Ice Station
10/12/2017 at 6:32 AM (Books, Uncategorized) (Books, History, Humour, Literature, novel, Politics, Reviews, Thriller)
Ice Station is Australian thriller writer Matthew Reilly's second novel, released in 1999.
When a diving team at Wilkes Ice Station is killed, the ice station sends out a distress signal. A team of United States Recon Marines led by Shane Schofield, under the code name of Scarecrow, arrives at the station. At the station, he finds lots of French scientists have arrived, and several more arrive after the Marines' join them. The French reveal them to be soldiers and a fight ensues at the station, claiming the lives of Scarecrow's men along with several scientists and most of the French soldiers. Mother loses her leg, Samurai is badly injured, and two French scientists are captured.
Schofield decides to send a team down to find an object below the ice where the diving team was going. Later, Samurai is found strangled, leaving the only people he trusts to be one of the scientists, Sarah Hensleigh and another soldier named Montana as he was with them at the time of Samurai's death. Hensleigh, Montana and two other Marines, Gant and Santa Cruz, are sent down to where the diving team vanished. While alone, Schofield is shot and killed. He later wakes up, found to have been accidentally resurrected by his attacker, and is in the care of scientist James Renshaw, the believed killer of one of the other scientists at Wilkes. Watching a video of Schofield's death, they view the attacker and discover it to be Snake, one of Schofield's men. The two capture Snake before he is able to kill the wounded Mother.
Meanwhile in the United States, Andrew Trent and Pete Cameron meet; Cameron is a news reporter and Trent was a former Marine using the alias Andrew Wilcox to avoid being found by the U.S military who had tried to kill him a few years back. They hear the distress call from Schofield and Trent realises what happened to him was duplicating itself in regards to Schofield.
The team learns of an impending attack by the SAS and decide to flee the station. During the escape via stolen vehicles, Schofield and Renshaw's is pushed off a cliff, Schofield's close friend Book and the step-daughter of Sarah Hensleigh, Kirsty, are captured, while Rebound escapes with four of the scientists. Schofield manages to destroy a French submarine and he and Renshaw begin their journey back towards it. Meanwhile, the SAS Brigadier Trevor Barnaby kills the two remaining French scientists and feeds Book to a pod of killer whales. Schofield returns to the station and manages to kill all of the SAS and Snake, and save Kirsty. Schofield receives a message from Trent with a list of members of a secret service known as the Intelligence Convergence Group (ICG) which includes Snake and Montana.
Gant and her team find what appears to be an alien ship, but which turns out to be a spy ship. Montana kills Santa Cruz, but is killed by mutated elephant seals. Schofield and the two others arrive and Hensleigh reveals herself to be an ICG agent, but is soon killed by a wounded Gant. Remembering the station is about to be destroyed, Schofield, Gant, Renshaw, Kirsty and her pet fur seal named Wendy escape on the spy plane and land on the USS Wasp. They later destroy the plane using a guided missile fired earlier. It is revealed Mother escaped Wilkes before its destruction and was luckily saved by US forces.
The survivors get to Hawaii where they are nearly killed by an ICG agent before being saved by Andrew Trent, Pete and Allison Cameron, and the captain of the USS Wasp. Renshaw assumes custody of Kirsty since he is her godfather, and Schofield doesn't leave Gant's side until she recovers.
The Hundred Foot Journey
10/10/2017 at 6:00 AM (Books, Uncategorized) (Books, Classics, Cooking, Culture, Humour, Literature, Movies, Reviews)
I am currently in the middle of a book called The Hundred Foot Journey. It is written by Richard C. Morais and is the recipient of accolades from Joanne Harris, the writer of Chocolat (yes, the movie with Johnny Depp).
This story is about an Indian family that moves to France and sets up a rival restaurant across the road from a French restaurant that has been awarded 2 stars. Madame Mallory, the restaurateur is eagerly awaiting her third star but when Maison Mumbai goes into competition with her regarding supplies, she is very displeased because the Indian restaurant becomes quite popular with the French populace who live in the area.
