A gift from my wonderful friend Lisa! And what a fun little read this was.
Nothing mindblowing in here, mostly things I knew already, but reading sometA gift from my wonderful friend Lisa! And what a fun little read this was.
Nothing mindblowing in here, mostly things I knew already, but reading something about science written by somebody who is passionate and good at explaining is never a chore.
Lomax does a good job summing up 10 important things about dinosaurs into funny, interesting little bites. A really enjoyable, quick read....more
... the year of comedy. Light and delightful and distant. Days we can't have back.
A gift from my dear friend Lisa. Not a book I knew anything about go
... the year of comedy. Light and delightful and distant. Days we can't have back.
A gift from my dear friend Lisa. Not a book I knew anything about going in, and I absolutely loved it.
Oliver is a student in his fourth year at the prestigious Dellecher Shakespeare conservatory. He along with the other five fourth-years are inseparable until a series of events twists their tightly knit group into a knot resulting in a gruesome death. Years later, Oliver is released from prison and revisits the events of his final year at the academy with the detective who put him away.
I'm not a Shakespeare person, I'll say that up front - I've tried in the past but I am nowhere near smart enough to grasp subtext and the layers upon layers of it which exist under the text of a Shakespeare play. IF WE WERE VILLAINS is absolutely dripping in character as a result of the conceit of the Shakespearean setting.
It feels a lot like a fantasy setting, a kind of grimdark Harry Potter. The characters are all larger than life, leaping off the page. Their conversations are held half in dialogue and half in recital and as a result even the most mundane day-to-day occurrence carries the weight of a dramatic event.
Conversations are often written like a script, name and line - which I honestly found quite helpful as someone who often forgets who's speaking in a back-and-forth written conversation - and adds to the feeling that Oliver et al are living in a Shakespearean tragedy.
Rio does an excellent job of making you doubt every character at some stage. A proper mystery which keeps you guessing - but maybe I'm just not too good at mysteries.
An excellent read! I honestly can't think of any critiques I could make. Thank you Lisa for gifting it to me <3...more
A gift from my wonderful partner Mel, FLIGHT is a slightly depressing walk through the SA White Collection - a significant collection of birds and eggA gift from my wonderful partner Mel, FLIGHT is a slightly depressing walk through the SA White Collection - a significant collection of birds and eggs collected by the eponymous SA White in the (now mostly extinct) Adelaide Reedbeds.
Art done by the author and her mother accompany most of the birds no longer found in the area, along with the original notes from the ornithologist White.
I'd rather be myself than pretend to be someone else just to get rich. I don't think being employed is a sign that you're successful. I think being
I'd rather be myself than pretend to be someone else just to get rich. I don't think being employed is a sign that you're successful. I think being yourself is a success. I know that sounds kind of trite, but it's fucken true.
Like most everybody, I first found Nat's What I Reckon during the first year of the pandemic (isn't it kinda scary that we can measure it in multiple years now?), and his combination of constant swearing, metalhead appearance, and surprisingly useful cooking advice won me over.
I think a lot of people probably bought this book expecting it to be a cookbook - I certainly thought it was when I saw it being advertised, though he's now released an actual cookbook (Death to Jar Sauce: Rad Recipes for Champions) - and so were probably surprised when they picked it up and found it really to be more of an autobiography with a half dozen or so recipes sprinkled throughout.
I like Nat. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, and reading UN-COOK YOURSELF gave me further respect for him between his health (both physical and mental) struggles and the long, meandering road he has walked to get to his current level of success.
I enjoyed reading UN-COOK YOURSELF, plenty of fun anecdotes and a lot of decent philosophising about society that I tended to mostly agree with. As much as he was adamant he didn't want to sell out, the book as a whole did feel a mite forced - the random cutouts of him holding kitchen implements every few pages seemed very much like something that a desperate editor who hasn't actually watched his videos would be putting in, and I probably could have done without the 'IS IT SHIT?' inserts where he debates whether depression, school, and everything inbetween is shit or not.
It's also written in his signature style - 'fucken' rather than 'fucking', 'ya' rather than 'your' - which got a little old by the end. I know what Nat sounds like - it must have been more effort to write it that way than just writing it normally, and I don't think it would have lost anything in the process.
