To Be Read Pile: Blue Line - Bo Driscoll & Dawne Walters

Blurb
Patrick ‘Neiler’ McNeil, defenseman for the Atlanta Spartans hockey team is well on his way to the ‘Big Show.’ He has it all…looks, personality, talent, supportive family and the best teammates a guy could ask for.

What he doesn’t have? A woman to his life with. After a steady stream of bad dates, Patrick is ready to swear off women. That is until he sees her across the room…

Jane Sanderson is getting over a betrayed heart. Her ex left her with no money and no car. Abandoned. The last person she wants to get involved with is a hockey player. Yet, where better to run into one than the place she works, BLADES Sports Bar, where she sees him....

When the very charming and seductive Patrick sets his mind to something, he wins. Jane finds herself falling for him more and more each day with the things that he does for her.

At the peak of their happiness…her ex comes back to town hell bent on destroying her happiness.

Where there is pain, there is healing. Where there is ice, there is hockey…and that’s where it all began.

Worst Line:  I slide my hands up to his hips and feel the indentation, the cut of his abdomen. What I call cum gutters. I know better, but that's what I call them.

I want you to go back and read that line again. Really read it. Absorb it into your soul. And the next time you read something that clunks or hear a line of dialogue that doesn't work, I want you to think to yourself 'At least it wasn't cum gutters'.

This book was bad, but it did have one redeeming feature: the hockey sequences are pretty ace. I've done a lot of research about hockey books in the last few months and in an environment that is mostly filled with players going to their lockers to get 'the things they need to get' all of the hockey sequences in it feel real and varied and like they might have been written by someone who not only enjoys the game but has played before.

The plot is meandering and without any real drive until it commits the cardinal sin of having a major conflict that could be resolved with a text message. The sex scenes included the phrase 'cum gutters' but did involve a faintly hilarious sexcapade that involved spreading a blanket on centre ice and no frozen genitals.

If you want to read a few good sports scenes surrounded by poorly written, barely proof-read prose that weaves between boring and mildly offensive, this is the book for you.

Get it here https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01HT6KJJE

101 Ways To Live Better: Organize Your Space

Welcome to my 101 series, which explores 101 little things you can do to improve your day to day life, and the world, just a little bit.

Our fifth post is: ORGANIZE YOUR SPACE

Everything you own should have a home, somewhere in your house where it belongs. That includes your handbag or wallet, incoming and outgoing mail, your remote controls, your keys, your shoes and all those other miscellaneous things that end up lying around on the dining table and kitchen bench. After all, its very hard to tidy your house and put things away if they don’t have anywhere to go!

I am a firm believer in the KonMari method of cleaning out clutter, which boils down to clearing your home of everything you don’t use and don’t love. Paperwork that must be kept can be scanned and stored digitally, but for a few vital documents like birth certificates. Clothes that don’t fit, that you don’t love, that don’t suit you, should all be donated. You don’t need as many clothes as you think. I have two dresses, about ten shirts and five pairs of pants. I don’t own any skirts. I also have three jackets and two pairs of shoes. That, for me, is plenty for all seasons and all occasions. Buying new clothes is a big deal for me and I only buy good quality things I can wear most days.

Even if you don’t like the KonMari method, it still helps a lot to have places to put everything, to make life more manageable.

If you are like most people, you will struggle to find homes for everything simply because there is not enough space in your house. However, it will be easy if you have cleaned out all those hundreds of items you don’t like, don’t need and never use.

I am someone who can’t tolerate what is referred to as ‘visual noise’. Remember when you were a teenager and you put up a collage of your favourite bands and actors on your wall? Or maybe you have a displace case full of trinkets. Or stacks of books everywhere.

I find that stressful. I like empty spaces and clean lines. So, my workspace is quite sparse with one or two focal items that I love.

Yours doesn’t have to be. Some people love visual noise and having collections and art all around them in a riot of colour and shapes. That’s great too, but make sure all the things around you are things you have chosen. There is a huge difference between posters and figurines from your favourite movies and a pile of dirty washing you haven’t put away.

It is also important a space be functional to you and what you want to use it for. Before decorating and arranging a space, write down how you would like to spend your time in it, what its function is going to be.

If you want your dining room to be a place where the family connects, don’t situate the table in a way everyone can still see the TV. If you want your office to be where you work, don’t store the kids’ toys, or set up your Xbox in there.

Sitting down and really thinking about how you want to use your spaces, will probably lead to you thinking about what is most important to you in life, how you wish you were spending your time. You might decide to get rid of your TV completely! Or at least put it in a cupboard you can close, so it’s not always there—a huge unblinking void in the middle of your space.

Not me though, I love my TV. Mine pivots so I can see it while I am cooking and while I am on the treadmill, but I also use it for audio books and music.

Organize your space and take pride in it, it’s your space, organized for your needs, not just a dumping ground for your stuff.

To Be Read Pile: All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

Blurb

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Best Line:  So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

This book was gorgeous, start to finish. I normally can't stand books that hang purely on descriptive prose but all the chapters are short, dreamy vignettes that I blasted through like a cookie jar.

I love books where it feels like I'm getting a different perspective and learning new things and this delivered in scads. First there was Marie-Laurie a young blind girl in occupied France who flees from her home in Paris with her father and between simply trying to survive and understand what happened to her home, becomes embroiled in the resistance. It was a fresh perspective on a story that has been told (and told and told)

Then There is Werner. Dear, gorgeous Werner who loves radios and gets a harsh introduction into the Hitler Youth. I think, what I liked about Werner is that he wasn't the lone resister in a crowd of monsters. He has an interest and the Hitler Youth nurtures it. And, when asked to do something horrible, he bows to the peer pressure around him. Not because he's an inherently bad person, but because that was how people behaved. He feels bad and guilty and he's confused because he's told he's doing the right thing. It's nuanced and his actions are explored and dissected and ruminated on throughout the book. Plus, I got to learn some interesting things about early radios and bird watching.

If you're looking for a book that is achingly beautiful and so understated and subtle that you won't start crying until a full half hour after you put it down, this is the book for you.

Get it here https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501173219