Five Minutes Peace

GUEST BLOG: Cally Taylor's Five Books to Curl Up With

I am delighted to welcome Cally Taylor - whose debut novel, Heaven Can Wait, Helen reviewed just yesterday - to Five Minutes Peace. Take it away, Cally!

When Keris asked me to write a guest post about my five favourite books to curl up I had to have a long, hard think. I know what my five favourite books of all time are (although I do switch a couple around occasionally) but ‘books to curl up with' is a completely different issue! To me a book you curl up with is akin to chocolate, a log fire or a deep bubble bath – something that allows you to escape from the real world for a while.  Here they are...

1. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

In a nutshell: It’s about a man who, when his girlfriend leaves him, rakes through his past relationships to try and understand where it all went wrong.

Why I love it: I think High Fidelity was the first book - written by a man about relationships - I’d read that wasn’t from a pervert’s point of view (Lolita by Nabakov) or obsessed with sex (anything by Henry Miller). There’s something so everyday-man about Rob, the main character in High Fidelity. He could be a friend of mine, or even someone I’ve dated and for that reason he’s very real. I loved his obsession with music, his constant list-making, his flawed, funny personality and couldn’t help but root for him all the way through.

BOOK REVIEW: Heaven Can Wait

I'd been looking forward to the gorgeous looking Heaven Can Wait by Cally Taylor for ages and I wasn't disappointed. I laughed - out loud (unheard of for me) - at a sentence on the very first page. Good start, I thought, then went on to laugh even more towards the end of the first chapter.

Cally has written short stories for various magazines and anthologies and won competitions for her writing but Heaven Can Wait is her debut novel. It is about Lucy Brown who, on the eve of her wedding day, has a fatal accident. Yes, that's right. Fatal.

So this isn't your regular chick lit. As you may have guessed from the title - this is chick lit with a supernatural twist. 

BOOK NEWS & COVERS: The Nanny Returns by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus

You know, I had no idea Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin had written a follow-up to The Nanny Diaries. I spotted it on Chick Lit Examiner and went "Ooh!" then "Ooh!" again at the lovely cover. And then, of course, I checked Amazon UK for the British cover. Hmmmm.

Now, I do like it and if I'd seen it first I probably would have thought it was lovely, but the US cover is just so much more modern, don't you think? I mean, it's still got the skyline and the umbrella, but it looks like a book for grown-ups whereas the UK one could easily be YA or even younger. (Oh and US have gone with "Nanny Returns" whereas the UK version has "The Nanny Returns". Why?)

Anyway, covers aside, you can read an excerpt here from Monday.

Harry Potter Themed Poster

Now with a teething child, a hard working husband, a child off school for half term plus trying to have a career of my own, I do let things get to me a little. I've been tempted to buy a Keep Calm and Carry On poster for some time to remind me not to get so strung out but I'm glad I put it off. Because I have to have this poster.

It makes me smile every time I look at it. From Etsy.

[via Domestic Sluttery]

Mma Ramotswe's Cookbook

This is such a lovely idea by Stuart Brown. Mma Ramotswe from The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency has got a cookbook out. Featuring a foreword by Alexander McCall Smith, this is a recipe book for the traditionally built. Stews, fruit cakes and redbush tea all feature along with lavish photography and well laid out instructions.

There is also a chapter entitled 'Making Time for Cake' which sums it up nicely.

Completely genius book packaging

One of my favourite blogs is called Lovely Package and it's all about packaging and design. The pictures above are of a Hitchcock Novel Set. It's a collection of novels that were made into movies by the director Alfred Hitchcock. Taking the idea that these novels were the original screenplays to the films, the designer Sheldon Hui, packaged them to look like movie scripts.

Not only do I completely love them, it also made me think about how book packaging could be developed. Not a huge amount has been done in this area, I don't think (although I'm happy to be corrected). I've seen books in boxes and cardboard sleeves, plus books with interactive elements, but the possibilities are endless, particularly if you think about the idea of putting video in too. I feel quite agog.

BOOK NEWS: What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

I loved Malcolm Gladwell's first two books - The Tipping Point and Blink, but I haven't read his third, Outliers, yet (I was put off by the fact that he apparently couldn't find a single female example of genius), but I'm still keen to read What the Dog Saw.

It's a collection of his columns from The New Yorker and includes "What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?" (I heard him talking about the hair dye issue on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge and it was fascinating.)

But to more pressing matters: which cover? On the left is the US cover. I like it because it's simple and matches the previous covers. On the right is the UK cover. I like it because it's a bit different and the picture made me smile*. What do you think?

* I accidentally typed that as "slime". Heh.

BOOK REVIEW: Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Reviewed by Stella

In a dystopian future, Toby and Ren are two former members of God's Gardeners, a cult which prefers to grow their own food from the ground and only resorts to eating meat in the very direst of straits. Separately, however, it seems that Toby and Ren are in the direst of straits since they seem to be the only two people on earth who have survived "the flood", a catastrophe foretold by the leaders of God's Gardeners which has wiped out civilisation as they knew it.

In their two separate voices, Toby and Ren tell their stories of life as members of the cult, life after the cult and how they managed to avoid falling foul of the catastrophic events which lead to their current predicaments.

CHRISTMAS LIST: Who Am I? by Anthony Adolph

Yep, I've thrown caution to the wind and mentioned the C word. I know. I'm as sorry about it as you are, but the fact of the matter is, there are only, I don't know, fifty-odd shopping days until Christmas and so we need to think about it. We do. We do and that's final.

So I'm going to start featuring some books that I think would make good Christmas presents, starting with Who Am I? which I think is completely brilliant. I was planning to give it to my 10-year-old nephew, but I might just end up keeping it for myself. It's a little bit like Who Do You Think You Are? but in book form (obviously) and with lots more facts and history and activities ... because it's aimed at children. It's not cheap at £14.99 (although it's currently only £8.99 on Amazon), but it's definitely one that certain kids will find fascinating.

BOOK REVIEW: Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown

Because I am very slow, I've only just discovered Derren Brown. I'd heard of him, of course, I think it would be almost impossible not to have at least heard of him, but I'd never watched anything until his lottery... er... prediction. (I know he didn't really predict it, don't shout at me, but 'announcing the lottery numbers just after they'd been announced' isn't the same.) Even so, I became a bit fascinated (and a bit in love) with him and then a friend recommended his book.

Described as "a journey into the structure and psychology of magic", Tricks of the Mind examines and explains various tricks, from card and coin tricks to memory systems, hypnosis, "unconscious communication" and what Brown describes as "anti-science, pseudo science and bad thinking" which includes the supernatural, alternative medicine and mediums/psychics. Unless you're absolutely fascinated with this kind of stuff, you probably won't want to read it all (I skipped some of the hypnosis and memory parts) but it's definitely worth trying every chapter - you never know, you might find yourself glued to it*.

* Not literally. Probably.