Books in June

I knew I'd be spending my July holiday with my nose firmly planted in some YA so I stuck with sensible adult books for June. It was another month of clearing some long-time to-read pile residents.


THE NIGHT WATCH (4 years)

I bought this book when it was first released and started reading it right away. Unfortunately it was so boring I stopped fifty pages in. I decided to give it a second chance because I love Sarah Waters's other books, especially Fingersmith and The Little Stranger (which was a scary book, I love a scary book). I finished it this time but it was still dull. The story is told in three episodes presented in reverse chronological order; this just didn't work because the inter-linked stories were not interesting. It was totally anticlimactic.


LA BETE HUMAINE (5 years)

I've had this book for ages. I went through a phase a while back of reading stuff by French authors and moved out of the phase before I got around to reading this. Recently I saw it listed on a forum as a top neglected classic so I figured I'd give it a go. It was pretty much a gore-fest. I don't think there's a character in the whole thing who'd think twice about killing another person and that got a little silly. If you've got time read both but I would recommend Thérèse Raquin over La Bête Humaine; by the same author, it deals with pretty much the same stuff but more simply and therefore (I think) more effectively.

THE TIME MACHINE-H.G. Wells (19 years)

I've got about a hundred of these classics. I read lots of them (mostly the girly ones like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables), some were unreadable and still are to this day (Lorna Doone) and some of them (like this one) my 7-year-old self dismissed as "for boys". This is a short read. Your main guy travels forward in time, makes friends with some weird kids, discovers some underground cannibals and sets a forest on fire before hightailing it even further into the future. Some of the stuff he sees further into the future is pretty chilling. And he SPOILER ALERT just disappears in the end which is also chilling. Is it worth reading the bit with the cannibals and the forest fire to get to the chilling stuff though? Probably not.


THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

I loved this! It's been about a month since I read it and I still have dreams about it. Nearly everyone in the UK has gone blind from looking at a meteor shower. The Triffids take this opportunity to slap people down and feast on their corpses. Shudder. It's a good, creepy, post-apocalyptic yarn.

Mouthface

I must admit I was pretty sad when facehead supreme Sunshine was evicted from the BB house. I thought she was utterly dreadful but she was one of the more memorable characters. I imagined that a vision of Sunshine's enormous, bobbing, praying mantis face would spring to mind whenever anyone mentioned Big Brother 2010 in the years to come.

Rachel (not to be confused with early evictee Rachael a.k.a. Bob-a-Beyonce) is the new Sunshine, same whining, same intense loud-itude and a similar though not identical cranial anomaly:

Sunshine had so much face you could barely see her head; with Rachel it's the mouth-to-face ratio that's off. There's another difference. Sunshine was deliberately obnoxious which indicates an underlying intelligence. Rachel is dumb as a box of rocks. She's so annoying because she's oblivious; of her volume, of people telling her to shut up, of how retarded she looks when she jumps up and down screaming.


Another thing I'd like to address that I feel really needs to be addressed in the house is the issue of Mario's disgusting T-shirts. I've made a collage of my...um...favourites?

So left-to-right there's the collage shirt (you can't see it in this picture but it says Ribena on the right elbow), the one with the butterflies embroidered on it, the one covered in a twee curtain print and the sickly polo shirt. There's also a close-up of his new moustache, and I toyed with the idea of including a picture of his giant left nut but I thought that would be too much. If you really need to see it I suppose you could click here. It hangs down weirdly like a second penis!
Anyway back to the T-shirts. Are these T-shirts cool or expensive? I don't get it. They're worse than the shirts they wear in Jersey Shore, the ones with the spangles and the wings on the back.