Author: latepaul

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Accidental Diet diet L3 lesamy Less is More

The Accidental Diet – Week 1

So… I’m doing it again. And a bit like when I started Lesamy it’s partly by accident. With Lesamy I started out wanting to get fit so I wouldn’t get out of breath easily and ended up weighing myself to see if I’d lost any weight. This time I started doing some walks in the evenings, largely to get me out of the house and because I thought the exercise would help my mood, and give me time to think. That was about a week ago and I noticed that I’d started to lose weight.

What I’d realised though is that I want to do something a bit more sustainable, also something where I’m not necessarily exercising every day. That tends to make me tired which leads to a certain weariness which doesn’t help the motivation. So I’ve decided to do Intermittent Fasting, specifically the 5:2 version – which means you fast for 2 days a week and eat what you like the rest. “Fasting” means 600 calories, which is low but I can do that for a day if I know I can eat what I like the next day.

I will keep up the exercise but I’ll have at least two days off, probably the fasting days but not necessarily. It’s tempting to make Mondays both a fast and exercise day since it should help me weigh-in a little lower. But we’ll see.

Anyway, here’s my first week’s numbers – and yes they’re good, and yes I know if you do anything after not bothering for a while you tend to lose a good bit at first.

Lost: 3.4lbs
Lost so far: 3.4lbs
Average Weekly Loss: 3.4lbs
Weight: 279.8lbs (20st)

Created by MyFitnessPal – Nutrition Facts For Foods

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 29: The Girl in the Wave – Robert Kibble

The Girl in the Wave is different from the other books I’ve reviewed in two ways – first it was written by someone I know quite well and used to work with, second it’s not actually been published yet. So I’m reviewing a book you can’t get your hands on yet. Robert has published a couple of other books Fighting the Philosophical Leopard and other stories and Past Presence. I’ve read a couple of stories from Leopard but when I asked him which book I should read first he encouraged me to read this one rather than Past Presence.

So a bit of a dilemna for me, but not for long. I’d read it and I want it to count so I need to review it on my blog. What I will do is withhold a score since that would be unfair since what I read is probably not the final version. As I understand it he’s planning to give it a final edit at some point and then it will probably be published.

The Girl in The Wave is the story of a man who’s just finished university and is living with his parents in Cornwall and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’s half-heartedly looking for jobs but mostly he spends his days pretty aimlessly. He’s taking a walk along the beach one day when he sees the eponymous Girl, swimming in the sea and suspended momentarily in a wave. He becomes fascinated by her and tries to find out who she is and of course wants to meet her. Once he has actually met this mystery girl they begins a relationship of sorts but in many ways the mystery only increases.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a quick read, I read it on a trip away of a couple of nights – being a novella rather than a novel. I think it’s a book of two halves. In the first part we follow the narrator as he discovers and tries to find out more about and meet this “girl”. In the second part we find out about her story. I found the first part of the story more intriguing, Robert builds the sense of mystery well so that you reader want to know more about this woman as much as the main character does. In the second part of the book at lot of the questions are answered and it becomes much more about suspense and tension. This was still enjoyable but not quite as much as the first part.

To be fair some of this may be due to some formatting issues in the version I had which were particularly pronounced in the second half of the book and quite distracting. Also I know that the ending in particular is something Robert was not 100% happy with. I suspect if he can figure out a way to end it differently he may well do that.

So no score for now, but when there’s an official version, I’ll probably re-visit it.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 28: Pump Six and Other Stories – Paolo Bacigalupi

It’s been a while since I did a book of short stories. I got this book through Humble Bundle’s first ebook bundle. For those that haven’t heard of them Humble Bundle usually specialise in “indie” computer games. They sell based on a “pay what you want” basis with some money going to charity and the files are unencumbered by DRM. I bought one of their earlier bundles because I wanted to support the business model which I like (particularly the no-DRM part). Anyway I now have an extra 12 books on my TBR list so I thought I’d better read at least one.

I’d heard of Bacigalupi and already owned The Windup Girl, but hadn’t read him. All I really knew was that he was well regarded and could be broadly considered “steampunk”.

When you’re trying to review a collection of stories you naturally tend to look for themes or similarities. This is perhaps unfair to some of the individual stories but I’m going to do it anyway because otherwise I need to review each story in turn and I don’t have the time or the heart for that.

