise the title of the book is a slight giveaway as to what the contents will feature, but I found it unbelievably annoying to be reading about sizing throughout the book. Why does Heather constantly obsess about being size twelve? If she's obsessing about body image, why isn't she obsessing about the fact that she perceives herself to be fat? Why is it all about the numbers? And the constant bleating about "size twelve is the size of the average American woman" definitely started wearing thin (HA! PUN!) after it was repeated the first fifty or so times. OK, Ms Cabot, we get it. You're trying to write a book that deals with body image concerns. But don't you think you overdid it just a bit? And don't you think the end message - girls who aren't stick thin can still prevail - was more than a little trite?

The only thing keeping me reading was the crime/mystery plot, which, once it got going, chugged along quite nicely underneath the thick veneer of shallow chick-lit slathered copiously over the top. Once a mystery makes itself known to me, I feel compelled to find out who did it. It did provide some interesting scenes for our size twelve amateur investigator to get caught up in, and while the end result (and the motive for the crime) proved to be completely ludicrous, I didn't feel entirely cheated. I mean, after all, it is chick lit.

Needless to say, the book did not make me laugh once. Not that I was expecting as much. I don't think I'll be reading Cabot again.

RATING: The crime/mystery plot was good. Everything else was not. 3 STARS

"The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers" - Lilian Jackson Braun

BLURB:

"Times are changing in Pickax: a new senior centre is in the works and a production of CATS is set to delight Moose County residents; Polly Duncan is off to Paris, leaving Qwill without a companion for his apple barn concerts; and The Librarians Who Lunch are showing their Art Hats to help unite Pickax with their Lockmaster County neighbours.
Not to mention the conversion of the late Nathan Ledfield's mansion into a charitable museum! With Mr Ledfield's treasures being sold off to benefit needy children, the town is abuzz with excitement - that is, until a mysterious death from a bee sting leaves everyone but Cool Koko in a state of confusion.
Is it because Koko has sixty whiskers as Qwill suspects, or because Koko knows that the mysterious death was no accident?"

REVIEW:

I picked this up at random from the library, and I must admit, I just couldn't get into this one. Perhaps it's time I read and reviewed a book I didn't enjoy - there's a lot of 4 star and 5 star ratings here. While I enjoyed the descriptions of the two cats in the book, the rest of the novel (it's more of a novella than a novel, though) seemed rather dull. Constant descriptions of a cast of characters I was completely unfamiliar with, and descriptions of the places they lived, was a bit tedious for a first-time reader of this series. To me, the writing style wasn't quite engaging enough to properly complement the "quirky and cute" elements in the story. In fact, by chapter six, it was still downright boring, so I gave it a quick flick though, searching for the mystery it promised - but nothing grabbed me. Nothing intrigued me. I almost stuck with it for the sake of reading about the antics of Koko and Yum Yum (they're two Siamese cats), but unfortunately...nope.

RATING: The cats were cute, but the story was still boring one-third of the way through the book, and it just didn't appeal. 2 STARS

"The Eyre Affair" - Jasper Fforde

BLURB:

"Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend.

There is another 1985, where London's criminal gangs have moved into the lucrative literary market, and Thursday Next is on the trail of the new crime wave's Mr Big.

Acheron Hades has been kidnapping characters from works of fiction and holding them to ransom. Jane Eyre is gone. Missing.

Thursday sets out to find a way into the book to repair the damage. But solving crimes against literature isn't easy when you also have to find time to halt the Crimean War, persuade the man you love to marry you, and figure out who really wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Perhaps today just isn't going to be Thursday's day. Join her on a truly breathtaking adventure, and find out for yourself. Fiction will never be the same again..."

REVIEW:

I got tonsillitis while reading this book. I don't think this was actually caused by the book though, so don't worry, you'll probably be able to read it without becoming ill. However sitting up in bed for an entire day with a crazy fever allowed me to get through quite a sizeable chunk of this book in a short amount of time, which turned out to be a good thing.

This is one of the most bizarre books I have ever read, and trying to describe it without sounding completely delirious is quite a challenge. I mean, how would the ordinary person respond to a book description like this:

"Well, it's like a futuristic story...but set in 1985, in Britain...and people have pet dodos and stuff. And there's this big hierarchial law enforcement system that's divided into groups, according to what they deal with, like terrorism and stuff...and the main character in this book is a LiteraTec, meaning she works with any kind of literary crime, like people messing with important literary works etc. Oh, and her name is Thursday Next. They all have weird names in this book. There's another character called Jack Schitt. Anyway, some people can travel in time too, and the big villain of the story is trying to alter the original manuscripts of some important works, so that by altering the originals, all the copies of that work in the rest of the world get affected too...and Thursday Next has to try and stop him...and...yeah. It's kind of strange."

I swear, the author must be either a creative genius or a raving lunatic to have come up with most of the ideas in The Eyre Affair. It's just so 'out-there' and original, and with a deep undercurrent of absurdist whimsical humour throughout (the descriptions of the pet dodos made me smile, in particular). I can see how it's one of those books that would really divide people's opinions - you either love it or hate it. I belong to the former category.

However, there were a couple of things that I didn't like quite so much. First, the title implies that the book is based on (or at least makes a lot of references to) Jane Eyre, which is why I read this straight after reading Jane Eyre. However, references to Bronte's most famous work make up just a small (albeit significant) part of the story, and it doesn't even get to the 'Jane Eyre has been kidnapped' part until the last few chapters, so it doesn't fully live up to the implications its title. Also, there seemed to be a lot of different characters, and for a while I had a bit of trouble remembering who was who and what they did, etc. The weird names didn't help in this matter, occasionally detracting from the flow of the story (eg, you'd meet another weird name, and then you'd be thinking "Huh. 'Filbert Snood'? What kind of a name is FILBERT SNOOD?" for a while, rather than concentrating on the story.)

Or maybe that's because I was feverish.

At least this book provided something interesting to do!

RATING: On the whole, it was a very enjoyable, quirky read - and certainly very unique. However, despite its charm, I don't think I'd feel like reading it again, so I'm giving it a comfortable 3 STARS