…is the headline you’ll probably be reading if I decide to go down the career path of the (by now no doubt famous) Chicken Pot Pie Burglar.
Thank you, sir, for making my day. I hope it was a good pie and worth jail etc., not one of those crap ready meal ones.
That’s all I have to say about this, really. Carry on.
…is a concept our little Fluffninja maybe hasn’t fully grasped yet.
But otherwise, he’s doing fine, and developing into a very cuddly cat indeed.
Let’s add a bit of cat to the internet. (Because, clearly, there aren’t enough cats on the internet these days.)
Two weeks ago we adopted a cat from Cats Protection North London*.
We named him Steadman (because The Boyfriend is a bit of a fan and spotted a certain similarity to Steadman’s cats), but mostly he gets called Fluffninja or Wardrobe Monster. Because, being the terrified little stray cat he has been for most of his life, he moved directly into the most hidden space in our wardrobe and hasn’t really come out much since. Except to eat some chicken.
He’s making slow but steady progress, though, so there’s hope that he will settle in soon.
And here he is, our little Fluff:
*Awesome place, by the way. The lovely people at the adoption centre are doing a fantastic job caring for all those poor kitties, and were incredibly quick and helpful in sorting out the adoption.
For a mystical creature such as Monsieur Plumeus, being plucked from its enchanted native lands in a distant universe and plunged into the manic life in one of the human word’s greatest cities naturally comes as a moderate to severe culture shock.
Nevertheless, after several weeks of hiding behind a cupboard in a small room of the Victorian townhouse where his journey began, Plumeus is feeling confident enough to venture outside and explore the strange world he has come upon…
…but finds it’s not quite all that it’s cracked up to be.
Luckily, he also discovers caffeine.
However, he has yet to master the strange science of choosing from the large variety of fashionable coffee products.
So, here’s the last batch of books I’ve read in the first half of 2012. More to come as soon as I’ve had a payday and can stock up the bookshelf…
The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman | Amazon (UK)
Although Neverwhere had left me pretty disappointed, I decided to try another Gaiman, and I’m glad I did. Written for a young audience, the story of an orphaned toddler being adopted by a bunch of ghosts and raised in a graveyard is as morbid as it is touching. The Graveyard Book reminded me very much of the movie version of Coraline with its wacky characters and magical excursions into fantastically scary worlds. It’s the kind of book that is full of characters you’ll want to pluck off the page and add into your real life. It’s the kind of book I would have read over and over again as a girl, feeling the characters become more real every time, until I’d convinced myself that they actually do exist somewhere in a graveyard just beyond my reach. (I was a bit of a loner, as you’ve probably figured.) The Graveyard Book took me right back to my early reading days and reminded me why I’ve never been able to live without books.
Pens: 5 out of 5
The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde | Amazon (UK)
Oh-kay, weirdness alert. I wasn’t really sure about the whole Thursday Next series, but decided to give it a go after several friends recommended it. And I’m afraid it ends for me with volume one. Although the meta fiction thing grew on me about halfway through the book (when the actual plot finally kicks in after some over-indulgent introductory rambling), the concept behind it seemed just a bit too chaotic. Special detectives protecting our literary heritage? Cool. Real people and fictional characters jumping in and out of books? If we’re going that way, fair enough. A Nineteen Eighty-Four inspired setting? Well, if you must crush us with references, okay. It was when the time travelling came in that I got a bit of overload, and when it moved on to the vampires and werewolves, I finally had enough. It’s a shame that Fforde had to hopelessly over-clutter The Eyre Affair by cramming in every possible aspect of fantasy literature he could think of. Because the bit about moving between the real world and literary world would have been pretty awesome without all the rest annoying the hell out of you.
Pens: 3 out of 5
And onwards with the bookshelf. Here’s part two of the books I’ve read so far this year. This one mainly rounds up my (very brief) phase of being into Rich Hall’s books, but makes up with a few new all-time favourites on my shelf. Which, by the way, is absolutely bursting at the seams and needs to be extended very soon. I’m sure the Boyfriend will be delighted, seeing as he’s already had so much fun designing and building the original bookshelf…
Magnificent Bastards
by Rich Hall | Amazon (UK)
A collection of short stories from one of the funniest comedians around. From a dude in Montana who makes his money hoovering prairie dogs out of the ground, to a teenage girl who invites hundreds of thousands of MySpace friends to her house party, to the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign, this book is full of fantastically messed-up characters. And behind each story – most of which, admittedly, are a bit off weird – you discover the very touching truth of human encounters. And that’s what makes Rich Hall so good and so funny.