I suppose there are two things that stand out for me that came through in nearly all the stories. The first is that Bacigalupi’s style veers toward a lot of description of the background details. This isn’t something I always enjoy but I know that for some it puts you right there in that world and makes it feel rich and complete. The second is that the stories are almost all kind of morality tales. They take a trend that’s occurring in our current time and extrapolate it into a possible future and show the ill effects this might have, whether that’s patented GM crops in The Calorie Man or global warming’s effect on water conservation with The Tamarisk Hunter. Again, potentially this isn’t something I will always enjoy because it can veer toward preachy but I think it most cases it avoided being too directly that.

My favourites were Pump Six – the tale of a society in decline where no-one is any longer interested in the technology that supports their lifestyle, Pop Squad – the story of a future where the trade-off for constant re-juvenation is enforced infertility, The Fluted Girl – about body modification gone mad, and The People of Sand and Slag – about the effects of physical invulnerability.

7/10 – definitely a good collection, some gems here.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 27: Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett

I originally started this review with “I didn’t plan it but it turns out that my 26th book is Discworld #26 Thief of Time” – except I’d miscounted, it’s my 27th. Anyway this was a book I was looking forward to because I knew that it was a favourite of many people. There’s perhaps one more Discworld book that I am looking forward to in this way and that’s #29, Night Watch.

Thief of Time is a story about the History Monks and how they manage Time on the Disc. It’s about a young apprentice to Lu Tze, the Sweeper, who first appeared in #13 Small Gods. It’s also about the building of a clock so accurate that it follows the tick of the Universe.

I almost don’t know how to review Discworld books any more because I keep coming back to the same themes, that they’re good but I don’t love them like I once did, that I’m not sure if that’s the books or me, that maybe I just know the patterns of humour too well, that they’re always at least pleasant and some are excellent.

So by reputation this was supposed to be an excellent one and whilst it’s toward the better end, particularly of the Discworld books I’ve read lately it didn’t blow me away.

There’s a lot of fun to be had though and I wouldn’t want to put anyone off.

7/10 another reliably good Discworld read.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 26: Finders Keepers – Belinda Bauer

So if you’re going to read, or are reading, Darkside then you may not want to read this review yet. It contains no actual spoilers but by implication it tells you at least one thing about the previous book.

Finders Keepers is I suppose the third in a trilogy of books which began with Blacklands but it’s more like the second Jonas Holly book after Darkside.

Finders Keepers begins as a child goes missing from a car on Exmoor and a note is left which reads “You Don’t Love Her”. More children go missing and similar notes are left. Once again a police team is sent across from Taunton, largely the same characters and once again Holly is involved in the investigation.

Steven Lamb returns again and plays a key role. Also this time we also get to meet his younger brother Davey who has a plan to catch the kidnapper.

There are things that Bauer is good at that she still does well in this book – the creation of tension and suspense, relationships between characters, particularly in families – but somehow it wasn’t as effective overall as her previous two books. I definitely didn’t have that same sense of wanting to know what happens next and being caught up in it. Also I think the actual crime and the villain are, ah, a little weird.

The main reason I read this straight after Darkside was to get resolution on Holly himself and you do get that but by the time it came the character was so abused – both in terms of himself and the way he’s used in the story – that I was a little jaded and didn’t really care. Which is a shame.

6/10 – not bad but failed to live up to the potential of the previous two books.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 25: Darkside – Belinda Bauer

Darkside by Belinda Bauer is the follow up to Blacklands which I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. I bought Darkside as soon as it came out but with the way these things go I found myself reading other things first. (This, by the way, is why I’m wary of start a series.)

It’s not quite a sequel to Blacklands although it’s set in the same part of the world and Steven Lamb, the hero of that book is a character in this. It’s a few years later and Steven is now a teenager but the book follows the village policeman Jonas Holly. Holly is relatively young and had a promising career but had to give it up when his wife got sick. They now live in the village of Shipcott. When an elderly woman is murdered as the local policeman Holly is obviously involved, but after a bad start with a team sent over from Taunton he soon becomes sidelined even as the investigation grows and more murders follow.

