Emma Types Stuff

It's quite annoying to break up a really good reading run with something so very meh . I got an early vibe that I wasn't going to like this book, which morphed into increasing irritation. I should have just stopped, but it was so brutally fast paced that by the time I was really fed up I was already at 65% and it seemed silly not to hold on for one more hour of reading.  This received praise putting it alongside the The Handmaid's Tale , which adds weight to my theory that modern literary types should read some genre fiction as a palate cleanser more often. If this was a self-published book I'd never slag it off on here, but it was freakin' Booker Prize nominated.  So, what's it about? Calla grows up in a country in which girls are separated once they reach puberty. They are given a ticket that either marks them out for career or for motherhood and then the career girls have to run for their lives through wilderness to reach a city. Wherever they end up, they wi

I don't recall the first time I watched Jurassic Park. It's been a part of my life so long that I couldn't tell you when I first saw it, or how it came to be one of my top ten movies, even if I was under oath.  Where other beloved franchises ( The Cornetto Trilogy, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes ) have clear 'before and after' lines in my life, Jurassic Park's universe seems to have always been there, being awesome - or at least enjoyably awful.  I certainly didn't see it when it came out. Even if my parents were the sort to take me to see blockbusters regularly (they weren't) I was still only five in 1993. Yet its claws still reached me... we did a dinosaur project at school for which I received a Jurassic Park notebook that has stayed in my memory far longer than whatever I actually won the prize for. My guess is that I eventually saw the movie on TV, on a night when not much else was on, and regular repeats cemented my love for it.  I always vaguely mean

I read it, ok? I read it! Can the whole Richard Osman publishing complex leave me alone now?  Yes I did used to watch Pointless, and yes I did like him on Taskmaster, and yes I do watch Midsomer Murders ... but sometimes you have to fight against being put in a box. So I decided I'd read The Thursday Murder Club, Osman's mammoth hit, when I was ready. Which, as it turns out, is four years after it was published. So, here was my theory going in: Richard Osman is a clever person, and a known wit, and wrote an above-average murder mystery. A clean-cut murder mystery is the exact sort of book his daytime audience laps up, and it was no doubt helped along by bookshops, keen to promote a celebrity book without the whiff of a ghostwriter. Once it got around that he'd actually written it and that it was pretty good, the snobbier end of the market read it, followed by the people who don't read much but will pick up a book everyone is talking about.  Did I begrudge him the suc