Pens: 4 out of 5
The Adrian Mole Diaries – The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4; The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole; True Confessions Of Adrian Albert Mole; Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years; Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years
by Susan Townsend | Amazon (UK)
What can I say! Adrian Mole has been one of Britain’s favourite literary characters for decades, and finally I am one of his many fans. Sue Townsend is a complete genius, and not just because of her uncanny ability to get into the head of a teenage boy. It’s Adrian Mole’s entire world – from the early 80s West Midlands small-town life to the 90s Soho food renaissance – that makes these books such an unbelievably delightful read. To me, a German with a not very solid basis in British history who has spent the last four years trying to figure out this country, the Mole Diaries have been a most enjoyable lesson in recent cultural history. And I also very much wish I’d known Adrian Mole when I was a teenager, because it would have made being a teenager infinitely more bearable. I cannot tell you how much I love these books.
Pens: 5 out of 5, plus a whole pack of new pens on top
…lives at the end of our backyard, in the middle of London, where she currently raises two adorable little pups.
Er, yikes. It’s July and I still haven’t done a bookshelf for this year. We’d better get going. There are 33 on the read-list so far, so I’ll split them up into a few posts to protect you from complete book overload.
Comes with the usual health-and-safety warning: Spoilers.
Schweinskopf al Dente
by Rita Falk | Amazon (DE)
Another German provincial murder mystery, part three of Rita Falk’s bestselling Franz Eberhofer series is mostly more of the same, which in this case means more hilariously entertaining micro-cultural comedy with a bit of a crime story in the background. To be fair, I probably only love these books so much because they are set around my home town and feature a whole range of characters and customs that could have been plucked straight off our road in the village. Most of the fun in this series is based on regional culture and dialect, so this one’s probably best enjoyed by German natives / native speakers, which means we can move right on to the next book.
Pens: 3 out of 5
Island of the Sequined Love Nun
by Christopher Moore | Amazon (UK)
I had almost given up on Christopher Moore in the light of the recent, largely disappointing additions to my bookshelf. But then, just in time, along came Love Nun to sway my opinion of his writing back into more favourable regions. This is a great adventure, with a good story that’s nutcase enough to have you laughing out loud but doesn’t go completely off the rails in terms of the plot. A washed-out pilot stumbles onto a remote island, where a vaguely mental doctor and his evil wife are doing some not exactly ethical stuff with the cannibalistic natives under the guise of an old cargo cult. Much madness ensues. This could also make a fantastic movie, by the way.
Pens: 4 out of 5
Well, this has certainly been my discovering Pratchett year. I fell in love with Discworld after a friend gave me The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky (both reviewed in part 1), and once I’d got hooked on the magic there was just no stopping. I particularly love the witches, so I went with their storyline for my first proper exploration of the Discworld universe…and then spent the rest of the year reading mostly Pratchett as well. So here we go, the third and last part of my epic 2011 book review.
I Shall Wear Midnight
by Terry Pratchett | amazon (UK)
Oh wow, that was dark. Prattchet’s teenage witch has certainly grown up, and for a witch that means facing a whole lot more than puberty. This book made me realise once again why I love Pratchett so much: It’s comic fantasy, but there’s a balance, a kind of very practical-minded morality to it. With Pratchett magic’s not all sparks and glamour; it has consequences and requires sacrifices. And so I Shall Wear Midnight reveals that Tiffany’s dallying with her magical powers in the previous volumes didn’t only lead her into immediate showdowns with mythical enemies, but has also conjured up a much more complex force from a deep, dark corner of history – one that’s frighteningly human. Where there’s witches, there’s always people with a stake, and history tends to go in cycles and repeat itself. And with the ancient spirit of a powerful witch-hunter on the loose and turning her land against her, the stakes are high for Tiffany. Meanwhile, there’s still that issue with boys being idiots…
Read it? Yes. And read the other three first!