The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer, and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea
and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie and the Story Siren. They're a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your
blog,
highlight our newest books and see what everyone else received for
review, borrowed from libraries, or bought.
It's been another really quiet week when it comes to book gathering. I think September has just been one of those months where I've had so much going on that books have fallen to the bottom of the list. Hopefully I can get back in the swing of things in October.
EDIT: My mum got me the below, which is so cute. The picture is roughly life-size!
What have you been up to, and what have you added to your bookshelves?
Food shows are big business at the moment, whatever culture or religion you are, and the UK's first Halal Food Festival tapped into that zeitgeist.
Held over three days in an exhibition space in the ExCeL in east London, the festival brought together artisan producers, celebrity chefs and foodies (nicknamed 'haloodies'). I headed down for the second day to check out all the fuss.
The festival hall was packed when we got there just after 2pm, and we got stuck right in, heading round the various stalls, trying out products and purchasing plenty along the way. A highlight was the mango fudge produced by Suffolk-based Yum Yum Tree Fudge, which nearly made me swoon.
At the cooking school area, we watched Glasgow-based chef Ajmal Mushtaq lead six people in making a chicken curry, which smelt delicious and tasted pretty good too (since we all got to try a bit). At the live cookery theatre we watched Aneesh from The Chocolatier put together something truly scrumptious looking that involved lots of chocolate and coconut.
Where the Halal Food Festival fell down, unfortunately, was in the food that you could eat. After a few hours wondering round, there's only so many samples you can eat before you want something substantial. Granted, there were some amazing stalls at the festival, selling burgers, wraps and more. But they weren't very close together, meaning it was hard to compare and contrast and decide what you wanted. A "food village" of sorts, around a seating area, would have been good.
Once you did decide what you wanted, there was the queuing. First, there wasn't really room to queue in the event space, so lines of people stretched out past other stalls, getting in the way. Second, the most popular stand had a queue that people waited in for an hour. That is absolutely ridiculous. Bigger stands, spread out a little more would have been perfect.
Obviously, the festival organisers needed to consider cost, but if I were them I would have cut the festival down to two days (yesterday's opening day was a wash, according to many stallholders I spoke to), and then spent the money saved on hiring a bigger space.
Still, this is the first time this festival has been held. With a few lessons from this year, next year's event has the potential to be bigger, and much better.
My
week in books is a feature where I share
things I've found interesting from the past week that concern books,
literature and all things book blogging.
Last time I did one of these I mentioned Roald Dahl Day, which was earlier this month. There's a great Pinterest page here, with pictures of the Dahl inspired lunches people made to celebrate Roald Dahl Day. Brilliant. One of my favourite authors is Neil Gaiman, who recently released Fortunately, The Milk... (great book with lovely illustrations, go read it if you haven't already). To celebrate, his publishers Bloomsbury asked people to put together videos raising a glass of milk, which you can find here. There are some inventive and funny ones in there.
This next one is technically not to do with books, but it is to do with writing, so I figured I could include it. Huffington Post did a round up of punctuation marks we no longer use, which you can find here. I'm a geek, so this really fascinated me. I saw a trailer for The Book Thief recently, and it looks amazing. Here's a piece from Hollywood about how the book was turned into a film. And here's the trailer if you haven't seen it...
Here's a piece from The Guardian about a previously unknown Ian McEwan short story being discovered. It may have been a week since news that the Man Booker Prize was going international was released, but people are still talking about. Here's a piece from The Atlantic about how the decision is a good thing. And finally, I know nothing about Tone Almhjell's The Twistrose Key, apart from that it has a beautiful website, here. What have you found over the past week that you've enjoyed?
Memory, myth, fairytales and a child's imagination come together in Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
A sweeping novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is both a children's book and an adult's tale.
A middle-aged man returns to the place he grew up for a family funeral. In between the service and the wake, he finds himself back at a pond on a neighbour's farm, and while there he remembers the war that raged when he was seven, and how he was saved by the Hempstocks - Old Mrs Hempstock, Ginnie Hempstock, and 11-year-old Lettie Hempstock.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a novel of myths and mysteries, and I found myself puzzled and confused at times. I'm still not sure I understood quite what happened, and whether what happened was real or not, but in this way I'm like the narrator, a man who remembers and then forgets, who doubts his memory, and whose recollections of that incident when he was seven differs from those of other people involved.
