Week Four: Night School

I have now read all of Richard Wiseman's books and as ever they are elucidating and entertaining non fiction without the dry and hard to follow sections.

Loads of fascinating stuff and if you want to know more about sleep, dreams and performance I would highly recommend it.

Also extremely good to remind yourself why it's not good to just accept your sleep patterns and to do something about them

Lots of very interesting tips for dealing with issues for adults and children and how little hacks can improve almost every part of your life.

The most fascinating is 'If you have a stressful day - deprive yourself of sleep, if you have a great day - go to bed early.'

If you have a bad experience a good sleep embeds it in your memory, whereas lack of sleep helps you forget. Yes it's more complicated than that, but still interesting none the less.

Week Three: How Not to Be A Boy

How to be amused, very amused and enlightened and then miserable - all in one book.

Helps when you like the writer certainly, and the other half will get a look in at some point I'm sure, but for now this book was so beautifully heartfelt without being cloying or posing too much.

Webb has a style and a voice that comes through in every sentence, so even the most cringe-worthy  embarrassments read like sketches and you can't help but smile and be amused. Contradictory to this is the facts, the heartbreaking facts of life, love and death that often sneak up and belt you from nowhere.

Laugh then cry, then laugh again and feel the pain healing for him and you as the reader.

Honestly I can't recommend this book enough for my female friends, maybe not how every guy's mind works, probably the minority.

But any one who does think like this and ends up in the same point by the end is worth getting to know as a person (not a Boy or a Man, or a not-Woman - a Person).

Read the book.

 

Week Two: Orphan X

Finished a book on Day One of this year, (even though Google thinks I'm in America I guess) so had loads of time to start/complete another one and I fiddled about with Springsteen and Atwood but then picked this up which a good friend had suggested (though I never take suggestions) and started it 3 days ago.

And it is everything I hate about thrillers and thriller writers yet I liked it and it gripped me more than enough to race through it by the weekend.

So it does the usual thing of having a mystery loner who is super-humanly trained by special forces for wet-work and can recognise the make model and the shop that a gun was sold in by the way a person is walking when it's holstered. The usual OMG he's so cool bullshit that peppers these books.

But I couldn't put it down. It was cliched,  obvious and yet compelling. The fingerprints of a brand obsessed author with a less than funny acerbic 'wit' that comes spewing sarcastically out of people who even barely speak English dot the landscape with machine gun carelessness.

But I still invested and read it all.

In 3 days.

So I'll stop bitching...

In a minute. WTF is with mystery and thriller writers who are so fucking obsessed with showing off their intimate knowledge of 'high end' (expensive and ridiculous) brands? Guns, beds, cars and alcohol? It irritates me.

Now I'll stop.

Way better than I Am Pilgrim - a book in the same fantasy vein.

Recommended in spite of my rant.