Something happened to me when I read this book that used to happen all the time and hardly ever seems to happen any more. It’s the reason I read and the thing I look for when I read. I got so swept up in what was happening that I couldn’t put the book down. I just wanted to keep reading in order to find out what happened next. So for that reason alone I really loved this book. I thought the characters were great and the interactions interesting. The head of the Taunton team, who takes an instant dislike to Holly, seems at first blush to just be a barely competent detective who is merely there as an adversary and contrast to Holly, but actually he’s more interesting than that. Holly’s relationship with his wife and the relationship between his work and looking after his wife are also story threads that engage.

There is one thing, and that is the ending. It wasn’t that I was disappointed or annoyed, merely that there was something about it that was left unanswered. Maybe it didn’t need to be and so I chose to reserve judgement.

9/10 – a slightly ambiguous ending but it didn’t spoil an excellent book.




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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 24: The Truth – Terry Pratchett

Yay! Discworld #25. And I’m now into the 21st Century with my catch-up.

The Truth is an Ankh-Morpork centred novel about the arrival in the city of the printing press and the newspaper industry. I knew that this was one of Melissa’s less favourite discworld books and so I was prepared for it to be not that great. So maybe partly because of lower expectations I actually quite enjoyed it.

It was a little odd to have a story in which Vimes and Vetinari appeared but were not a huge part of the plot. There were a couple of new characters that seemed to be a bit over the top just for the sake of it. But I quite liked the protagonist, I liked his assistant/romantic interest and I enjoyed a couple of the other minor characters.

My reviews of Discworld books risk getting samey (like the books themselves?) so I’ll leave it there I think. I’ll try to save myself for the books that make more impact, and I believe #26 is supposed to be very good.

7/10 – another fun discworld romp.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 23: Wool – Hugh Howey

I don’t want to bore you with apologies about how long it’s been since the last RED update (or blog post of any kind), however I will say, to be fair to Wool, that the long delay has been to do with events in my personal life making me not feel like reading very much. I stalled in the middle of this book but not because of the book itself.

Wool is set in a post-apocalyptic world where what’s left of humanity lives in an underground silo and the worst crimes are punishable by being sent outside for ‘cleaning’ which involves spending your last few minutes, while the poisonous atmosphere eats through your suit, wiping down the cameras so that the silo-dwellers can temporarily get a clear view of the outside. But, as ever, all is not what it seems. Is the silo really all there is?, is the outside really a poisonous uninhabitable wasteland?

First thing to say about Wool is that it was originally published in 5 parts and it shows. The first part – the original short story – is complete in itself. However it gives away some information as part of its climax that I think you’d want to keep back if writing the novel from scratch. Parts 2-5 are more connected but suffer from having being written individually and so characters and plot elements that seem central in part 3 may not be by the end of 5. Particularly with the characters it was harder to care when you realised they may not be around that much longer.

That said it was an intriguing world. (I was going to say “well-built” but you could pick holes in it all day long if you’d a mind to. I don’t usually.) And he certainly knows how to create tension. I can see exactly why Ridley Scott bought the film rights. The best bits read like set pieces from a good SciFi thriller movie. That said there were bits that felt like padding.

He’s written a prequel which I hear good things about and which was at least written as a complete novel from the word go. I will probably check it out eventually but it’s not next on my list.

6/10 – good plot, interesting world, characters and coherence needs work.




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book reading

How to Waste The Rest of Your Life (not) Reading

or

Are ebook Samples really Useful?

Why Did I Do This?

One of the biggest problems with books these days – and I guess I really mean ebooks – is there’s just too much freaking choice. The rise of self-publishing is undoubtedly a good thing, it means that anyone and everyone can get their words online and into a form you can conveniently download onto your phone, tablet or ereader device. But not everyone and anyone can write, or has something interesting to say, or can use a spell-checker apparently. And that’s before we get into issues of taste and preference.

One of the tools that sites like Amazon use to counter this problem – along with ratings and reviews – is the availability of free samples. Basically every ebook available from Amazon also has a sample – usually the first chapter or so – that you can download for free. A try-before-you-buy option with no commitment. Good idea huh?

Yes. Well, I mean I think so in principle but I seem to almost never use them in practice. This post will be partly about why that is. Maybe.

