If you are a big reader you may well read A Storm of Swords as one book. However, if you are like me, reading a book longer than Anna Karenina is no small undertaking.
To make it easier I read Part 1 earlier. Even so, it is still a meaty novel, twice as long as your typical one. What a novel it is though. The more I got into it, the more I could not put it down.
I have only seen Game of Thrones up until the end of series 3 and A Storm of Swords goes beyond that so for the first time in the series I was breaking new ground.
There is a special circle of Hell in which George R. R. Martin will be subjected to all the things he has done to my favourite characters.
As with any instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire, lots of people died. Some of them I was pleased about, some I was annoyed about, some of which I was just surprised at.
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The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel Margaret Atwood. It describes a near-future dystopian world in which democracy has been replaced by a fundamentalist Christian military government and re-structured society.
In said society women are divided into functions for men. The protagonist, Offred, is a handmaid. She is used for breeding purposes only. Still, better than being a Martha, or shipped off to the colonies…
The final piece of the puzzle of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (a trilogy in seven parts). Forward the Foundation follows Hari Seldon from the time he decides to work on psychohistory (at the end of Prelude to Foundation) and the founding of the First Foundation on Terminus.
Once you have read all the other books, you pretty much know what is going to happen. However, it is still an entertaining read. Everything slots in and completes the story.
Food For Free is a book by Richard Mabey on foraging. I got the pocket-sized edition which is great for travelling around with.
It contains descriptions of loads of different plants you will find it Britain and each one comes with an illustration and a photo. It describes what it looks like and what you can do with it. All good stuff.
On the negative side, it is very insistent that you use a real identification guide, which it claims this is not. I felt that distracted a lot from the purpose of the book. Why make it pocket-sized for example if you’re not taking it into the field?
It is also arranged alphabetically whereas I felt grouping similar plants together would be more useful. If I see a plant I want to be able to find that section and work out which one it is. That way also has difficulties – how do you find the section you want if you already know what it is, and how do you judge what is similar? However, on balance I think the trade off would have been worth it.
It does however address any concerns you might have that you could accidentally pick something poisonous by telling you it will probably be fine. I feel much better after that…
I almost gave up on The Rosie Effect. Sure, I enjoyed The Rosie Project. But it did not make me feel like I had to read the sequel. So I mulled over striking it off my reading list. However, just before I did I went back to Bill Gates’ blog to re-read his post about it. It raved about it, so I kept it on the list.
I’m glad I did. As Gates points out, life through the prism of autism provides a surprisingly identifiable view of the human condition.
It picks up a while after The Rosie Project finishes and tells the story of Don and Rosie as they prepare to start a family.
I also found out that “cross-nursing”, the practice of swapping babies to feed, can be beneficial for the immune system of the child. However, a little research suggests there are serious risks and other complications. Anyway, something to discuss with Elina later…
I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting when I decided to read a novel that was essentially a love story between a 12 year old girl and a pedophile, but it was definitely worse than I had anticipated. Though at least the details of their carnal acts were glossed over.
I have sometimes seen Lolita costumes on eBay. Who could possibly think that was a good idea? Only, I vainly hope, someone who had not read the book.
It is super easy to miss broken links on your website. Even if you test it rigorously, it can be difficult to catch them all. That is where an automated crawler can come in useful. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is one such tool.
It only runs on Windows, so I had to run it in a VM. It is also rather a blunt instrument – it crawls everything even though you can be pretty certain that if you have checked one article ID page, they are all going to work. But those few points aside, it is very useful.
It rapidly spiders all of your pages and reports back on both broken links and redirects. It checks CSS, JavaScript and images resources too, and you have the option to check external URLs as well so you get full coverage. It then spits out a HTML report. It is amazing how many little links you find that need fixing when you run it. Well worth spending a bit of time on.
