Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir is a book by Amanda Knox, the girl who was convicted of murdering University of Leeds student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. Four years later the conviction was overturned on appeal, though is since going back to trial.
I’m not sure how useful it is as case notes – it’s clear from the book that Knox is innocent, but then as she wrote the book, you would expect it to be. If everything she says in the book is true, then the entire trial is a joke, but it certainly can’t have been written without bias.
BBC News published an interesting article about how what she writes in the book differs from what she said at the time. Things have almost certainly changed in the edit. But that said, even when you strip away the bias, it seems very generous to describe the evidence they do have as beyond reasonable doubt.
In any case, the book itself makes for an interesting read. Presumably there is little left to hide after the trial went through every detail of her personal life, so it is laid out without reservation. It’s structured well, in a small chunks that made it easy to read and I struggled to put it down every time.
I’ve finally got round to watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It’s the first in a trilogy of films based on the book The Hobbit, which is a lot of films given the whole of Lord of the Rings was covered in the same time. As Elina points out, if you have time for a song at the start, your film is too long.
Overall, I didn’t think it that good, but I wasn’t disappointed (because I had already lowered my expectations).
I didn’t like Martin Freeman as Bilbo. I like Martin Freeman in general, but we spent most of the film asking why Arthur Dent slash John Watson was running round Middle Earth. Not a problem I’ve had before, but he seemed a little more out of place here.
While The Hobbit was always a lighter book than Lord of the Rings, I felt the film was almost comic and silly. For example the orc king in the Misty Mountain was just a silly joke character and the fact that they survived that while being mobbed by such huge numbers was one bridge of disbelief too far.
Despite that though, it held my attention for the whole time (though we did watch it over two evenings) and I’m looking forward to seeing the remaining films.
We would like to say a big thank you to James Murray, who ran the Leeds Half Marathon earlier this month, in aid of us. He completed the 21km run in under two hours!
At the end of April, I travelled to York to compete in the Division E International Speech Contest final. You can see a video of speech in a previous post, albeit it at a different competition to this one. I only managed third place, but live and learn – only four months until the next one!
At a recent A-Soc talk, James talked us through some of the witchcraft he and his chemistry buddies are coming up with, including plastic that heals any cuts in it just by shining a light on it! You’ll find the video on Worfolk Lectures later this month.
I was quite excited to get onto Sourcery, the fifth book in the Discworld series, as I’m a big fan of the wizards. Plus, who doesn’t love Rincewind? I’m seriously considering it as a middle name for Chris Junior. While I was an enjoyable read, I didn’t find it quite as good as Equal Rites or Mort – but then anything with that amount of Death in it is always going to be hard to beat.
I can totally accept that as a last resort, I would drink the liquid from elephant dung. It’s a great survival technique. But here is my question. How did the first person figure that out? What were they doing that lead to that discovery?
I was walking home a few weeks ago, having been out shooting restaurant photos, when I saw a bird sitting by the canal. Rob tells me it is a Canada Goose.