Nevertheless, I can respect that given the opportunity to write a fucking book, he didn't just write a 120 page pamphlet of recipes filled with swearing and call it a day but actually tried to give us a look into what makes him who he is. He did his own thing, which I appreciate.
Lastly, the recipes themselves are illustrated by several local Sydney artists, and are excellent - I think comic format works really well to portray his video style, and they're still informative and easy to follow. I look forward to making myself some Quarantine Sauce in the near future....more
It's certainly a Nat's What I Reckon cookbook! Great art (as I said in my review for UN-COOK YOURSELF, I think comic-style is a great way to illustratIt's certainly a Nat's What I Reckon cookbook! Great art (as I said in my review for UN-COOK YOURSELF, I think comic-style is a great way to illustrate cooking instructions), good looking recipes, and some fun little text asides about various topics....more
"Oh, dear lady, there is enough of a story there to fill a book."
Isn't that the truth? What an absolute brick. There were several times during rea
"Oh, dear lady, there is enough of a story there to fill a book."
Isn't that the truth? What an absolute brick. There were several times during reading PRIORY that I was surprised it was a single book - it feels as if it could very easily have been split into two or three, and I'm not totally convinced that it was well served by being 'crammed' into a single 813 page book (if it's possible to be crammed into something that long).
In a world split between West and East, The Nameless One, an evil dragon of pure darkness, is coming back after being imprisoned for a thousand years - it is up to a motley crew of varied folk from varied countries to overcome their differences, discover ancient magical artifacts, and finish him once and for all.
PRIORY is trying very, very hard to be capital E Epic fantasy - it's huge, has a vast array of characters and nations, some maps, and even a glossary and a dramatis personae. Dragons, wyrms, ancient forest witches and sisterhoods of mages - but in the end, it didn't leave a capital E Epic impression on me.
It is well written, for sure, and the characters are for the most part likeable and interesting - with the notable exception being Niclays Roos, who I yawned my way through every interaction with. The world is very unique, at least I thought so, and I liked the fact that there was this dichotomy of wyrms being evil and loathed in the West, compared to the East's worship of dragons. The utter lack of any kind of bigotry around sexuality, gender or skin colour was refreshing, and it took most of the book for me to realise that the Inysh weren't white - and it didn't really matter.
However, the book takes a long time to get rolling - I think the plot really kicks off at about page 300, by which point you've sat through quite a lot of exposition and development of characters who you aren't given much reason to care about or latch onto.
The plot feels somewhat contrived, which I'm okay with if it's written well, which it mostly is - however the ending seems, funnily, to be rushed. Once you're at 813 pages, why not round it up to a nice even 900 and give the big conclusion more space to breathe? I was sitting with 60 pages left, thinking 'How is she going to pull this off?'.
As it turns out, kind of sloppily.
I did enjoy PRIORY OF THE ORANGE TREE, more than I didn't, and there's something impressive about such a tome of fantasy that I couldn't bring myself to dislike despite it's somewhat uneven plotting. A decent read, but you have to be patient before it gives you the good stuff.
Finally, thankyou to my dear friend Lisa for gifting me this for my birthday :)...more
A friend of mine gave me this because he ordered a copy online and somehow got two of them.
Pretty standard isekai. Guy is online in a fDNF'ing at 30%.
A friend of mine gave me this because he ordered a copy online and somehow got two of them.
Pretty standard isekai. Guy is online in a future VR MMO a-la Sword Art Online when the servers shut down, leaving him as the only person in the game, with almost unlimited power.
Honestly just couldn't grab my interest and it is painfully things-I've-seen-before....more
Thanks to my girlfriend's parents for giving me this one for Christmas, most appreciated.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World WThanks to my girlfriend's parents for giving me this one for Christmas, most appreciated.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War 2 are two of the most controversial events in warfare. As a student of World War 2 - albeit I've always been much more interested in the European theater than the Pacific theater - I've read quite a lot about the subject, but it has always been tinged with a distinctly rationalist tone. 'Sure, it was a tragedy, but it stopped World War 2 so it was in service of good'.
