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cyphomandraI was on the third floor in a meeting for today's 5.0 aftershock (shallow and close to the city - knocked out power for thirty minutes or so). I did end up heading for the doorframe (with one of the other meeting members - the rest milled around, while one slightly confused soul went and stood next to the window) but I went there fairly slowly and, really, this whole series of quakes have pretty much suppressed my finely honed Wellington childhood instincts of leaping for the doorframe in any tremor. This is partly because Civil Defence says in most modern houses it's better to stay put, and partly because I am finally living in a place with mainly built in shelving, so staying put does not involve various 1.8 metre bookcases descending on me. Now my instinctive reaction is to check Twitter and Geonet... unfortunately this morning's shock knocked out the cellphone towers for a bit as well.
So. Books not currently in my possession that I have read:
Mary Stewart, This Rough Magic. I read this under unfair circumstances - it's sitting next to a computer I use three or four times a week, and I read it while waiting for the program I need to boot up. On the other hand, if the narrative had actually gripped me more I would have taken it away and finished it somewhere else. Romantic thriller, set in Greece, heroine actress who gets entangled with alcoholic famous actor (elderly), handsome son, dashing peasants, and evil but apparently attractive guy smuggling currency to Albania. All the references are to the Tempest, including a concluding paragraph that made me much more interested in the peasants than in the main characters, but this did not stop me from getting The Mountain Goats' International Small Arms Traffic Blues stuck in my head at unhelpful moments ("Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania..."). Good attempted drowning at sea sequence, but I preferred My Brother Michael.
This Way Up, Lindsay Wood. When I was eleven, my teacher was heavily into outdoors activities and bushcraft, and we spent a lot of time going for walks through the bush (usually with very bad weather), and learning how to cross rivers, what plants to eat, how to treat hypothermia and (in an extremely memorable lesson) gun safety and why not to drop a loaded gun. Somewhere in all that we did orienteering on a school camp; I liked it, wanted to do more and then my family picked it up as well. I only competed during my teens - I tend to approximate distances a bit too much to be good - but my father still competes, and my sister does intermittently.
So. In this book, Corey is an overweight pre-teen who spends all his time playing Counter Strike until his mum gives him an ultimatum about joining a school sports team or losing his broadband connection. He picks orienteering and ends up liking it more than he expected, getting motivated, competing as part of a team, coping with the inevitable evil bullying type and triumphing in the competition at the end by charging over a cliff. I liked the little moments in this - Corey sneaking out to do running training - and I liked the orienteering, but I did think the necessity of having Corey triumph for the team was a bit forced, and there's an odd bit on one of his first runs where he starts panicking about being lost that never rang true (it's over a very short distance, but also I spent a lot of time orienteering wondering where the controls were, but never actually feeling that I was *lost*. A long way back from the start and/or in the wrong place, yes, but not actually lost). Still. A better NZ sports book than that VM Jones one about climbing, and a nice reminder of past activities.
Captain Underpants, books 5,6, 7 and 8, all by Dav Pilkey. I read the first nine chapters of the last one of these (Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People) to a friend's seven year old before he went to bed, and then needed to know what happened next. Or before. I still haven't read the first ones, which are possibly a touch more obsessed with toilets, but these are fun - yes, they do have a lot of toilet humour (and in books 6 and 7 a lot of jokes about nasal mucus) but they also have some nifty jokes for the adults (character names like the school secretary, Ms Anthrope), a nice line in fourth wall breaking and fairly tight plots in which everything gets resolved UNTIL it all falls apart in the last chapter. Plus, one of the two leads (George) is black, and the Wicked Wedgie Woman is probably the best villain (and there are great animal sidekicks). I can tell you're all overwhelmed at my taste, but I was expecting something just plain gross, and these are actually pretty funny (oh, all right. And the snot creature is gross, but at least it's vividly atrocious rather than just icky).
So. Books not currently in my possession that I have read:
Mary Stewart, This Rough Magic. I read this under unfair circumstances - it's sitting next to a computer I use three or four times a week, and I read it while waiting for the program I need to boot up. On the other hand, if the narrative had actually gripped me more I would have taken it away and finished it somewhere else. Romantic thriller, set in Greece, heroine actress who gets entangled with alcoholic famous actor (elderly), handsome son, dashing peasants, and evil but apparently attractive guy smuggling currency to Albania. All the references are to the Tempest, including a concluding paragraph that made me much more interested in the peasants than in the main characters, but this did not stop me from getting The Mountain Goats' International Small Arms Traffic Blues stuck in my head at unhelpful moments ("Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania..."). Good attempted drowning at sea sequence, but I preferred My Brother Michael.
This Way Up, Lindsay Wood. When I was eleven, my teacher was heavily into outdoors activities and bushcraft, and we spent a lot of time going for walks through the bush (usually with very bad weather), and learning how to cross rivers, what plants to eat, how to treat hypothermia and (in an extremely memorable lesson) gun safety and why not to drop a loaded gun. Somewhere in all that we did orienteering on a school camp; I liked it, wanted to do more and then my family picked it up as well. I only competed during my teens - I tend to approximate distances a bit too much to be good - but my father still competes, and my sister does intermittently.
So. In this book, Corey is an overweight pre-teen who spends all his time playing Counter Strike until his mum gives him an ultimatum about joining a school sports team or losing his broadband connection. He picks orienteering and ends up liking it more than he expected, getting motivated, competing as part of a team, coping with the inevitable evil bullying type and triumphing in the competition at the end by charging over a cliff. I liked the little moments in this - Corey sneaking out to do running training - and I liked the orienteering, but I did think the necessity of having Corey triumph for the team was a bit forced, and there's an odd bit on one of his first runs where he starts panicking about being lost that never rang true (it's over a very short distance, but also I spent a lot of time orienteering wondering where the controls were, but never actually feeling that I was *lost*. A long way back from the start and/or in the wrong place, yes, but not actually lost). Still. A better NZ sports book than that VM Jones one about climbing, and a nice reminder of past activities.
Captain Underpants, books 5,6, 7 and 8, all by Dav Pilkey. I read the first nine chapters of the last one of these (Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People) to a friend's seven year old before he went to bed, and then needed to know what happened next. Or before. I still haven't read the first ones, which are possibly a touch more obsessed with toilets, but these are fun - yes, they do have a lot of toilet humour (and in books 6 and 7 a lot of jokes about nasal mucus) but they also have some nifty jokes for the adults (character names like the school secretary, Ms Anthrope), a nice line in fourth wall breaking and fairly tight plots in which everything gets resolved UNTIL it all falls apart in the last chapter. Plus, one of the two leads (George) is black, and the Wicked Wedgie Woman is probably the best villain (and there are great animal sidekicks). I can tell you're all overwhelmed at my taste, but I was expecting something just plain gross, and these are actually pretty funny (oh, all right. And the snot creature is gross, but at least it's vividly atrocious rather than just icky).