The family was originally living in Mumbai India but then moved to the UK, after the protagonists mother passed away in the wake of a political melee. In the UK, there is far too much variety to compete with when it comes to owning a restaurant and after some not so savory dealings with his cousin, the protagonist and the rest of the family move to Lumiere in France. Unfortunately their decision to open an Indian restaurant so close to her is not palatable to Madam Mallory.
Things change later on when the main character is employed by the rival French restaurant because she realises Hassan, the protagonist, has perfect pitch on his palate when it comes to experimenting with food and bold and exotic flavours inspire him.
The book deals with the clash of cultures in different locations ( Mumbai, Lumiere, London, Paris ) involving food and in an interesting way explores people's reactions to things that are new and foreign.
09/02/2015 at 12:37 PM (Books) (Books, Chuck Palahniuk, Contemporary, Damned, Fiction, Humour)
The first book I ever read by author Chuck Palahniuk was Fight Club so I had this feeling upon reading Damned that it was not going to stand up to this particular predecessor and rightly so because it didn't.
Madison is the intelligent but overweight and bullied daughter of a wealthy Hollywood couple with a penchant for adopting kids from poor countries for the publicity. Left alone with her new foster brother in a hotel while her parents go to an awards night, she ends up in the netherworld because of a "game" taught to her at an exclusive Swiss boarding school. Madison ends up making some friends consisting of a rip-off of John Hughes Breakfast Club characters if they were serving detention in Hell. Every chapter also emulates Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret but pulling a switch a roo, all the questions are addressed to Satan. Not having asserted herself while she was alive, Madison reinvents a new life for herself and uses her telemarketing job to create a conduit between the living that are to be soon deceased. When Madison finally meets the prince of darkness she is told an unpalatable story about herself and it ends on a note that suggests a sequel.
The book is clever in its mockery of tropes and exploration of theology and mythology but felt haphazard with the storyline. I liked the initial premise of having these characters form an unlikely bond in the underworld but a twist in the plot made it feel irrelevant. What I got out of Damned was even if you do end up in Hell, death is not all that bad.
Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language
10/30/2014 at 12:07 PM (Books) (Bill Bryson, History, Humour, Language, Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language, Non-fiction)
I've just been taken on an armchair tour on the history of English via Bill Bryson's entertaining book Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language. I explored this genre a little bit when I wrote my post on the Gift of the Gob but this book goes into a lot more fun detail about the origins of English into its ultimate status as the world's most spoken tongue. This book was published a while back so some of the notions do seem rather dated and erroneous as they seem to have been sourced from places you could not rely on as factual authorities. It is still an entertaining read.
Bryson first explores the ambiguities of English as understood by a foreigner. For example in English, one tells a lie but the truth, the sentence "I could care less" is equivalent to "I couldn't care less" and the phrase "all items not on sale" means some items are on sale. He explains the intricacy of English by pointing out in the phrase 'I went swimming', swimming is a past participle while in the phrase 'Swimming is good for you', it is a gerund despite being the same word. He also goes into some detail about foreign words in other languages and I have found out that in Japanese the word for foreigner translates as 'stinking of foreign hair', Italians call syphilis 'the French disease' and con games get called 'American swindles' in France and Italy.
Next I found insight into how the possibility of speech evolved. The evolutionary change which pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat brought about with it the possibility to communicate by talking. So this is why humans can talk and animals can't. Then history of linguistics is given a mention by discussing the contributions of Sir William Jones, who discovered there were commonalities across languages despite geographic boundaries and proposed a theory that all classical languages derived from the same source. For example, brother is known as bruder in German, bhrathair in Gaelic, bhrata in Sanskrit and biradar in Persian. It may seem tenuous but I can see a connection.
The author then explains how language always has the same purpose but is achieved in multiple ways. When it comes to features of grammar and syntax, such as number, tense or gender, they can vary depending on the language. For example, the Japanese language doesn't use plurals, in Russian nouns have twelve different inflections and Irish Gaelic lacks the words yes and no. Then he goes on to speak about cultures in which languages co-exist and how majority languages usually dominate in spite of careful measures taken to prevent minority languages from dying out.