This book is the first proper historical work I've read which has flown in the face of that narrative - if anything, the book is deeply biased against the use of the bombs, a point of view that I've always held myself so this review is likely to be flawed from the outset. But nevertheless, here we go.
The old samurai, in frock coats and winged collars, sitting at attention at the conference table in the government's well-stocked Tokyo shelter, continued to observe - in extremis - the ancient forms of deference and decorum of the warrior class; they lived in the shadow of an antique past, in the darkened codes of 'honour' and 'sacrifice', in whose interests they were willing to destroy their nation and race. -p256
The book begins with an overview of the state of the world at the outset of 1945 - Roosevelt's death and Truman's ascendance, the defeat of Germany, the Japanese Empire's defeats and retreats throughout the pacific, and the research into the atomic bomb. As someone who hasn't been too interested in the Pacific theater until this point, this was valuable. I knew the broad strokes, but the first few chapters of Hiroshima Nagasaki do a fantastic job of laying the foundations for the deeper study to follow.
A chapter is dedicated to the US firebombing campaign which destroyed dozens of Japanese cities - including Tokyo and Osaka - and it is in this chapter that, if it weren't already, Ham's bias becomes self-evident. He labels this campaign of terror and wholesale civilian slaughter as the barbarism that it was, and doesn't shy away from the lack of Japanese response.
Fully the last two thirds of the book are dedicated to the preparation, use, and aftermath of the atomic bombs Little Boy and Fat Man. This is the real meat of it. There are three major themes running throughout this section off the text - the brutality of the US campaign, the Japanese leadership's indifference to the slaughter of its people, and the argument of whether the bombings were 'justified'.
Ham is quite obviously a detractor of the United States' campaigns against the Japanese homeland - this is made obvious by the chapter dedicated to the firebombing campaigns across Honshu and Kyushu. I was vaguely aware that the US had firebombed Japan (especially from the film Grave of the Fireflies), but I didn't realise the extent of the campaign - pursuing a flawed philosophy that the death of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants would cripple Japanese morale to such a point that they would have no choice but to surrender (a concept that anyone who knew the slightest amount of Japanese zealotry at the time would have found laughable), Major Curtis LeMay intentionally targeted civilian population centres and displaced millions from their homes.
This campaign continued for several months until the Japanese surrender in August - concurrent with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ham doesn't pull any punches with these events - the injuries, destruction and sickness are described in full detail, from a child losing his eyes from the change in pressure (screaming 'Soldier-san, help me!' while nobody listened), to a girl who tried to pick up her brother and carry him to safety, and found his skin sloughing off his arms in bloody, wet sheets.
This was the great success that was heralded back at home in America.
Lewis [co-pilot of the Enola Gay] scribbled 'Just how many did we kill? My God, what have we done?' 'My God, look at that sonofabitch go!' he is said to have also shouted, according to other crew members. -p298
65,000 of Hiroshima's 90,000 buildings were 'rendered unusable' and the rest partially damaged. Glass windows were blown out at a distance of up to 8 kilometres. But 'nothing was vaporised', the report noted optimistically. p414
While the bombing of Hiroshima is portrayed as a tragic waste of human life, the bombing of Nagasaki is worse - in fact the Japanese, having received word of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria the day before, were drafting surrender terms to send to America when a messenger burst into the cabinet and notified them that another 'special bomb' had been dropped on Nagasaki - the Japanese cabinet ministers paused for a moment, then went back to their drafting.
For most, the news that 30,000 of your people had just been wiped out would be an event worth dropping everything for - but not so for the Imperial Japanese. Throughout the book, the Japanese leadership's total and utter lack of care for their people is drilled home again and again - it wasn't that they didn't care whether they died or not, it is that they were expected to die for the Motherland. The Japanese plans to rebuff a US land invasion was predicated on the 'one-hundred million' residents of Japan (in actual fact Japan only had a population of 70m at the time) rising up and repelling the western invader.
After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were in the process of developing a 'field cap' to protect their people from the glare and heat of future atomic bombings - this goes to show how just how low a priority they placed on the bombings. They were prepared to weather more of them until the 'inevitable' land invasion. And the United States was prepared to drop more of them - had Japan not capitulated on August 15th, the US had a half dozen more bombs in the pipeline, with plans to drop them every 10 days or so.