However the thing that really inspired this post was when samples are used in the recurring arguments over the relative quality of indies versus trad-published books. This is a sub-section of an argument about quality and it basically says that even if there is a lot of unreadable junk out there it’s possible to find the “gems” by using, amongst other things, samples.

Let’s just say I’m sceptical about this – surely it simply takes too much time to read samples to use them as anything other than a final filter? But that’s a gut reaction. So I thought I’d test it. Sort of.

What did I do?

I decided to throw a few numbers together and see what came out.

On the 16th August 2012 I went to amazon.co.uk and I looked at the available fiction ebooks (I almost never read non-fiction). I read mostly from the following genres (Amazon’s categories) SciFi, Fantasy, Crime & Thrillers and Action & Adventure. I looked for a “comedy” category but although I found “humour” as a category for paper books I didn’t for the Kindle store. Also that included non-fiction humour – books of essays and memoirs and so on – which I’m less inclined to read.

Anyway here’s a list of how many titles there were:

Genre Total
Action & Adventure 38,375
Crime & Thrillers 74,605
Fantasy 38,790
SciFi 33,904
All four 185,674
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694
All Fiction 561,178

Clearly, even without further analysis that’s too many books. Fortunately Amazon gives me lots of ways to filter these. I can look at just the ones with a 4star or higher review average (I want to read the good ones right?), or the ones which came out in the last 30days (let’s assume I check regularly) or I could look at what’s about to come out. Or combine two or more of these.

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 38,375 4,508 1,435 70 70
Crime & Thrillers 74,605 12,987 3,035 509 250
Fantasy 38,790 6,383 1,813 178 136
SciFi 33,904 4,102 1,427 102 10
All four 185,674 27,980 7,710 859 466
SciFi/Fantasy 72,694 10,485 3,240 280 146
All Fiction 561,178 67,690 22,813 3,253 1,409

Now some of those numbers look less scary but what do they mean in terms of reading samples?

What did I assume?

I needed to make an mathematical model (i.e. a spreadsheet) and for that I need some generalisations or assumptions.

First let’s assume that it takes me on average 5mins to read a sample. Sample sizes vary but I am a slow reader so I think this is on the low end but that will favour the proposition that samples are a good way to filter.

So let’s plug that into our model and here’s the time taken to read all those samples:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 133d 5h55m 16d 15h40m 5d 23h35m 5h50m 5h50m
Crime & Thrillers 259d 1h05m 45d 2h15m 11d 12h55m 2d 18h25m 1d 20h50m
Fantasy 135d 16h20m 22d 3h55m 6d 7h05m 1d 14h15m 11h20m
SciFi 118d 17h20m 14d 5h50m 5d 5h22m 8h30m 50m
All four 645d 16h50m 97d 3h40m 27d 18h30m 3d 23h35m 2d 14h50m
SciFi/Fantasy 252d 9h50m 36d 9h45m 11d 6h00m 1d 23h20m 1d 12h10m
All Fiction 1949d 12h50m 235d 0h50m 79d 5h05m 11d 7h05m 5d 21h25m

Whoops! The power of multiplication has turned what had seemed reasonable book numbers into to unreasonable lengths of time. I’m clearly not going to spend days (or months, years!) reading samples to decide my next “full” book read. About the only thing that seems reasonable is 4star SciFi from the last 30 days.

How did I refine the model? (assumptions #2)

OK so I’ve got some numbers now but are they at all useful? Would any sane person really trying to read all the samples from a particular category? Probably not. We can refine the model with a couple of additional assumptions. Let’s say I go to Amazon and look at the list of my particular category – it shows me them in pages of 12 where I get the book covers, titles and authors. Probably what I would do is page through this list and click on a few likely looking ones and read the blurb and if that didn’t immediately disqualify itself I’d then download the sample.

So let’s assume it takes 5seconds to scan each page of 12 book titles and covers.

Let’s assume that for any list 10% are worth reading the blurb and that it takes 15seconds to skim-read the blurb.

Remember this is based on testing the idea that samples are actually the way to go so the blurb-reading is really to confirm that the cover/title has given the correct impression as regards genre and probable content.

Finally let’s assume that we commit to read the samples of half the ones where we read the blurb i.e. 5% of the list overall.