I found the overview of how English developed in England under the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons quite informative and interesting such as the fact their pagan gods are preserved for antiquity in the names of our weekdays; Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday stand for Tiv, Woden, Thor and Frig and Saturday, Sunday and Monday stand for Saturn, the sun and the moon. The English spoken changed after the invasion of the Vikings which meant a lot of Scandinavian terms became part and parcel of English. English language changed even more after the 1066 Norman conquest because their French origins resulted in the aristocracy speaking in French and while the peasants continued to speak in English.
Next comes an overview of the richness of the English vocabulary and the complexities of multiple synonyms, polysemy and contronyms. A Danish linguist said words were formed in four ways: adding to them, inventing them, removing from them and leaving them alone. The author suggests two more ways: making mistakes and borrowing from other languages.
The minor treatise in orthoepy lets readers know none of the letters in English can be relied on for consistency. The c in race, rack and rich are all pronounced differently or remain silent like the b in debt or the a in bread. Most words are not pronounced in the way it is spelled.
The discourse on dialects made me aware of something I did not know before. Apparently one of the people quite interested in the study of dialects was J.R. R. Tolkien who later became famous as the author of The Hobbit. Dialects in England apparently function differently to the way dialects work in North America. It does not only need to distinguished by region or locality as there are occupational dialects, ethnic dialects and class dialects.
Have you ever wondered how the alphabet came into being? It has evolved from pictographs. People used pictographs to represent things but once they hit on the idea of using them to represent sound, the possibility of having an alphabet came into being. The two possible ways of rendering speech into writing is then discussed by outlining their pros and cons. Apparently English spelling is erratic because for a long time, people were indifferent to using consistent spelling because dialects prospered as there was no central authority for the English language. Things changed after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and standardised spelling was achieved by 1650. At the very same time, the Great Vowel Shift was underway. People changed the way they pronounced vowels in vast groups of words, but the publishers weren't cognisant of the changes. This is why the: 'ea' sounds different in knead, bread, wear and great. English lost the /k/ sound from /kn/ words, the /w/ from /wr/ words, and the /g/ from gnat and gnaw. By the time the change was complete, writing habits had been established.
Reviewers have been rather critical of some of the author's errors so I guess go into reading this with an aware mind. However I do think some of the errors are oversights on the parts of the editor and proofreader as they haven't done the job of checking facts for accuracy. It is a very light-hearted approach to English language discussion so I think this is worth looking only if you enjoy the way the author, Bill Bryson, writes.
The Rosie Project
08/21/2014 at 9:37 AM (Books) (Books, Don Tillman, Fiction, Graeme Simsion, Humour, Romance, The Rosie Project)
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is my newly assigned book club read. Love finds you is the defining message in this marvellous tale full of hilarity which is narrated by the character of Don Tillman.
Don Tillman is an awkward and socially incompetent genetics university professor who decides to get married. Unfortunately he is extremely fussy and designs a sixteen-page questionnaire to eliminate undesirable candidates from the get go. This way he can ensure his potential wife is not a barmaid, a smoker or drinker and is always punctual.
Rosie Jarman is asked out by Don Tillman and she accepts. He finds out to his chagrin she fits all his undesirable criteria. To gently let her down, he offers to assist Rosie in finding out who is her biological father. After all, he does have genetics lab facilities at his disposal.
While he spends time with Rosie, Don starts to find out the nuances of social cues and how to fit in properly. He starts to see how accepting Rosie has been while he has been discriminating. He even manages to get a second date for the first time in his life and avoid ice-cream taste issues. Perhaps Rosie Jarman fills the Wife Project candidate criteria after all?
We also are given insight into the life of Don's best friend, Gene. His project is to sleep with one woman from every country in the world. Don's understanding of social constructs or lack of it hinders him from understanding Gene is a jerk. Exposure to Rosie changes the way he observes the world and reacts to it.
In the Rosie Project, Don Tillman ultimately learns love is a master that you can't fight with objectivity because it can deprive one of reason when it chooses to find you.