New Book #19: Bedtime Stories

The latest book I read, I heard about in an article a few years ago, and it had been on my Amazon wish list for years. So when I saw it in Waterstones for £1 I couldn't turn it down.

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma is about a promise Alice and her dad made to read aloud together for 100 consecutive nights. Upon completing what this, they then challenged themselves to see how long they could keep their ‘streak’ of reading going. They started the challenge when Alice was 9 years old and finished on her first day of college. This totalled 3,218 nights!

I thought it was a great book to read for the challenge, as what they did was a challenge itself. Alice and her dad Jim have a very close relationship and it explored her being raised by a single father and the ups and downs of growing up.

Jim was a Librarian and his passion for reading and books was shown throughout the book. I have to admit I cried at the end when he retired from being a school librarian, but cried of happiness when in his retirement he volunteered to read to the elderly in old people’s homes and found it rewarding.

It’s a great read for anyone who is close to their dad or has a passion for reading. There’s also a list of a selection of the books Alice and her dad read if further reading inspiration is needed.

New Album #19: It’s all a Blur

My friend Jen and her husband Mark are music experts, so it’s about time that listened to one of their recommendations. Mark said I should listen to Blur’s Great Escape album, so while cooking some banana bread I got through the whole album.

Mark, Jen and Alex James from Blur, who can add making cheeses to his talents!

Like the Led Zeppelin album there were quite a few songs on the album which I recognised. The whole album felt like a concert, so it definitely made cooking more entertaining. Stand out songs for me were Charmless Man and The Universal.

Listening to the album couldn't have come at a better time as Blur is playing a gig at Hyde Park in a few weeks, which a few of my friends are going to, including Jen and Mark. So at least when they tell me all about it, I’ll know a few more of the songs they’ll be going on about!

New Book #18: Broadening my Horizons

I read this book a while back and came across it thanks to a colleague at work. Recently I’ve been interested in how people can move on from things in their life, and my colleague recommended I look at CBT which is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I bought Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Dummies and got reading it straight away. It was quite a long book with 20 odd chapters. In essence it was a textbook and was a struggle to finish it at the end, but I did find it really interesting. The theories actually make sense and can be applied for everyday use. It’s a good book to have for friends if they are going through a tough time.

New Album #16-18: Rocking, jazzy pitch

I’m whizzing through the albums for the moment, and have listened to another three. The first and second were recommendations from Linsey my music guru of the moment. Are You Experienced is a pretty epic album by Jimi Hendrix. There were a few songs that I recognised, Foxy Lady being one of them. The album was great and Jimi Hendrix really is one of the masters of guitar.

Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album was the next album I listened to and I recognised quite a few of the songs from when they were first released. The ones that hadn't been released as singles were okay, but not very memorable.

The final album came courtesy of my friend Ro who I caught up with over the weekend in a trip to Northampton for a friend’s birthday. She had the Pitch Perfect 2 soundtrack so we listened to that on the way there….and on the way back. By the end of the trip my flatmate never wanted to hear it again after the trip as we had it on repeat. I got the first film’s soundtrack which was great, and this one had more songs and more mash ups which I like the most. 

New Album #15: Monkeying Around

Album number 15 is another recommendation from my friend Linsey and her attempt to brainwash her friends in a good way with all things Alex Turner (her future husband.) He has already featured in the challenge with the Age of the Understatement album. So I listened to the Arctic Monkeys Album AM and I have to say it was pretty good.

My favourite songs are Do You Wanna Know? which days after hearing it, is still in my head. The other song is I Wanna Be Yours and as soon as the lyrics started I recognised it. I text Linsey asking why did the lyrics sound familiar and she said it was from a poem that Alex Turner studied out school.

For some reason I kept my poem anthology from school and found the poem the lyrics are from. Its called I Wanna Be Yours and is by John Cooper Clarke.

As you can tell from my notes I said back in 2001 that it was meant to be performed and was written like a pop song. Great minds think alike!

New Food #18-20: Full of Bubbles

Over the weekend I tried Ginger Beer for the first time. My parents love the stuff and as you can see from the picture, my dad has started to like photo bombing! I wasn't a great fan of the taste, and the smell was of ginger was too strong for me.

I also tried passion fruit bursting bubbles which my mum bought me for Christmas. You can put them in drink or in yoghurt, so I tried both. They tasted quite nice even though the shell was apparently made out of seaweed. Once burst it was just like a passion fruit purée.

And on Sunday I tried olives. I remember on a holiday with my uni friends, two of them; Emma and Chris would get through a jar of them very quickly and eat them like raisins. The ones I had were part of a vegetable wrap and they were okay, but then the last one tasted disgusting and has put me off eating them again.

New Books #16 and #17: The biggest Contrast

I wouldn't have thought I’d read this book for the challenge, but after some persuading from my sister Lisa I did. For my 16^th book in the challenge I read Miley Cyrus’ autobiography Miles to Go. Now Lisa wouldn't say she’s a fan of Miley Cyrus, but she’s got 2 copies of the autobiography, one for craft purposes and the other to read. And after not including the Hannah Montana movie as part of the film challenge, she said I had to read the Miley book.

So I did and it was a challenge to finish it because it wasn't the best book, very laughable in a lot of places. I learnt quite a lot of trivial things about Miley Cyrus, for example she wants to be asked more about her hands in interviews! It would be interesting for Miley to read back what she wrote and whether she kept to anything she said back when she was 16.

In the biggest contrast possible the next book I read was Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. I've only read one poem of hers before and that’s onion. And probably most people my age would've read it as it was in a poem anthology for GCSE English.

The concept of the collection of poems in The Wife is clever; it’s the view point of famous wives in history and literature. Darwin’s wife, King Kong’s wife, the wives of the Kray twins. However with a large majority of the poems, I didn’t have an extensive knowledge of the husband’s life to fully understand the poetry written. My favourite poem in the book was Mrs Fraust and that’s because of its quick pace and humour to it.