Tag Archives: book

Girl Hunter by Georgia Pellegrini (and Chukar Hunting)

This book was fine.

Woman chef becomes hunter in order to truly participate in her omnivorous life.

Pretty good stories, good looking recipes but one thing really bothered me.

The chukar.

Georgia shoots her chukar at a Texas game ranch where “…an olive brown figure rises from the left, only 10 yards in front and, crosses my path in a diagonal leap skyward.”

She who has never tasted a chukar gets her bird, and life is good. I bet she even remembers how it tastes.

I have also been chukar hunting.

It was a bit different than that.

My Dad, brother and cousin Johnny all went chukar hunting in Nevada a few years ago. After lots and lots of driving we arrived and it was beautiful.

We parked the truck down along the river.

Until I realized that I had to hike up all that beauty.

See here is the thing, the locals don’t call them “Dirty Rotten Bastards” without due cause. Chukars hang out on the side of the mountain until they see you coming, then they run – straight – up – the – mountain. When they reach the top they no doubt do a few chukar high fives before the Dirty Rotten Bastards laugh and fly down the other side of the mountain. 

I don’t run up mountains as fast as a chukar, my game vest stayed empty.

After a few days of hunting we got smarter and learned what the birds ( I mean Dirty Rotten Bastards) were flying to and we were able to set up hunts so that they flew down our side of the mountain. That sounds like it should be much better, and it was. All you had to do was stop upward movement on a 45 degree, rocky, snow covered slope, pivot outward to be facing the flying birds and then attempt to stop gasping for oxygen in the thin mountain air so as to steady your gun and get a shot off.

My game vest still stayed empty.

Then I’d watch and watch as the unscathed bastards would fly off, mark where they went down, hike back down my mountain and get ready to chase them up the next one. It was fantastic in a masochistic sort of way.

Fortunately not everyone was as bad a shot as I was and we were able to eat chukar for dinner at night.

Unlike Georgia I do not remember how it tastes.

I was so tired by the end of the day it’s possible I would have thought cardboard a delicious dinner.

Tyler (who can kill a chuckar) and dogs along ridge.

As the local mountain lion hunter told us, you go Dirty Rotten Bastard hunting the first time for fun, the next times are all revenge.

And now that I have my own bird dog and know that I have to pretend I’m training for a marathon before I leave, I can’t wait until I have an opportunity to get my revenge.

Hopefully I’ll even remember how it tastes.

Would I recommend the book? I go bird hunting because I like the hunting. Figuring out what the birds are eating, where they will be and when, watching the dogs work the field (or mountain) and maybe if I’m lucky being able to fill my game vest with something tasty for dinner. I’d rather hike up and down mountains while puzzling out how it all works with friends or family than be certain of finding game on a managed property with a guide.

The author is a hunter to find out where her food came from, participate in the harvest and cook great food. I think what she does is admirable, I think her stories are good and I’m glad she wrote a book about it, I just can’t broadly recommend it as a hunting book. It’s not my kind of hunting.

Pocketful of Posies, A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes by Sally Mavor

I love nursery rhymes.

Once, just after starting my blog I wrote about some of my thoughts on children’s books. You can take a quick peek here: Pick a Good One, O Best Beloved, I’ll wait while you do…

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After reading that I’m sure you know exactly why I love reading nursery rhymes to the girls but just in case you didn’t go read it I’ll elaborate.

Even the most well known of the nursery rhymes have uncommon words, (dame, contrary, posies) and once you venture into some of the other less well known rhymes you get even more, horrid, doth, stile, delve, caper, sup and comely just to name a few. We certainly don’t stop and identify each unknown word, that would be boring but Ivy will often ask if she doesn’t understand a word even if it’s in a rhyme that she’s heard many times before. I like to think I’ve got a decent vocabulary but I’m not throwing around comely and caper very often! I can’t think of a better way to sneakily expand vocabulary than through a bunch of short fun rhymes.

Since the rhymes are so fun and short both girls are starting to memorize a few (beyond Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star)  so we can now “read” together trading lines back and forth. Good for the memory and just plan fun!

Nursery rhymes, gotta love ’em!

Recently one of my librarian cousins told me about this book:

As you now know from reading my old post I say gorgeous illustrations trump even crappy writing when we pick out a book.

This book has nursery rhymes and fantastic pictures -what can I say librarian cousins are great!

The illustrations are photos of artwork made out of everything from acorn caps to beads, sewn together on felt backgrounds and populated with little handmade people. Ivy and Clara have both poured over the pictures and so have I, they are fascinating!

Would I recommend it? Yes!

Kudos to anyone who can name all ten nursery rhymes my uncommon words came from!

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Sometimes when everyone raves over a new book, my stubbornness emerges and I avoid reading it.

I have no good reason for this, I’m just contrary.

After approximately 45,879 people told me to read these books I was still ignoring them.

Then it was picked as our book club book last month so I gave in.

How did I like it? I’m not sure.

On the one hand:

I was completely sucked in, couldn’t put it down, dreamed about it (mostly nightmares), lost sleep over it and got the next books as soon as I could.

On the other hand:

The main character drove me nuts in the second book and was annoying in the third.  It’s got a pretty good ick factor, nightmare inducing even. By the third book I felt as though the author was sticking with her gimmick that worked instead of branching out leaving me a bit so-so on some of the plotting. And, even though this should be superfluous, the name Peeta was fine with me until I tried to say it out loud and then every time I saw it I thought of PETA and that’s just never good.