The confusion didn't mean I didn't enjoy the novel though. I found it poetic and scary, at the same time, and got caught up in the fable and fairytale elements of the book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is simultaneously a novel about the things we as children were afraid would happen if we misbehaved (letting go of someone's hand when they were keeping us safe), and a novel that is firmly rooted in a fantasy world.
Gaiman has a real way with words, using them to create images that burn themselves in your mind. At times, I was reminded of his earlier novel, Coraline. That book terrified me, and I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane employed a similar method when trying to scare the reader. Rather than the fantastical bad guys being the ones who scared me most, it was the narrator's father who won the dubious honour of being the most terrifying character in the book.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a book you shouldn't think too hard about, or try to dissect or understand, or find a moral in. It's purely a story, one that confuses and scares and delights, and that's where its beauty lies. How I got this book: From the library
The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer, and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea
and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie and the Story Siren. They're a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your
blog,
highlight our newest books and see what everyone else received for
review, borrowed from libraries, or bought.
From the library: Whiskey Beach by Nora Roberts The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
Bought:
The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas The Zahir by Paulo Coelho Just in Case by Meg Rosoff Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
It's been a pretty quiet week for me reading/blog wise, as I've had a lot going on elsewhere. What have you been up to?
Fava beans, chianti and murder, that's what I know of Hannibal Lecter from that one time I saw Silence of the Lambs and was completely terrified.
A little older, I felt more prepared for Hannibal, which across 13 episodes develops the character of Lecter (Mads Mikkelson) into a suave, sophisticated and, dare I say it, almost likeable person, despite his murderous and cannibalistic tendencies.
Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is a brilliant criminal profiler, haunted by his ability to see into the minds of serial killers. Asked by the FBI's behavioral science unit - headed by Laurence Fishburne's Jack Crawford - to help them solve the case of a Minnesota Shrike, a serial killer who has been brutally killing college aged girls, Will soon finds himself on an ever disturbing path. As he chases more serial killers, he is unaware that the greatest one of all is sitting across from him, being his psychiatrist, acting his friend.
Hannibal is a carefully crafted procedural, which doesn't feel at all like a procedural. The case of the Minnesota Shrike unexpectedly pervades the whole series, even though the serial killer is caught in episode one, and other murders shock and disturb, and stay with Will and the team for a long time.
Dancy is an interesting choice to play Will. A pretty boy who's more often the romantic lead in films, he's not the first actor I would have picked for the nervous, deeply affected Will, but he makes it really work. Dancy's Will is likeable, and draws out the most caring instincts in the viewer - I just wanted him to be okay the whole time I was watching, and I spent plenty of time angry at other characters for not taking the cues that Will was not alright.
Among the characters I felt the most anger towards was Jack, who ploughs ahead with using Will to help him solve crimes, thinking that just having Lecter counsel Will is enough to counter the bloody and brutal sights Will is exposed to.
Of course, Lecter is a help, which is what makes him so much more disturbing than any other serial killer encountered in Hannibal. Lecter is a friend to Will, and a father figure to Abigail Hobbs, the daughter of a serial killer. He helps them both, listens to them, and genuinely cares for them (in his own way).
Mikkelson's rich tone of voice, and his stately presence, make Lecter a calming influence in many scenes, and add to the horror of those in which he kills. Lecter's enthusiasm for fine dining adds black humour to the programme (and is a nod to the fava beans and chianti), as he serves up gourmet dish after gourmet dish to his friends - all of them unknowingly eating human parts.
Hannibal is not a perfect programme. There are distractions which take away from the core of the show and are completely unnecessary - a couple of episodes are wasted on exploring Jack's relationship with his wife, only to then not even mention her for the rest of the series, and there's an aborted romance of sorts in the second half of the season. And reporter Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki) is an annoying and largely superfluous character. She's clearly around to function as a signpost, and therefore is rendered badly enough to be both unknowable and unlikeable.
Overall, though, Hannibal is an intriguing programme. It dispenses with many of the annoying cliffhangers that are so often found in drama series, meaning the surprise is not the who but the why, which is much more interesting. The killings are gruesome and of a kind I've not seen before on television (it beats Game of Thrones for horror, if not bloodshed), and the end of series one left me wanting more. Just don't eat meat while you watch.
