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MannyRayner

Manny Rayner's book reviews

I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.

Currently reading

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
Richard Dawkins
R in Action
Robert Kabacoff
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
Douglas R. Hofstadter
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Harold McGee
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Simon Evnine
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Christopher M. Bishop
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
Richard C. Tolman
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten

Princess Daisy (Spanish Edition)

Princess Daisy - Judith Krantz That lunchtime, all the women at work were talking about Princess Daisy, so I thought: what the hell, I'll read it. Some kind person lent me her copy. It's a strange book. The story-line and the characters are a ridiculous mishmash of stock elements, haphazardly spliced together: a playboy father, a beautiful mother, a cruel half-brother who incestuously rapes her, a brain-damaged younger sister she has to take care of. People keep falling in love, getting tragically killed, losing their money in stock crashes, and things like that. Her portrayal of the British upper classes simply defies description.

The weirdest thing of all, however, is that even though most of it is just nonsense cobbled together from movies and trash novels, she actually does know a lot about fashion. (She was a fashion journalist for a long time). So you'll be having some absurd seduction scene, and suddenly she'll break off for a detailed, apparently very sophisticated description of what the woman is wearing. I was reminded of the Monty Python sketch where they present a hard-boiled detective story with the focus mostly on what the wallpaper looks like. If you're the sort of person who enjoys leafing though old copies of Vogue (one of my best friends does), it's by no means impossible that you will enjoy this book!