Plugging those numbers in to our new model the overall time take per list is:

Genre Total 4star 30days Coming Soon 4star+30
Action & Adventure 8d 12h19m 1d 21h11m 6h44m 19m 19m
Crime & Thrillers 15d 14h34m 3d 13h01m 1d 14h15m 2h23m 1d10m
Fantasy 8d 14h16m 1d 5h59m 8h31m 50m 38m
SciFi 7d 15h19m 1d 19h16m 6h42m 28m 2m
All four 36d 8h29m 5d 11h28m 2d 12h13m 4h02m 2h11m
SciFi/Fantasy 14d 5h35m 2d 1h16m 1d 15h13m 1h18m 41m
All Fiction 110d 21h01m 13d 6h04m 4d 11h12m 1d 15h17m 6h37m

Still a lot of large numbers there. I’m automatically rejecting anything over a day. However an hour and a half to check out upcoming SciFi/Fantasy seems doable, as does a couple of hours to review the 4star+ books in my favourite genres from the past 30 days.

So, whilst the numbers overall confirm my gut instinct, limit the scope a little and it may actually be a viable method.

Hold on a second your model is wrong because…

I can think of two main reasons someone may object to the way I’ve set this up:

  1. The numbers in your assumptions are wrong. Obviously it’s true that if we vary these numbers we can come out with different answers. All I can say is I think the assumptions are roughly true for me and I’ve tried to err on the side that would lessen time taken so that I’m giving sampling as a method a fair chance.
  2. In reality, no-one would do it that way. Clearly when you have a nice simple equation you can plug whatever numbers you like in and get the answer. A human being however would react differently given 10 books to sample rather than 10,000. In other words the assumptions don’t scale. I think this is true. I think that the larger the number of books you have the more you would want to use other filters first OR the more likely you are to simply bail out early i.e. read the first 25 samples say, and pick the best of those. However I think the numbers are still useful because they show the difficulty of getting your book read, based on sampling alone, if it’s lower down that list. Which I think just confirms what indie authors already know which is the importance of getting as may good reviews, ratings and getting as high up those popularity lists as possible.

Have I learnt anything?

I think so. I had assumed that if I wanted to find something new to read I should follow the usual routes – reviews from trusted sources and recommendations from family/friends – methods which haven’t changed since I started reading (well before the advent of ebooks). I hadn’t expected sampling would help because I hadn’t expected that the numbers would ever dip to low enough levels to be reasonable. Turns out that may not be true and scanning the latest 4star books in my chosen genres once a month for samples might be a worthwhile investment.

Or not. Because intellectually I can see the merit. Psychologically an hour reading samples when I could be reading my next book seems like an hour wasted.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 22: Tigana – Guy Gavriel Kay

Oh dear. Been a long time hasn’t it? Still the increasingly inaccurately named Read-Every-Day project continues.

Tigana was the Sword and Laser Book Club book for June. And I did actually read it in June but given the current date it’s a poor show that I haven’t written it up until now. Anyway…

Tigana is a fantasy novel set in the world of the Nine Provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm. The Peninsula is split with half the provinces controlled by one foreign tyrant and the other half by the other with a single province remaining neutral. The story follows the journey of a young musician who becomes involved in a quest to unite and free the peoples of the Palm.

With a couple of strong caveats I really enjoyed this book. Caveat number 1 is that it takes a while to get going. If you’re tempted to give up try to keep going until chapter 5 or the scene in the hunting lodge. If you’re not gripped after that fair enough. Same logic applies if you feel confused. There’s a lot of geo-politics early on that does eventually become clear.

Second caveat is that the language takes its time. On S&L it was described as ‘flowery’. I think I’d call it ‘literary’ in any event it can be very descriptive at just the times when you want the story to move forward more quickly. But if that doesn’t bother you or you actively enjoy it then it will be a good read.

Although it’s a fantasy book and there is some mention of magic, mystical creatures and other realms this is really a story about people. It’s about war and the consequences of living with an invading power. There’s some interesting questions about morality in the book and you may find you come to be more sympathetic to more than one character who at first seems irredeemable.

It is quite a long book – 678 pages – and I had to “power through” to make sure I finished it on time. This had consequences for subsequent reading in that I didn’t feel like reading for long stretches after that. But I don’t really hold that against it.

7/10 – could have been more concise but a powerful read nonetheless.