Entries Tagged 'What I’m reading' ↓

Have surprised myself by reading a factual book from end to end and can even remember some of the stuff I’ve read! It’s Espresso: Coffee Supreme Training Manual. It was published in 2001 and has definitely stood the test of time!

The main thing I need to work on is my ‘mouse tails’ – have to twiddle my grind & dose to get a finer stream of coffee with the objective of just the right amount of espresso in the cup after 25 seconds.  Could also polish my milk pouring habits but for the most part the milk design on top doesn’t impact the flavour.

It’s a really great book – I love the voice, the flow and the illustrations – check out this great paragraph – so descriptive that it just takes you right back to those terrible early days:

Many years ago, when making a fluffy cappuccino was the greatest challenge in coffee making, trainees were encouraged to maximise the creation of foam. This usually resulted in the customer receiving a drink with a head of tepid fluff floating on a sea of scalded slop. It may have looked impressive to the naive eye, but it tasted awful.

So true.

While Nikau is closed, they’ve started up a blog, medicine for those of us that are pining!

I’m so excited to see that I’m featured in their list of ‘Stuff we like’!!

Have received much sh*t from the Mister over the last 6 weeks as I have been totally absorbed and enamored with the Twilight series – yes yes, teen novels. But I don’t care. I enjoyed reading them. I was totally drawn into the romance of it all. Plus I’ve never really got into any kind of science fiction or make believe stories and this series was obviously pitched at a level that I would understand that subject matter. I’m pretty impressed with myself that I got through 4 huge books in 6 weeks – and worked every day and knitted a small child’s sweater (Nicky, if you’re reading this I’m up to the sewing up part)! And they’re huge books – 430, 560, 640 and 750 pages!

I can’t wait for the movie of the second book to come out in September! (And I bet the Mister will come with me …)

Look! It’s The Very Hungry Caterpiller helping to spell ‘Google’ this morning in honour of the first day of spring. Takes me back to my childhood – that big hardcover book with holes in the pages.

Hmmm, guess that means it’s first day of autumn on this side of the world.

Am addicted to the story on stuff.co.nz of the poor koalas rescued from the fires in Australia. So tear jerking.

First there was the story of Sam Koala found in the burnt bush by a fireman who offered her a drink of water from his bottle and she befriended him enough to drink through 2 bottles and hold his hand. Don’t watch the video if you’re a crybaby.

Then there’s the story about her now at the animal shelter where she’s met Bob Koala who wasn’t so badly burned and they keep on hugging each other and he’s become all protective of her.

Man I’m reading a load of rubbish at the moment, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m loving it. This year alone I’ve read 5 books already! It’s not as though my day job is particularly hard at the moment but there’s some kind of peace in my world that I can get lost in a few chapters of rubbish before I go to sleep or at the weekend.

And while I’m reading rubbish, the Mister is grappling with a very grown up book. If that old rule – if you don’t know 5 words on the first page then the book is too hard for you – applies, then he should definitely have put the book down. However he’s persevering – it’s about social physics. Hmmm, I know what those 2 words are but together as a phrase?!

So my books are like:

• a girl spent the whole book avoiding her new flat mate and convinces herself he’s a very shady character, an assassin or something like that, but in the end he’s just looking for his birth mother and they get together in the end.
• a girl runs a club and it goes bad, she ends up bankrupt and while trying to hide and get her life back together she tolerates the love of a guy trying to help her whilst being crazy about another guy but in the end he’s a bit of a sh*t and she gets together at the end with the first guy who never stopped loving her the entire book
• a girl goes to live in a small village to housesit for her parents while the place sells to get over a recent break up and spends the whole book avoiding the local crim who despite being hated by half the village is set up to marry the outcast daughter of one of the village notaries, but in the end he cans the marriage on the day and gets together with her in the end.
• a girl takes a job for a guy she quite fancies although before anything can happen her ex who dumped her comes back into her life with offers of marriage and a new house although it turns out he’s  a 2-timing scoundrel and she gets together with her boss at the end
• a whole lot of girls wrote in about their ‘boy’ problems only to be told by the writers of Sex and the City that ‘He’s Just Not That Into You. Cut him loose.’

