Georgette

Interesting juxtapose between western decluttering conventions and the KonMari method. She recommends throwing out things that “doesn't spark joy”. I can't throw away a perfectly good item when it can be donated or sold. Slows down the process but reduces landfill. Having said that, I can't disagree with being conscious of what you own and keeping items that make you happy. She also assigns personalities to her items, treating them as though they had feelings. It's weird when you read it in a book teaching you how to do stuff, but I think most of us do it already.

This book is the Muggle equivalent of ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them'. An overly-thick tome with gorgeous photographs of fairy-like creatures in their pristine habitats, detailing what they eat and giving a glimpse of how they live. I didn't finish reading this book. The date indicates when I gave up. Encyclopedias are only fun if you are very interested in the subject or if you're looking for something, which I'm neither. Stars for the photography and layout though.

I needed a couple of days to recover from this novel. By the end of it, I was drained yet enthralled. My reader-self was in pieces on the floor, but my inner psychopath was as delighted as the day I discovered [b:The Silence of the Lambs 23807 The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter, #2) Thomas Harris https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390426249s/23807.jpg 22533] and Hannibal Lecter. Hey, if a certain Ms Steele can have an inner goddess, I can have an inner psychopath. The premise is as it says on the tin - boy is tired of living, brutally murders a pretty and popular classmate, and goes on the run. Eventually he is caught, or rather, he turned himself in because he figured the cops are too slow and dumb to actually catch him. While the drama played out around him, he clinically toys with the China justice system and everyone swarming around his case - his mother, his aunt, his victim's mother, the investigating officers, the journalists. He spends a lot of time alone and contemplates suicide to end the boredom of endless waiting. We sit with him inside his head for the entire ride and sometimes there's nothing interesting going on in there, which I suspect is rather different from how traditional crime novels work. I also suspect this contributed to the number of reviews saying that the second half of the story was slow. Usually the action and frenzy builds towards the end of the novel when the heroes are closing in on the criminal before he gets away. In this case, Su (which is the boy's name, mentioned perhaps just once in the entire novel) wasn't interested in getting away. He just wanted them to solve the puzzle of why he did it and execute him already, and holy shit they're taking bloody forever.While his act was completely premeditated, we don't get a full grasp of why he did it until he explained it in the end. I admit that I'm not a fan of confessional monologues that run several pages, but I was pretty invested at this point and didn't mind that much. I found myself nodding along to his explanation (again with that inner psychopath thing).This is the first time I've read a novel from China that I enjoyed. I've decided not to name names that made me stop, and call it a day here.

I've not read a ‘Pearls before Swine' compilation prior to this one although I've chuckled at the ones a friend regularly shares on Facebook. This book was a delight, combining the slapstick of the Crocs with their long suffering zeeba neighba, and the comedy of Rat, Goat and Pig. Puns are fun!

My ARC was courtesy of NetGalley.

How could I have NOT heard of this webcomic before??

I don't live with cats, but I'm somewhat familiar with them because I have many friends who are cat slaves, and I used to work at the local animal shelter.

Georgia Dunn's cast of three cats - Lupin, Puck and Elvis - report on the hard-hitting issues such as “The People bought some stupid-looking thing for the dining room”, and “The house is under attack from a mysterious red dot”, or “The Woman is trying to use a laptop”. Cue some extremely predictable cat behaviours with deadpan commentary and the seriousness of getting a job done.

Bonus points: I'm a journalist... a newspaper one, but a journalist nonetheless and I can relate to the importance of being on top of current issues such as being at the scene where bacon is being cooked or entertaining great suspicion when you are told you're not allowed to be somewhere.

I love this book so hard. I read it at least two more times and bookmarked the website so I can catch up with the latest news, which is further along than where the book ended. I showed this galley and gave the URL to a couple of colleagues who have cats AND a Human Pupa. This is probably my best discovery this month.

If you are an animal rescuer or support your animal shelter, the reporter cats have a wonderful Special Report on shelter cats here which is worth passing along: http://www.breakingcatnews.com/breaking-cat-news-special-report-shelter-cats

This ARC is courtesy of NetGalley.