But even with all that I couldn’t put it down.

Would I recommend it? ??????

I know that since 87,902 people told me to read this some of you must be out there.  Help me out here, would you give it a broad recommendation, or do you all just like to get me to read things that are nightmare inducing??

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Ugh!

Very, very rarely have I given up on a book and failed to finish it but I gave up on this one.

It got to be so that every time a different book came my way I’d throw this one in the corner and read the new one. I even hit a point in the book where it said that I’d be throwing the book in the corner, but I kept doing it anyway. Finally it came due at the library and I gave up and sent it back.

It was recommend to me, and I liked other books this person recommended and I’ve ever read other books by this author I have enjoyed but I just couldn’t do this one.

Has anyone read this book?

Is it worth going back to and finishing (I was about 3/4 of the way through)?

Would I recommend it? Not so much!

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

First off you should know that even though the word witch is in the title vampires feature prominently in the book as well.  I usually avoid vampires, but since I never read anything sensible like a book flap, I didn’t know they were in here until it was too late. Fortunatly gruesome incidents were minimal and I ended up enjoying the book.

Would I recommend it? Well now, if you are someone like John who’s sense of the universe is completely disrupted by vampires who don’t die in the sunlight then you’d better avoid it. If the specific traits and habits of vampires are of less importance to you this may be an enjoyable read with an interesting mix of magic, history and science.

Diana Gabaldon

Start with Outlander and then keep going.

I’ve been re-reading them in between other books since Jane has been born and I’m on my 6th book of hers in a month.

I haven’t yet had the words “dinna fash” or “you’ll ken” come out of my mouth yet but it’s a good thing I’ve only got one book left or I’d be yelling “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ” next time I burn dinner.

Would I recommend them? Having just stared blankly at the computer screen for a many minitues I have no tidy way to sum up the books nor why exactly I’d recommend them.

I think I’m in a Jamie and Claire induced stuper… and now I have to go read what happens next – even though I’ve read this one twice before.

In The Woods: Who’s Been Here? by Lindsay Barrett George

I like this book for many reasons but I’ll admit the reason it really stands out is because it doesn’t shy away from the fact that goshawks eat blue-jays and fox eat woodchucks.  Perhaps it makes me overly bloodthirsty and morbid but I think that’s awesome and rare find in recent children’s books.  When you read an older book, things get eaten up all the time,  Peter Rabbit’s father was made into a pie after all.  Nowadays it’d be more likely that he’d get sold to a pet shop and spend the rest of his life in as a classroom pet.

Come to think of it, Mr Rabbit may have preferred the pie.

In any case, in this book children are walking through the woods finding animal sign.

For instance they find blue feathers on the ground, and ask the question:

“Who’s been here?”

The answer is provided on the next page – a goshawk and a blue jay.

In addition to the bloodthirsty aspect and the excellent pictures I like that there is not a lot of text. Not  much text has two benefits, either we can whip through the book at mock 10 because we’ve read it six times that day already and I really need to be getting dinner ready, or we can talk about what’s happening in the pictures, what time of year it is and try for the 7,000 time to convince Clara that it is a MUD dauber not a wood dauber.

But she is two and so I’m afraid it’s going to be a wood dauber for the foreseeable future.

Would I recommend it? Yes, there happens to be a whole series of these, I think we are going to have to find more at the library but I’m glad to own at least this one!

Terrier by Tamora Pierce

I had just finished this book and was trying to explain to John a why I liked it and this is what came out:

“It’s a book that had it been a movie I would have loved it but because I liked the book I’d never see the movie, but do you know what I mean?”

Fortunately he did know what I meant.

Here is a translation for the rest of you. The book involved a lot of beating the bad guys up with big sticks, funny quippy sort of comments from the good guys, who weren’t all guys and weren’t an angelic type of good. The main character is a girl who’s quite adept at beating people up herself, and she has an interesting purple eyed cat.

As it turns out my favorite movies are the ones where good guys aren’t really that great and they make lots of quippy comments while they are running around blowing things up, which is always good because there is significantly less gore and guts.

I’m not a fan of gore and guts.

-Or I like romantic comedies.-

What I really don’t like, and have just stopped watching altogether are movies based on books that I liked. My reasons are as follows:

1)They are never as good as the books.

2)My mind is then poisoned with movie images that I can never shake, which is extra lame because of the first reason.

3)I don’t actually read a ton of books where stuff gets blown up, so I don’t really have to worry about overlap there.

4)I do read books full of suspense. Suspense in books is fine, I just read faster, I like it. Suspense in movies irritates me and I ALWAYS jump. I hate jumping.

5) I also hate nightmares. It takes a bit in books to give me nightmares, Steven King gives me nightmares. When it comes to movies I could probably manage a nightmare after watching the Sandlot. Therefore half the books I read are movies I would never see for fear of nightmares.

6)If I want to have deep thoughts about something I’ll read a book. Movies are, in my opinion, for open mouthed, drooling, mindless, entertainment. Therefore if I’ve read a book that requires any sort of brain power I’m not interested in seeing it on the screen.

When in comes to movies I didn’t love Seven Pounds (way too much thinking) I won’t be watching the Time Travelers Wife, or Inkheart (because making a movie about a book like that is just wrong) and don’t even get me started on Harry Potter…

But I did really like this book. So much so that if it becomes a movie I’ll never – ever – watch it.

Would I recommend it? Yes!