September and October book reviews
How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything - Mike Berners-Lee (non-fiction, environment) (****)
My brother-in-law is obsessed with food miles. Obsessed. He flat-out won’t buy anything not grown in the UK. And yet his last holiday involved flying to Africa. And he eats a lot of meat. And he wants to have a child.
See the contradiction?
Trying to do the best for the environment is such a tricky thing. I consider myself a good environmentalist! And yet I’m sitting here on an internet/cloud-connected computer writing this book review, which isn’t great in terms of energy use. Short of going off-grid and living in a tree, no one can live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. So you need to pick your battles wisely and figure out what’s really bad for the planet and what you can and should cut out.
That’s where How Bad Are Bananas? becomes really helpful. Mike ‘I didn’t invent the internet, that was my brother’ Berners-Lee sifts through a myriad of data to rate everyday activities in terms of just how carbon-centric they are. The resulting book is a bit heavy-going in places, but Berners-Lee is an affable narrator, making it an entertaining-yet-thinky read.
And guess what? As long as you buy foreign-grown food that arrives by boat, the carbon footprint is negligible. Ha! HA.
However, I do really need to cut down on my cheese intake. Oh, cheese. You were my favourite. :,(
A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4) - George R.R. Martin (fiction, fantasy, LONG AS FUCK) (*)
I have heard that the makers of HBO’s Game of Thrones are planning to split the third book into two seasons. Might I also suggest that, when they adapt A Feast for Crows, they reduce it to a five-minute montage (possibly accompanied by a Decemberists song)? Because that is how much happens in this book. Nothing. NOTHING HAPPENS.
The whole thing reads like a writing exercise. Like George RR Martin sat down and thought, "gosh, I don’t know what to write, so I’ll just write whatever’s in my head, plot be damned." Unfortunately, what’s in his head is as dull as dishwater.
I think the premise of Crows was supposed to be that the notion of a seamless segue between wartime and peacetime is erroneous and, in fact, a post-wartime society seethes with misery and unrest. But the seething is just too low-key and the misery lacking in emotional punch.
In place of the action of the previous book, we’re forced to follow characters on wild goose chases or journeys that are seemingly without end. One character joins a cult. But somehow even that’s quite dull.
There’s something genuinely sad about the point at which writers become "editor-proof". Crows is clearly that book for Martin. To add salt to the wound, he finishes this boring, bloated book with an author’s note that can summarized thus: "lol, sorry if you hated this book, but IDC."
SALT. WOUND.
Eating Well for Optimum Health - Andrew Weil (non-fiction, health) (****)
It’s hard to overstate how useful and illuminating I found this book. I’ve muddled through life thus far, eating reasonably healthily by using some fairly obvious guiding principles (fruit and veg = good; chips = bad), but I never really understood nutrition. (To quote Mean Girls: "Is butter a carb?")
Despite my fuzziness on how various foods are categorized, I didn’t expect Eating Well for Optimum Health to be such a revelation. But it really, really was! Andrew Weil really cuts through the noise of media chatter about healthy eating and provides reasonable, well-researched advice on how to eat. Some of the science-y bits are... well, science-y. But there are helpful bullet-point synopses at the end of each chapter, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t grasp every biological nuance.
Weil even includes a section on developing better body image/health at any size. I can’t fault this book. It’s great.
Signature Killers - Robert D. Keppel (non-fiction, true crime) (**)
Even by true crime standards, this book is pretty nasty. Robert D. Keppel delves into a number of sado-sexual serial killings, and the result is a lot of "young woman hacked apart by weirdo loner man" casefile detail.
Keppel tries to give some meaningful analysis of "signatures" and how they differ from MO -- and, indeed, maybe his analysis was groundbreaking when the book was published, but now it all seems very old hat. To make things worse, Signature Killers is really, really badly written. This isn’t Stephenie Meyer "for the love of sparkles" purple prose bad writing; this is just plain clunky, flunked-out-of-high-school-English bad writing.
However, this is one of those books that I find tricky to review, because despite all the ways it is nasty and pedestrian... it was exactly what I needed to read. I’m researching serial killers and Signature Killers was incredibly helpful. So... am I glad I read it? Yeah! Do I recommend you read it? Hell no.
