The Chemist

Stephanie Meyer writes long books. The Chemist is a nice cosy 530 pages long. Plenty of time to get attached to three main characters and a handful of supporting players. We open up with our hero talking about how much she loves the Bourne novels…except they aren’t very realistic. And thus we enbark on a Jason Bourne novel starring a woman instead of a man. I liked The Chemist except for one thing. Our hero tortures and occasionally murders people. Nothing wrong with that…she maintains she’s a good person and like Arnold in True Lies…she only tortured bad people. It’s…

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Back of the House

Scott Haas hangs around chef Tony Maws restuarant Craigie on Main and watches the great chef and his team work. Tony is a chef and an asshole-of course, that’s a bit redundant. Anyone who has watched Hell’s Kitchen is familiar with the foul mouthed antics of Gordon Rasmey and one of my personal heroes for lo these many years has been Anthony Bourdian. Neither man seems to suffer fools easily. So Tony is the self centered, I’m Right, You’re Wrong demi-god of his tiny little world. There are times when Scott shows one of the revolving cast of line cooks…

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Iain Reid’s novel is short. A couple of hundred pages. The story is broken up into small bits. A snippet of a love story. A bit of a horror tale. A little mystery. What is the meaning of the title? What things are they thinking of ending? Who is thinking this? I’m thinking of ending things is a highly stylized book. It reminded me a bit of Flowers for Algernon. It’s not quite as good as Flowers for Algernon. Few stories are. The stylistic tick here. Is the use of short sentences. Sometimes. Very. Short. Sentences. A little of this…

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The Things They Carried

After fifty years or so, it seems impossible that there would be anything new to hear about the war in Vietnam. Boys were sent to the other side of the world to commit murder and mayhem and many of them came back damaged and broken. Many of them didn’t come back at all. We’ve seen their stories in TV shows and movies, read about them in books and short stories. We’ve even laughed about the conflict in the sort-of-a-protest song Alice’s Restaurant. So it is a bit surprising to read yet one account of yet one more soldier’s experience and…

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Revival by Stephen King

The genius of Stephen King is his ability to write in such a way that you feel as if he is talking to you across the dining room table. This time he seems to be talking directly to men of a certain age, somewhere between fifty and sixty, who share memories of the same TV Shows and the same popular music, among countless other things. I listened to the audiobook read by David Morse and he does a great job of reading the story of a man from Maine who loses his faith as a boy. We follow our hero…

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Crimson Death

As with the last Anita Blake book, there was some hope to be had in the opening pages. Edward calls and tells Anita that rogue Vampires are running amok in Ireland and that he needs her help. But instead of the next chapter starting with Edward driving Antia away from Dublin Airport, we spend the next few chapters watching Antia and two of her sex slaves looking for a good place to take a shower. Seriously. Laurell K Hamilton doesn’t so much write novels anymore, as several hundred page long sermons on the poly lifestyle. One of the themes she…

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The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo

I’m not a fan of Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen her show and I missed the season of Last Comic Standing that was her breakout moment. But I do like memoirs, even pretty bad memoirs can have one or two good moments. I love the title of The Girl With Lower Back Tattoo. That is pure fucking genius. By the way, Amy loves the word fuck. And the word fucking. And the words clit, cunt, pussy, vagina, asshole, cock, dick, penis, shit, bastard, and pretty much any other word you have ever heard that might in any way make you uncomfortable.…

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The Big Fat Surprise

Carbohydrates are bad, refined and processed carbohydrates are evil incarnate. Nina Teicholz covers the history of food recommendations in American history. Along the way she talks about fad diets, popular trends, myths, misconceptions, and outright lies designed to line the pockets of the people who benefit from a fat and lazy American population. Nina Teicholz goes out of her way to give the benefit of the doubt to these people who actively grew rich while we all grew fat. I would send them off to The Hague for crimes against humanity. Like Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, Nina tells the…

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Dracula

[easyazon_link identifier=”B007B7GOYQ” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Dracula[/easyazon_link] by Bram Stoker. Performed by Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Simon Vance, Katherine Kellgren, Susan Duerden, John Lee, Graeme Malcolm, and Steven Crossley. I read Dracula many years ago, about the same time I read Frankenstein,The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. A bit of overload on the Victorian novels. So I found this audiobook with Alan Cumming doing most of the heavy lifting and thought I would give it a listen. I have to say the cast here did an amazing job. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Dracula, whereas…

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Eat Street

The ManBQue Guide to Making Street Food at Home Any fan of Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern knows that the best food to be had is street food. The good folks at Manbque know this as well. I had never heard of Manbque, but that didn’t stop me from reading their cookbook. I’m a bit of a cookbook junkie. I pick up just about every one I run across and flip through the pages. As a photographer I look at the photos, as a foodie I check out the recipes. Both are pretty good. I like the writing style used in Eat…

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