On the bedside table July 7 to 20

I know, it's a two week list this time, but as you'll see, I had a lot of reading to do!  I didn't even finish one book (You're Not So Smart) before it had to go back to the library.

Here's what I've read in the last two weeks

Success Secrets of Sherlock Holmes (Acord) - An interesting book taking characteristics and habits of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and showing how we mortals can use them to be more successful in our lives.  I found the snippets of information about Conan Doyle more interesting than the self-help tips, most of which were pretty standard fare -- do what you love, pay attention to the details, etc. My take-away: I need to re-read the Sherlock Holmes books as I feel some of the traits Acord was lauding were ones that I had found grating when reading the books. 

A Wolf at the Table (Burroughs) -- I love Augesten Burroughs. LOVE him.  I've loved every book I've read by him.  That said, I often mix him up with David Sedaris, who I often confuse with Dave Eggers.  Anyway, this is a haunting memoir about the author's experience of growing up with a father who was clearly quite mentally ill, and how his mother tried to protect him in the best way she could at a time when a married woman didn't have a lot of options.  Burroughs tried vainly to elicit love from his father and the stories are sad, scary and sometimes funny.  Eventually Burrough's mother loses her grip on sanity as well, leaving him effectively orphaned and under the care of a tremendously unstable doctor (see his book Running with Scissors.  Don't see the movie, it's not good.).  Despite the abuse and disinterest Burroughs received from his father, he still tried to get the love and attention he so desperately craved right to the end of his father's life. Kudos to Augusten for turning out as well as he did and writing such great books. My take-away: Living with a crazy person can make you crazy.

The Last Apprentice series (Delaney) -- THIS is why it took two weeks to post.  I randomly picked up book 3 of this series and enjoyed it so I ordered the rest from the library, assuming they would come in at a leisurely pace. They all came in on the same day.  So I had seven books to read and luckily they were interesting enough that I read them all in one go.  Phew.  The basic premises is that the renowned Spook in the area (a Spook is a person who deals with the dark, driving away ghosts, battling witches and trying to make the area safe) has trained 30 apprentices, many of whom didn't survive, and hasn't found one that can replace him.  He takes on Tom Ward as his last apprentice and throughout the series they battle various forms of evil with the help of a young witch, Alice.  My favourite character doesn't appear until about book 4 or 5 -- Grimalkin, the witch assassin who swears she will kill Tom but ends up being his ally.  My take-away: only order one book at a time . . . .

On the bedside table, June 30 to July 6

My job recently lent me an Ipad to trial an application for work.  It's been interesting to have one.  Maybe I'm not using it right or something but I seriously don't understand the appeal of them.  I've downloaded some apps but the Ipad is too bulky to take with me everywhere, making the apps that seem most useful (Evernote etc.) much less useful.  One app I am liking is Overdrive because it lets me download books from the library.  So this week's books were downloaded and read on my Ipad.
Oh yeah, we downloaded Angry Birds as well. Stupid birds. I may never sleep again.

NurtureShock (Bronson/Merryman) -- ah, this is one of those books that I've read before and forgot until I was well into it and it all seemed familiar.  It's an interesting book about how a lot of the common wisdom we use in raising children (praise heavily to increase self-esteem, not talking about race will make children "colour blind") are wrong and actually cause the opposite effect.  I enjoyed the information in the book (yay information!) but then felt anxious and unsettled because I obviously caused my children great harm (because I belive in full catastrophe thinking) by following what seemed like the best parenting ideas at the time.  So, it's a good read for the information but not if you're looking for parenting support and tend to be insecure anyway.  My take-away: interesting bit about how babies actually learn new words which I'll revisit now that Carson is starting to talk.

Nerd Do Well (Pegg) -- I love Simon Pegg's movies. I think Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are hysterical.  And I wanted to like this book, I really did.  Unfortunately, I couldn't even finish it.  He intersperces his biographical bits with some fictious bits where he is a superhero? with a robot butler.  I ended up just skipping those bits but even with doing that it just  . . . drug.  In the introduction he mentions that writing a biography seems a little self-important and would try to downplay that aspect of it.  Which he did to the point where it wasn't intersting.  Normally I would perservere but a HUGE stack of library books, all with non-renewable return dates and the promise of something interesting inside them finally made me give up on this one.  A third through the book and he was still around 10.  My take-away: Just because someone can write a funny movie doesn't mean they can write an interesting book.