I acquired this digital copy of Dirty Pretty Things by Michael Faudet via NetGalley.

Stars: 2/5
tl;dr: Read this book if you “don't like, don't read” poetry.
Full Review (with photos, bonus commentary and a surprise appearance by the author):
http://www.georgettetan.com/2016/06/review-dirty-pretty-things-michael-faudet/

For some reason, I was disproportionately excited about finally getting a copy of Faudet's poetry book. Perhaps it's because I've read and liked Lang Leav's Love & Misadventure, and because the nature of their relationship resulted in the expected cross-promotion on my newsfeed. You probably encountered the hype for both, even if you're not the poetry-reading type. The promotional work was extremely well done and quite likely contributed to its great success.

According to his blurb everywhere, this book is a “#1 Best Seller”. It was also a Goodreads Readers Choice Award Nominee for Poetry last year, but everyone (including Leav's Memories) lost out to Trista Mateer and her second poetry collection The Dogs I Have Kissed.

Leav wrote the introduction to the book, which was not unexpected. She shed some light on how they met, and that they already share a similar aesthetic, which you'd notice if you've read both their work. She talked about how their writing brought them together. What writer won't find that terribly romantic and who won't want a match who's also their creative soulmate?

A bunch of pages in and I was already getting this uncomfortable feeling like I have overextended my expectations of the book.

Nonetheless, I soldiered on but I was making updates on both my Litsy and Goodreads account as I went along. But the sinking feeling continued. One of the big problems I had with Dirty Pretty Things is that the poems appear on one page, followed by a blank page. I grabbed my copy of Love & Misadventure (it's from the same publisher) and found the same thing, cept that I didn't really notice it with physical book. On an iPad, it's an extra swipe.

There were many of these one-liners, and some were good but the others seemed like an awful waste of a page. I mean, I've shot off a repartee or two on Facebook every now and then and gotten a lot of likes for it. I wouldn't have thought to compile them all in a book for prosperity, but maybe that's why I'm toiling in obscurity instead of being a best-selling author.

Okay, I don't hate it all. There's a few in there that I liked, including a couple of one-liners. And you gotta admit that the pithy stuff fits nicely in a social media graphic, doesn't leave things hanging the way an excerpt from a novel does, and can be enjoyed whether or not you go looking for the rest of it.

Other reviewers mentioned this: you'll probably notice the phrases “dusky pink nipples” and “white cotton panties”, among others, jumping out at you. If you're the drinking type, go get sloshed.

There's a few longer pieces - short stories or flash fiction. I felt that those were more substantial. Faudet is capable of writing some engaging prose; I enjoyed those more and wonder how he'd fare writing a novel.

Dirty Pretty Things was the first ARC I downloaded from NetGalley and I was ready to give it all the stars. I wanted to sigh dreamily at every page. Instead I made a Twilight/50 Shades comparison.

The description of this graphic novel is interesting, particularly when gender dysphoria is gaining recognition, technology is close to perfecting full body transplants, and society is grappling with the ethics of it. Here's the official blurb:

A dystopian tale that analyzes the conflict between perception and identity through the struggle of three people who consider a ‘body transplant' as a solution to their lives.

This and the cover design was enough to perk some interest on some rather heavy topics. I appreciate where Rios was trying to go with this but a couple of things didn't really work for me, particularly with the red-pink monochrome that the comic uses throughout (feels unfinished somehow) and the skinny text that had me frequently pinching and zooming the page on my iPad. It read better at second try, but there were parts where the panels and action was chaotic and hard to follow.

There were three main characters - Noa, Mike and Charlotte. Noa identifies as a man but feels trapped in a petite female body that will never turn into the hulking lumberjack type like Mike. Mike claims to be an ex-convict seeking a new life. Charlotte claims to be bored. On Noa's request, they sit down after their body transplant briefing for a chat because Noa is the youngest (17) among the three and needed some hand-holding.

