Memo Pad

I’ve been umming and ahing about my Memo Pad posts lately. I ‘m not sure whether I should make my book reviews into their own post or not. The original idea was for the memo pad to be a summing up of all the things I have done in the month, including what books I have read and what crafts I have done. Recently though, the book reviews have taken up quite a lot of space and now I’m wondering if it might be better for them to have their own post? What do you think? For now I’ll keep them here.

Books read: 3

Artemis Fowl (Book 1) By Eoin Colfer *****

This book is about a Artemis, a young, Irish, criminal mastermind who finds out about the existence of faeries and magical folk so naturally tries to find a way to exploit them. I never read these books as a kid and I’m honestly not sure why. It’s the exact kind of story I was into at the time and two of my best friends in primary school loved these books so I really don’t know how they passed me by. I decided to give them a try recently and have all 8 (?) books in the series waiting for me to read now. I thought the first book was good, it’s obviously a children’s book and I am expecting the world to get more complicated and interesting as the series goes on as children’s series tend to. But I thought it was a solid start to the series.

Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle #1) by Christopher Paolini *****

This book is a pretty typical fantasy story. A young boy finds something magical (in this case a dragons egg that hatches), goes on a quest, meets a beautiful girl that he falls in love with at first sight and becomes a hero. Throw an evil king, dwarfs and elves into the mix and bam! story. I normally don’t care too much when it comes to originality in a story, so long as the story is interesting and exciting you can rip off other authors ideas all you like and I will still enjoy it (I mean, there’s a reason those books were so popular). I won’t give you 5 stars for it but you’ll still get a decent grade. So when I give this 2 stars know that it didn’t have anything to do with the unoriginality (is that a word?). I wanted to like this book but the dialog is just SO bad. It’s wooden and abrupt, the main characters all sound exactly the same. I’m sorry but a farm boy with no education is not going to sound the same and use the same words as a well educated story teller. The book did get better. I think I would give the first third of this story a 1 star but the tail end (say the last third) was better. Maybe it was because there was more action so the bad dialog wasn’t so obvious?

The Shepherd’s Crown (A Disc World Novel) by Sir Terry Pratchett *****

Tiffany Aching is a witch living on the Chalk and yet again she’s called on to do some difficult things. I’ve loved this mini series of books on Tiffany Aching set within the Disc World, they’re aimed at younger readers and don’t have as much of the confusing stuff as the other Disc World books but are still wonderfully Pratchett. I’m really glad his last book was a Tiffany Aching one.

 

I’ve also been reading a lot of fanfic this month. Mainly because I watched the new Star Wars film recently. But I ended up going back and re-reading one of my favourite series of fanfics this month too. It’s a Star Trek based fic set in the reboot universe (I love the first reboot film, I thought all the characters were amazing) and they’re prequels to that first film. Now, I don’t normally mention fanfics here but the series truly is fantastic. There are 4 stories in the series and they basically show all the events that happened during Kirk’s time at the academy that made Captain Pike trust him with being First Officer in the film. If you like Star Trek at all, I definitely think you should check them out. The first one is called Convergence

My Month:

I got my hair cut this month, it was getting too long for me to handle (and by this i mean it was a whole 4 inches long!) and I finally went to a local hairdressers. It has been ages since I went to one. Before we moved we had a hairdresser that would come to us and do it in my bedroom for me to use the least amount of energy possible. But since we’ve moved I was able to get a little easier. I’ll still only be getting it cut every 4 or 5 months but its great knowing I can get there.

Craftwise, I’ve started doing a bit more of a crochet shawl that I started years ago then put in a draw and forgot. The pattern is called I promise you pineapples. I love the yarn I’m using, it’s by far the thinnest yarn I’ve ever used (sock weight) but it’s a lovely colour. I still love it even though I got it into a tangled mess that took me hours and hours to untangle giving me quite severe back pain for a few days. But hey, that’s love. This is my Ravelry page for the project if you want any more info/a link to the pattern.

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