I've had this book a long time. It was bought as inspiration for the sort of fiction I was writing when younger and angrier, which I may yet resurrect. It is a narrative of the various murders and other crimes committed by Fred and Rosemary West over the space of a few decades. It tells the stories of the various people involved - it's probably sick to say that it really 'brings them to life', since we're largely talking about murder victims here, but you get the general idea. This is one of the first non-fiction books I've seen that really generates an understanding of how and why people come to commit the sort of crimes that turn them into media folk devils. (The other being Blake Morrison's As If, which I'm now tempted to re-read and review, but it's packed so it'll have to wait until we're moved and have bookshelves up)

I love the narrative style of HLM now as much as I did a decade or so ago, barring the odd minor irritation at Burns' tendency to repeat the same phrases and facts constantly throughout - 30-year-old me felt like saying YES I KNOW SHUT UP ALREADY on several occasions. It certainly made clear in full technicolour exactly how things can go so horribly wrong. Sometimes the most shocking bits were the pages of normal life, or the way in which certain things were normalised in the environment at 25 Cromwell Street.

( Sexual assault and violence triggers, not too graphic but does raise those issuesCollapse )

Yeah, i caved in and read it. Nearly all the advance publicity struck me as chronically sketchy, but as a vegetarian who wants to lose weight it still appealed to some part of my brain. So, anyway.

( Cut for weight loss triggersCollapse )

So, yeah, a bit of a mixed bag there. There are areas where the authors and i are in complete agreement. Some of the advice in the book (over and above the vegan bit) actually seems pretty good, and i may even try to stick to it for a bit. But the bits that pissed me off pissed me off badly, in a book-meet-open-window way, so it wasn't all good.

My latest procrastination attempt is one of those painful, martyred events called a book clearout. Which leads me to the point of this post. When i was a teenager (and a bit younger than that) i used to like teenage novels about people my age or a few years older living impossibly glamourous lives in brilliant locations that i couldn't fully imagine. (obviously, i *did* imagine to some extent, but you get the idea) Now i like teenage novels set in 80s/90s Britain, with all the rain and white dog poo (never thought about this until i saw an article about Life on Mars, but you really don't see that stuff these days!) and grotty buses (sadly, you do still see these in many parts of the country, including my route...), hairspray from hell and the possibility of being bombed by Russia. In other words, something vaguely reminiscent of the world i grew up in. Which is weird, because when you write it down none of that really looks like stuff to get nostalgic about.

Kazuo Ishiguru's Never Let Me Go is quite disturbing reading. It is about a group of people who find out when they are very young that they are clones whose purpose in life is to be organ donors. (yes, for me this is light reading) It raises all sorts of debates - i guess cloning itself is an issue these days. Of course I think of it in terms of the animal testing debate too - you'd have to read it with that already in your mind to see the parallels, but they are there, mainly i guess in the question of what constitutes human life. Like so many other things (this is me straining to avoid a Godwin breach so early in the year!) the level of complicty with some might regard as an atrocity (although activism for clone's rights is not mentioned, despite the regime not being an explicily tyrannical one for 'normals') is shocking. It highlights the way that certain events can just be regarded as part of normal life. I could say something about how the clones' lives mirror our own, but to be honest i only just finished the book and haven't thought that bit through enough to want to write it out. Just a warning that i may do so in the future.

Never shave your legs when in a temper. Sectumsempra, i'm sure, was born when JKR did just that. I have a little line of scabs up my left leg, which means no skirts for ages. I'm going to read up on union history and give them all names.
I never realised until yesterday that Val McDermid's early books (1980s) were published by Women's Press. Sad really that a shift to HarperCollins (too cool for a space?!?) is seen as a step up. (or rather that WP is seen as a cut below) Anyway, Common Murder is worth a read, if only out of nostalgia for another era of protest culture.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir's She Came To Stay, found it in the new secondhand bookshop in Duck City Central. She's a way better fiction writer than Sartre, imo - by this stage in Nausea i was getting kind of bored. (and that from someone who likes - 'like', btw, does not imply 'agreed with' or the opposite - Sartre's political writings) I've often felt like Francoise, although i've a nasty feeling i might have been more like Xaviere if i'd been prettier. :-/ Certainly this is kind of an appropriate time for me to read it, given the amount of thought i've been giving to the merits of monogamy and its alternatives - it exposes all the insecurities of an open relationship which have nagged at me whenever the issue has arisen. (well, that's its purpose - to show the insecurities of SdeB's open relationship with JPS, also to gain some sort of revenge for a particular incident)

Joolz Denby is gorge!! Sorry, had to say that. Not just because of her tats and piercings either. Or her writing skills. (although i would recommend you find Stone Baby or Corazon if you want to know who i'm talking about, as they are well worth reading, and would be even if she was in fact a ditzy little blonde with plastic bits)