In the end, Noa was the only one with a fully developed story line. I won't give away what became of Mike and Charlotte, but it does leave you wondering, especially with Charlotte.

Rios partnered with neurologist Miguel Alberte Woodward, MD for the science-y parts, including an essay at the end of the volume entitled ‘Stitching (an) I.D. Together', which I skimmed and ultimately skipped over. Perhaps the more medical or scientific minded reader would find this more interesting.

This ARC was courtesy of NetGalley.

I think the thing I'm most confused about is the target audience versus the actual protagonist age and theme in this book. Isn't Middle Grade supposed to be the pre-teen era where pimples, cracking voices and training bras are suppose to be the main problems?

On her 16th birthday, Princess Madeline is rudely surprised when her father informs her that she will pick a husband from a selection of royal suitors coming to her ball that night, not unlike how Cinderella's Prince Charming held a ball to meet all the eligible young ladies in the kingdom. This immediately tells you why she had to be 16; another day closer to Middle Grade and this book won't have seen the light of day.

Like all fairy tale princesses, Madeline is headstrong and wants to make her own decisions but the King was not hearing any of it because she is clearly a pawn piece to be married off for better kingdom perks. So she runs away, a plan she cobbled together in maybe an hour, and made up the rest of it as she went along. She gets kidnapped by bandits, who menaces her as menacingly as possible with readers whose average ages are just rolling over into the double digits. Which is to say they barely did anything except save her from the trouble of where to run next.

Meanwhile, her love interest is a young knight who fell in love with her at first sight. She wasn't aware he existed until he won the role as her champion. And naturally they ended up together because he was the least repulsive choice in the end.. Sigh.

I think this novella is fine if you're young and don't have very sophisticated expectations in story plots or character development. Here's a spunky princess with a problem. Here is a princess getting into deeper trouble outside her safe zone. Here comes her knight in shining armour.

I like the spunk and wanting to break out of roles assigned to you by the patriarchy. It's just that we don't really get to know the characters enough to sympathise or relate. Perhaps the constrains of the MG category is to blame here, because the writing was actually quite pleasant to read.

This reading copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

This is a gorgeous graphic novel, emphasis on the graphic part because there are no words here. The story unfolds in images and each is picture perfect. I found the solitary lion mentioned in the description a little hard to follow because I can't tell one lion from another. Usually a second read will clear things up somewhat, but my app kept freezing when I tried opening this book again. So I can't say much here cept that I'm excited to learn that there's a first and second book before this one and will be looking out for them. Worth it for the artwork alone.

This digital copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

This was pretty damn hard to put down.

Detective Jude Fontaine escaped a 3-year captivity after overpowering her captor and making a run for it. But she was not the same person anymore. Everything about her and her life before she was kidnapped has changed - she was replaced at work, her boyfriend was seeing another woman, she was a cold shell of the happy normal person she used to be. And she gained a new ability, a bit of a super-heightened sense in smell and the ability to read body language.

Despite being plucked out of a situation and dumped into another, Jude coped and bounced back. She returned to the force and was given a new partner Detective Uriah Ashby, who had reservations on whether or not she should return to work at all. They immediately get thrown into a new case, which of course has some kind of connection to both Jude's secret personal history and recent kidnapping. All this and how it eventually wrapped up is a little too convenient, but the writing is good and pulls you along to the next page. You really want to find out what happens to Jude and whether or not she is truly safe.

The great part about The Body Reader is that you have characters who have been through hell and are stronger for it, despite moments of human weakness. Both Jude and Uriah are compelling characters. Their partnership had a rocky start, but Uriah started to care and Jude started allowing someone to care. This didn't lead to any romance, thankfully, because that would have been way too cliche.

I'm interested in read more from this author if The Body Reader isn't just one sample of a formulaic plot.

I don't feel like this review did the book justice, but if you're a fan of thrillers, this is a pretty good bet.