My interests, summarized: health, the environment, serial killers, dragons.
My brother-in-law is obsessed with food miles. Obsessed. He flat-out won’t buy anything not grown in the UK. And yet his last holiday involved flying to Africa. And he eats a lot of meat. And he wants to have a child.
See the contradiction?
Trying to do the best for the environment is such a tricky thing. I consider myself a good environmentalist! And yet I’m sitting here on an internet/cloud-connected computer writing this book review, which isn’t great in terms of energy use. Short of going off-grid and living in a tree, no one can live a carbon-neutral lifestyle. So you need to pick your battles wisely and figure out what’s really bad for the planet and what you can and should cut out.
That’s where How Bad Are Bananas? becomes really helpful. Mike ‘I didn’t invent the internet, that was my brother’ Berners-Lee sifts through a myriad of data to rate everyday activities in terms of just how carbon-centric they are. The resulting book is a bit heavy-going in places, but Berners-Lee is an affable narrator, making it an entertaining-yet-thinky read.
And guess what? As long as you buy foreign-grown food that arrives by boat, the carbon footprint is negligible. Ha! HA.
However, I do really need to cut down on my cheese intake. Oh, cheese. You were my favourite. :,(
A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4) - George R.R. Martin (fiction, fantasy, LONG AS FUCK) (*)
I have heard that the makers of HBO’s Game of Thrones are planning to split the third book into two seasons. Might I also suggest that, when they adapt A Feast for Crows, they reduce it to a five-minute montage (possibly accompanied by a Decemberists song)? Because that is how much happens in this book. Nothing. NOTHING HAPPENS.
The whole thing reads like a writing exercise. Like George RR Martin sat down and thought, "gosh, I don’t know what to write, so I’ll just write whatever’s in my head, plot be damned." Unfortunately, what’s in his head is as dull as dishwater.
I think the premise of Crows was supposed to be that the notion of a seamless segue between wartime and peacetime is erroneous and, in fact, a post-wartime society seethes with misery and unrest. But the seething is just too low-key and the misery lacking in emotional punch.
In place of the action of the previous book, we’re forced to follow characters on wild goose chases or journeys that are seemingly without end. One character joins a cult. But somehow even that’s quite dull.
There’s something genuinely sad about the point at which writers become "editor-proof". Crows is clearly that book for Martin. To add salt to the wound, he finishes this boring, bloated book with an author’s note that can summarized thus: "lol, sorry if you hated this book, but IDC."
SALT. WOUND.
Eating Well for Optimum Health - Andrew Weil (non-fiction, health) (****)
It’s hard to overstate how useful and illuminating I found this book. I’ve muddled through life thus far, eating reasonably healthily by using some fairly obvious guiding principles (fruit and veg = good; chips = bad), but I never really understood nutrition. (To quote Mean Girls: "Is butter a carb?")
Despite my fuzziness on how various foods are categorized, I didn’t expect Eating Well for Optimum Health to be such a revelation. But it really, really was! Andrew Weil really cuts through the noise of media chatter about healthy eating and provides reasonable, well-researched advice on how to eat. Some of the science-y bits are... well, science-y. But there are helpful bullet-point synopses at the end of each chapter, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t grasp every biological nuance.
Weil even includes a section on developing better body image/health at any size. I can’t fault this book. It’s great.
Signature Killers - Robert D. Keppel (non-fiction, true crime) (**)
Even by true crime standards, this book is pretty nasty. Robert D. Keppel delves into a number of sado-sexual serial killings, and the result is a lot of "young woman hacked apart by weirdo loner man" casefile detail.
Keppel tries to give some meaningful analysis of "signatures" and how they differ from MO -- and, indeed, maybe his analysis was groundbreaking when the book was published, but now it all seems very old hat. To make things worse, Signature Killers is really, really badly written. This isn’t Stephenie Meyer "for the love of sparkles" purple prose bad writing; this is just plain clunky, flunked-out-of-high-school-English bad writing.
However, this is one of those books that I find tricky to review, because despite all the ways it is nasty and pedestrian... it was exactly what I needed to read. I’m researching serial killers and Signature Killers was incredibly helpful. So... am I glad I read it? Yeah! Do I recommend you read it? Hell no.
My interests, summarized: health, the environment, serial killers, dragons.