Ham makes his opinion on whether the bombings were justified well known by the closing chapter (tellingly titled 'Why'). The main reasons for justifying the use of the bombs is that they ended the war, and that if they hadn't used the bombs then the US would have risked a bloody land invasion of the Japanese mainland, killing many more Japanese and Americans in the process.
Ham carefully deconstructs these justifications. As stated above, and at numerous points throughout the text, the Japanese officials placed little importance on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the same could not be said of those on the ground in those two cities, who experienced likely the closest representation of hell on earth yet - dozens of Japanese cities had already been wiped out wholesale by the American firebombing campaign, what were two more? The real impetus for Japan's surrender was the Soviet Union's surprising and crushing invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria and Korea between the bombings. Nothing matched the fear Japan held for a Russia, and their surrender to America on the 15th was merely picking the lesser of the two evils to capitulate to.
That the bombings removed the need for a US land invasion is also a fallacy - the US leadership had in fact abandoned the possibility of a land invasion of Japan in the early stages of 1945 as too costly, far before the atomic bomb was first tested. Later attempts to use this as the justification for the bombings by Truman and other American officials neatly avoids this point.
Of course, a less virtuous explanation often given is that the bombings are proportionate 'revenge' for the attack at Pearl Harbour, and the Japanese atrocities throughout the war. I won't dignify this with any more words.
In the end, the thing that finally brought Japan to the table was Emperor Hirohito giving his own judgement - in the past when the Emperor had suggested peace or surrender, the militant armed forces had killed those advisors closest to him - obviously they had corrupted his Majesty for him to suggest such things. But as the dust settled on Nagasaki, the Voice of the Sacred Crane stating once and for all that victory was no longer possible was the real decider - and tellingly, during his surrender address, Hirohito only pointed to the Soviet invasion as the reason for this.
As stated, I've always been on the view that the atomic bombings are wholly unjustifiable. Nothing - no atrocities, contingencies, possibilities or plans - justifies the instant murder of tens of thousands of civilians, and the slow and painful deaths of tens of thousands more. Having been to Hiroshima, having stood on the Aioi Bridge and under the hypocenter, I cannot feel anything other than disgust that this was something that human beings did to their own.
At a time of war, people will applaud any story their government feeds them. Americans continue to swear blind that the bombs alone ended the war; that they were America's 'least abhorrent' choice. These are plainly false propositions, salves to uneasy consciences over what was actually done on 6 and 9 August 1945 when, under a summer sky, without warning, hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women and children felt the sun fall on their heads. -p510...more
I'm not a big Stephen King reader - in fact, I think other than now Under the Dome, the only King I've read was the novellas tBloody hell what a slog.
I'm not a big Stephen King reader - in fact, I think other than now Under the Dome, the only King I've read was the novellas that inspired the films Shawshank Redemption and 1408.
I probably would not have read this if it hadn't been a present from my girlfriend Mel's parents from their trip to Thailand - apparently books are just as expensive there as they are here, unfortunately, so I felt somewhat obligated to read it - but I'm glad I did. For such a long book, which took me over two weeks to read, it kept up a fantastic pace and despite a large cast of characters and myriad events over its nearly 1100 pages, never felt bloated or overdone.
I associate Stephen King with horror, so it was interesting to read a book by him that was really more thriller/drama - though still maintaining a special horror all of its own at the way people behave (or more accurately, don't) when things go off the rails. Reminded me a lot of another favourite of mine, The End Specialist, as far as how cynically it looked at how humans interact with each other in stressful situations.
A couple of things that I wasn't fussed on - the origin of the Dome felt a little shoe-horned, like it was from a completely different book, and in the end, the way the Dome is dealt with was sort of frustratingly simple and, really, silly. A bigger question mark over the Dome would have been more interesting, for mine.
Regardless, really enjoyed Under the Dome. Thanks Lorraine and Ian for giving me the opportunity to read something I would probably have missed otherwise <3...more
Liam || Books 'n Beards
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