How Clever

Look at what someone on Craftster has made. It's a very stylish coffee table created from a very grotty coffee table. Scroll down to see table crime converted to table design. I want one!

Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distance Healing to Vitamin O, by Christopher Wanjek

This is reminiscent of Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, but written about medicine particularly rather than science in general, and from an American rather than a British perspective. The author is witty as well, but nobody is as funny as Ben. The book was quite long, but as I kept waking up last night, I finished it in installments!

Did you know you could still be killed by the Black Death ... in America? That the organic movement has been so hijacked by big business that you would be better buying local than buying organic? That Rambo would be completely deaf after firing all those guns? For these and miscellaneous other facts about health, then read this book.

Day 133; Book 133

Memorial to Fife Members of the International Brigades

I knew there was a memorial in Kirkcaldy to the Fifers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, so I looked out for it when I was there recently. I wished I could have given it a clean up, but you can still make out names and home towns in the photograph above. Touchingly, flowers had been left at the memorial, even all these years later.

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

This is a mystery novel written just after the Second World War. Josephine Tey expertly creates the atmosphere of a small country town, which never again seems quite so cosy to the solicitor hero after an accusation is made against two local ladies. Apart from the odd aside about the "lower orders", the novel is surprisingly modern in tone. Books of the 40s and 50s can often seem oddly old-fashioned to us in language and ideas, whereas Victorian books do not have that same strangeness of tone. Perhaps it is because we expect that difference with the Victorians, but feel that we are close enough in time to the post war world to be surprised how different it actually was.

My book last night was originally going to be The House on the Borderland by W H Hodgson which looks like a fantasy/horror tale ... but I couldn't make any headway with it at all and gave up after the first chapter. Let me know if you think I should have persevered!

Day 132; Book 132

Iluvwords Now Reading Dangerously

Elisabeth of Iluvwords is now reading a book a day! A buddy, a pal, a fellow nutter ... hooray!

Le Weekend

I stayed up late on Friday to finish Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home (an impulse purchase). Yes, it was rather in the style of Harlan Coben but worthwhile in its own right with a well-constructed tale of dangerous secrets gradually being revealed. Like Coben, Barclay has an easy style and an unconventional hero.

Next up was Heavenly Date and Other Stories by Alexander McCall Smith (the author of the Ladies' Detective Agency stories among other things). I liked most of these short stories although some were rather sad - but I loved the one about the crocodiles which was everything a short story should be! (I can't tell you any more but it is well worth reading).

The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besier is the script of the play first performed in 1930 and later famous as a film with Charles Laughton as the terrifying Papa. Once again it is beautifully constructed with every speech counting and all building towards the conclusion.

For some light relief I read The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. Despite being written in 1892, this novel in the form of a diary is surprisingly modern. Pooter, our hero, comes across at first as dull and pompous, but just like Adrian Mole 90 years later, we soon find ourselves rooting for him and sympathising with his misfortunes (while laughing at them as well of course). In the days before teenagers were even invented, he has his very own "Kevin". I had to laugh when his son takes him out in his hired horse and cart (which he can't really afford) and terrifies Pooter with his driving! Plus ca change ...

Teenagers of another world altogether feature in the last play I read, Another Country by Julian Mitchell. This was first produced in 1981 and was also turned into a film with the inspired casting of Rupert Everett as Guy Bennett and Colin Firth as Judd. Bennett is gay; Judd is a Marxist, and both are outsiders at their Eton-like school. Bennett suffers more as he hadn't realised just how excluded he would become: after all, dalliance with a homosexual lifestyle was quite accepted among the boys, most of whom were however hypocricital when it came to the image of the school. There were hints at the end of Guy turning to espionage later as the ultimate outsider. Of course if I had read about the play beforehand I would have realised that in fact it is about the spy Guy Burgess so those hints were hardly out of place.

Day 131; Book 131

Linwood Barclay

Just passed the bookshop and on their half-price display they had Linwood Barclay's new hardback, Too Close to Home. This time I couldn't miss the blurb and it looked really good: "What if your next door neighbours were all murdered?" (It said). "And what if you found out the killers went to the wrong house?" Oooooh! And then I noticed it said, "If you like Harlan Coben you'll like this ..."

Should I go back to the shop at teabreak? Answers on a postcard please ... And why is there a funny gap beneath this post? Answers, etc ...

Day 128; Book 126