I discovered recently that the Roald Dahl Story Company has officially started commissioning new books “inspired by” Dahl’s characters. I guess there are only so many ways you can repackage the few books he wrote, and the next logical step is to start churning out official fanfic. It’s just another of their decisions in recent years that I find a bit disappointing…
Category: Books
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Quick book reviews
Two more library books done and dusted this week!
First was Miranda July’s All Fours, which I’d been waiting for months to read. I expected this to be sexxxxy; instead I just found it gross and sad. It didn’t help that I went in with a certain amount of identification as a middle-aged perimenopausal woman, but I found the main character really dislikeable and selfish. Which is fine; women can be jerks. But I found myself just not wanting to be in her head. There were multiple points where I found myself literally going “EWWW!” and cringing. I didn’t find any of it sexy, at all.
The second was The Story of a New Name, the second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. This one I loved. It continues the story of Lena and her friend Lila as they follow very different paths – the former finishing high school and going to university, while the latter enduring a marriage to a man she hates. It has cliffhanger moments that made me gasp out loud – that ending!! – and others that had me shaking my head in sadness. (Ugh, the night beach scene on Ischia.) And it’s so incredibly specific, which oddly makes it feel more universal. I think I identified most strongly with Lena’s feelings about going away to college, and her anxiety about never quite fitting in with people who came from intellectual families or those with generational wealth. She achieves more success than anyone ever expected, but it isolates her from the world she came from. Even her accent marks her out as not belonging in either place. (Yeah, it me.) And Lila – my heart breaks for her while she also infuriates me. I love her stubbornness and her survival instinct… and I get that the options for an uneducated Neapolitan woman in the 1960s were limited, but she could also be heartless and cruel. I was stunned by her choice on Ischia. It led to so much heartbreak. And of course, there are no good men in these books. None. Every one is a brute in his own way, trampling and using the women around him. Is that because of the culture in that time and place? Or is that really what it’s like? Did I somehow end up with one of the only good ones, or is there a latent brute lurking there too?
Obviously I need something lighter as a chaser now, something with characters that I actually like and who give me hope for the world!
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“The Story of a New Name”
I finished the second of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels today. This passage at the end brought unexpected tears to my eyes. I’m going to need some time to sit with this.
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Download & Transfer your books
As of Feb. 26, Amazon is removing the ability to download and transfer your purchased Kindle ebooks. This sucks. This means you lose the ability to back them up, or to move them to your devices over wired connections. If also means Amazon can one day decide to remove the books entirely, because you never really owned them to begin with.
I suggest you log into your account NOW and download each of your purchased ebooks. Of course they make it as difficult as possible, so you have to click on each one individually and download it to your computer. (I had 77 of them. I’m sure there are people with loads more.)
And then if you were so inclined, you might also install something like Calibre, an open source ebook collection manager. And if you were further inclined, you could also install some useful plugins that would give you further flexibility in how you read your purchased content.
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Aubrey/Maturin novels
Okay, I saw the movie version but don’t remember much about it. I certainly didn’t think I was interested in reading the books… until now. 😂 (Link via Metafilter.)
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Reading “The Story of a New Name” by Elena Ferrante
Current mood: “If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.” 🔥
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Evil.
“There is No Safe Word” – How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades
I read the whole thing, even though I hated it after the first section. It’s terrible. Those poor women. I don’t know how to separate this from my previous feelings about his art. I feel like so many things I enjoyed are now tainted and gross. We saw The Ocean at the End of the Lane in London in 2021, and I wept at how beautiful it was. It’s all corrupted now. Time to toss my last few remaining books of his.
And yeah, I do feel some hypocrisy at tossing my Gaiman and Rowling books but keeping a shelf of Dahl. He was an awful person too, who said and did some pretty terrible things. Somehow it feels different, like he’s historical evil rather than today evil. He’s not actively hurting people walking around the world today in the way the others are. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. 😕
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Eat Your Books
Unsolicited endorsement: Every Saturday I make a menu plan for the week*. As inputs, I go with our current fridge and freezer assets as well as whatever’s coming in the next Ooooby box. Then I use Paprika to find recipes that will use up the most perishable stuff first. Paprika’s great for organising your online recipes, and we keep our old iPad in the kitchen to cook from.
That said, last week I was looking at our bookshelf full of dead tree cookbooks and lamenting the fact that we rarely cook from them. “If only there was a database that I could search as easily as I do Paprika,” I said to the Snook. “Oh wait!” he said. “I saw something for that recently.”
Less than a day later we’d signed up for a year subscription to Eat Your Books and loaded our 40+ cookbooks into it. I was happy to see that just about all our books were already in there, and probably 85% of them were indexed. Once you’ve logged your books, you can search through the recipe indexes by ingredient, type of meal, etc. So handy! Already we’ve cooked from our books three times since: Neil Perry’s Persian-style lamb stew, Jamie Oliver’s Crispy Chicken, and Momofuku’s Brussels sprouts with fish sauce vinaigrette.
Highly recommended if you’re in the same situation…
* The Snook hates making meal decisions, so I make the list and assign him all the more labour-intensive dishes.