This digital copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

I feel a little bad rating this book although I can't finish it but there you have it. I couldn't get through the book. It sounds like it had potential and there's a few interesting anecdotes about the origins of some acronyms like SNAFU. But it's pretty dry, like a grammar book trying to be hip but not quite hitting the mark. The illustration of the parrot is also kinda “eh”. Maybe fine in its original run in 1991, but in need of updating.

Copy courtesy of NetGalley

I must say the preface raised my expectations a bit too much. The artwork reminds me of the older comics I inherited from my dad (circa 50-70s) which is kinda cool. But it was a bit hard to get into. I liked that the author plucked from mythologies all over the world. It's just that ultimately I can't tell most of them apart. Towards the end, the roles became a bit clearer but I've already forgotten or missed details from the beginning. I might give this another read if I can get hold of a hard copy. The page breaks was a pain in the ass when you get the full spreads.

Copy courtesy of NetGalley.

I didn't know there was a Jem and the Holograms comic book, so obviously I missed Volume 1 and 2.

This is not your mum's Jem and the Holograms!

As a huge fan of the cartoon, I had a small meltdown reading this modern incarnation, and I mean it in a good way. For one, I barely recognised anyone. I could only tell them apart from their hair colour (and by Kimber's rebellious response to everything!) but the girls have been given very different body types and I love it! This makes you think about how the 80's cartoon versions were boxy-shouldered carbon copies of each other cept for the different hair and skin colour. Synergy is sleek and sexy, yet still quite sci-fi.

So Synergy somehow acquired a virus called Silica who takes over and creates evil personalities for everyone. Aim? To take over the world. What else right? Not too surprisingly the cure was for Jem and the Holograms to combine forces with the Misfits, leading to several gorgeous musical montage spreads which tragically is silent on an ebook page.

Other stuff that I found different, new or outstanding compared to the cartoon include a couple of gay/lesbian relationships, one transgender woman, and some very lovely examples of female friendships. Truly outrageous and utterly timely!

Honestly speaking, the sexual orientation and dating life of anyone who is not Jem/Jerrica falls in the background when you're 10 years old. The only thing I remember is the insipid Jem-Jerrica-Rio love triangle.

Recommended for both past fans and new ones!

This copy digital was courtesy of NetGalley.

Utterly delightful! I like the nod to classic children books, and the message is obvious and narrowly escapes being preachy. Mostly because after the roam through the very squishy and greasy Ovenland makes my stomach curl a little as well. It's also lovely to see a young POC as the main character.

This copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

Part of what makes me squee in delight is that this takes place in Singapore, which is close enough to Malaysia geographically and culturally for me to relate and not have to keep checking the glossary. It is a cute mystery story with a smart but perpetually hungry kid and his wisecracking robot sidekick. In this first book, Sam invents Watson the robot, who immediately embarks with him to solve the mystery of a missing cookbook while traipsing all over Singapore's food heritage.

I found that there's actually a lot of books in this series already, so congratulations to the authors AJ Low getting picked up by Andrews McMeel!

This digital copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

I'm more than halfway through but I feel that it's futile to cling on for any longer because I've long lost the plot. Something happens in the town of Mammoth View, causing an exodus. Those who were left behind react differently. There was a couple of bank robbers, two police officers, a teen girl, probably another handful of characters. I don't know. I lost track. There's far too much going on yet not enough to move action along. It felt like there were as many characters and elaborate back stories as Game of Thrones, cept less interesting.

At first I wanted to push through and see how it ended, but I'm starting to recognise how I'm putting it off more and more, while not starting a new book because of ‘incomplete book' guilt. Enough of that. Life is too short.

This copy was courtesy of NetGalley.

Dec 22:
It went to New Zealand and back again with me. First person narrative kicking off in broken English but gradually improving. She charts her experience in England and with her lover there, comparing the difference between cultures. Quite an enjoyable read.

Dec 2:
And I find it while gathering all the scattered books around the house! Turned out it was in my bookshelf all along with the spine facing in.

Dec 1:
Filing it under ‘abandoned' for the time being until I discover where exactly did I accidentally abandoned the book. I was enjoying it too!