And now I’m onto:

• a girls running a hotel and is avoiding the overtures of a very handsome bad boy, let me guess, they’ll get together at the end

And the Mister’s book has stuff in it like:

The Physics of Group Motion

Vicsek had established himself as an expert on the growth and form of non-equilibrium systems, such as branched clusters formed by diffusion-limited aggregation.

(God I really am reading a lot of rubbish!)

Opened up the Cuisine that arrived a couple of days ago and was showered with loose leaf advertising tucked into it’s pages – heaps of it! Perhaps because it’s the Christmas issue, but c’mon, I want to read the magazine not all the bits of paper that are now all over the table and floor. Tucked inside were:

• Catalogue for Milly’s (kitchenware store) in Auckland … great … some of us don’t live in Auckland
• Mail order catalogue for New Zealand Nature … everything from clothes to books to monogrammed towels and souvenirs
• Wine Society order form
• Doubleday Book Club pamphlet
• Living and Giving store catalogue
• A postcard about Kapiti Aorangi Brie
• 2 Cuisine subscription order forms
• Cuisine Wine Country Magazine advert

That’s 9 bits of stuff!

Haven’t posted about my reading lately which I do have a *little* bit of time for out of work when I’m not glued to downloaded shows with my knitting.

Before we went away (and while we were away) I continued my way through another series in a similar vein to my Kay Scarpetta marathon. This time it’s Kathy Reichs and the Bones series. I’d already read a few before the Bones show started on they telly but I’ve gone back and started again. I’m just about to finish Cross Bones having read the first 7. Yikes – while on her website just now I saw that Kathy Reichs was in Wellington in September while we were away!

I also have loaded up on my iPod (much to the Mister’s disgust) a talking book. I’ve listened to one in the car before when travelling a long distance on my own and thought I might listen to one on the plane recently but never got around to it. Can’t waste it though so am trying to find every chance I get to sit in the sun in manner of the French on a weekend afternoon and listen to it – ha! Have managed a couple of walks in the last 2 weeks and have got through 4 chapters.

And just this morning I finished The Time Traveler’s Wife. I just read it in the middle of the latest Bones book in probably record time. I borrowed it from my friend in Switzerland and took it to Blenheim over Labour Weekend – started in on Sunday morning and finished it this morning. Haven’t had much sleep as a result! Great book. Couldn’t put it down. Can’t say why it was especially good except that it was a totally different concept in story for me. The book was about a time-travelling guy who visited his future wife when she was growing up and then throughout their lives together. Took me a while to get used to the style and to figure out how old he was in the present but once I had it I was continually waiting to see what happened next.

I can’t believe I just stood in Dymocks crying while reading an excerpt out of Richard Hammond’s latest book. Well, not outright sobbing but certainly obvious tears that the sales assistant would’ve noticed. While flicking through it I came upon the chapter called ‘Mindy’s Story’ which is Richard’s wife’s account of finding out about his rocket car accident last year and the trip to the hospital to find him lifeless and connected to tubes. God I must be some kind of emotional lightweight – mind you I was completely blindingly furious about work at the time and had stomped out for air so that probably didn’t help!

P.S. Was looking up the title of the book on Amazon (it’s On the Edge) when it kindly showed me that the 15th book in the Kay Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell is coming out in October – go those Amazon cookies!

This has been a while coming – only in that it’s been a few months since we were last at my parent’s place – but every second (if not every) visit the subject of Alexander Kitten comes up. He’s the little orange kitten that was the subject of my most read childhood book. I remember reading it and having it read to me and I love hearing the stories about how I loved reading it and having it read to me (complete with the bits about telling people off (mostly Granddad) who read it to me and missed bits out because I knew it by heart before I could even walk).

Mum did suggest that I hunt it down on the Internet and she was right, it’s there to be hunted. I might just have to get a copy seeing as my very own book was given away to some boy kids when it was thought that I’d grown out of it (obviously the orange thing hadn’t kicked in back then otherwise they wouldn’t have dared!) … and yes that’s part of the whole story-telling process above which is why Mum suggested I locate a copy … the scars of having the book wrenched from my teenage grip (yeah woteva) obviously run deep!

So, $3.99 on Amazon and in the mean time I can look at these pictures that someone had on a Flickr site. It’s a lot older than I though – 1959 – I thought it was at least from the 70’s!