Spaghetti squash has some of the flavour-holding properties of tofu in that it sucks up the flavour of sauces, etc. My best friend made me some mixed with alfredo sauce. It wasn’t bad, but he agrees it’s better with pesto or olive oil and some herbs.

I hate vegetables and this was ok! The texture is weird, but don’t be afraid of that. Definitely worth trying!

If you are a shallow, immature and selfish psuedo-christian, this book is for you. The only saving grace of this TERRIBLY hyporcritical and judgmental character is that she seems to tone down her psychopathy by the end of the book. But in the end, the only thing the liar of a main character is ever concerned with is herself. She lies to everyone from friends to love interests to God himself. And even when she stops (more or less), it’s hard to believe her intentions don’t simply revolve around rubbing how “saved” she thinks she is in others’ faces.

Also, any book that espouses forcing your beliefs onto others gets a failing mark from me.

I found this, happily enough, at our excellent library in New West. I’ve seen the documentary about this man several times, and the stillness, efficiency and pure simplicity of the ideas and actions presented have always soothed me. Now, my mind is excited about the ingenuity and hardiness of the man in question, Dick Proenneke. Aside from being smarter and possessing more useful skills than a roomfull of my own friends, I want to peer into the pioneering spirit, for it does not lack fear but lives comfortably with it, or as comfortably as can be lived, with the knowledge and skills necessary to make the best of it and thrive.

I’m looking forward to this adventure. May it inspire many more in me.

If you want to read someone’s repetitive, repetitive, repetitive Mary Sue fantasy about legions of perfect, beautful, smart, powerful, perfect men either fighting over or adoring, but all fucking, one insecure, shallow, selfish dumbass character, this book is for you. If you don’t demand a storyline to prop up the epic and imminently selfishly immature and needy fantasies of not one but ten Twilight twihards distilled and poured into one vessel, this book is for you. If you have a love of mind-rapingly tedious domestic disputes ocurring every 2 pages for 20 pages thereafter, this book is for you. And if you have no sense of intellectual self-preservation, there’s about twenty of these fucking books, all about exactly the same thing; some woman who has to have sex or everyone will die every day.

But it’s not weird, even when she has sex with the shapechanger in cat form, because she loves them all vewy, vewy much each in a different “of course you’re not my slave” kind of way, and they’re all like a family. It reminds me of the documentary about the porn industry I saw where one of the spokespeople said, “We’re all a big family”, directly before anyone with an STD or HIV as a result of that same industry was immediately forgotten and shunned.

Oh, and if you like magical shit more than supernatural shit, this storyline (annoying Mary Sue who just wants to be loved who has to have sex all the time with different men whom she all loves and they all adore her or else) can be found in faerie form in the other series by the same author.

Get ready to kiss your standards goodbye.

If you yearn for a story of a selfish and petulantly immature protagonist, this is the book for you. If you long to escape to a place so cookie-cutter unreal, every character seems like one unattractive trait with a paper mask affixed in lieu of a personality, this is the book for you. If you wish to let yourself go and delve into a world of the unbelieveably dense and lobotomy-sportingly boring, this is quite so the book for you.

Welcome to the world of Lori Shepard, a spoiled, hyporcritical, and frighteningly delusional child dressed up like a grown woman, complete with creepily-perfect husband, obnoxiously “adorable” sons, and a complement of shallow supporting characters in the guise of her “friends”, and yes she does use that word to describe them, in the bodies of the villagers she lives near. Gossip is the only thing of note these pathetically pointless personnages do, their other one or two points of note being mere window dressing. After a few pages of listening to their dialogue in your head, you’ll swiftly start to wonder why the author even bothered giving them any detail at all.

Speaking of the author, it would be useful to mention that the main character smacks so strongly of an author-insertion fantasy you can practically hear those smacks echoing across the English countryside the book is set in. Lori Shepard is a bored housewife with an almost ridiculously idyllic lifestyle, including expensive cars, perfect cottage, husband with jet-setting attourney lifestyle and of course her own independent wealth based on the inheritance of a woman who never even met her.

Because Lori was presumably never stopped from indulging in any whim or fantasy she felt like immersing her sense of reality in, as an adult she can’t turn it off, and indulges herself to the exclusion of anyone else whenever a cow farts the wrong way. Nancy Atherton, the actual author and not her horrifyingly shallow and psychotic insertion fantasy, has the boring and cut and paste British village as nothing more necessary than a backdrop to indulge Lori going off every few weeks or days, fabircating heinous and stupid mysteries and conspiracies over absolutely anything that she can lay her improbable little mind on. You will marvel at her gift for assuming 20 theories or “facts” when only one randomly spawning event occurs, and making assuptions that she immediately sees as true about anyone she drags into her author-insertion fantasy delusion psychosis, then passes it on in a manner the author tries and fails to cause to look quaint or harmless, but is actually quite rude and slanderous.

The best part is the misleading title of this pamphlet bound up like a book. You’d assume that “Aunt Dimity” is the main character, and therefore the main focus of the story. Not so! Like everything else in Lori’s world, which I’m thinking more and more is really a full-blown mental event had by a confused and lonely inpatient at a government facility and less anything that can be passed off as novella fiction, Aunt Dimity is the name of the woman who bequeathed her money and land to this twat, and said twat spends every bloody night talking to this dead stranger’s diary, and it writes back to her. As if you really needed confirmation about this woman’s mental state.

Aside from that and the feeling you get that the author is not only not British but has only seen the English countryside on BBC dramas and documentaries, the real slap comes when author-insertion girl starts displaying opinions of middle-class puritanism and catty disapproval more suited to an actual Brit circa 1945 than of any self-respecting sentient being of the 21st century. Seriously, this woman gets even more high-strung than usual (which is saying something, obviously,) when her sons start spouting meaningless knight vs. knave speak and when her husband sees someone bum (for fuck’s sake) at the faire, yet her high psuedo-morals seem to be blindingly absent when she’s breaking into people’s abodes, lying, gossiping (which is a form of lying, for those of you who are confused,) making wild and unproven false accusations and allowing her choices to override good sense, reality, and good manners. Who the fuck is this woman, Sarah Palin? The worst part about that is that of course the asshole friends and perfect mannequin husband all coddle, indulge and support her mental retardation and selfish story-making, just as if she were a real adult. It pulls at understandable reality until it lets go with a cosmic twang.

I was upset enough about abiding my promise to read new things and having had to slog through the painfully empty dialogue and the equally painful thoughts of Lori before I found out there’s at least eleven more of these fucking books. Perhaps I’m simply not geriatric enough to appreciate the capricious suspicion vs. mystifying and groundless praise this woman vacillates between in regards to the cardboard cutouts that come across her path in the guise of people, (done with illogical and dizzying speed, to boot,) but I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t exactly the kind of shallow, blind, bigoted, gossiping hick featured in this book finding this a worthy read or even a pleasureable waste of their time.

Let me qualify my favourable review with a statement: this is not a great movie, and often it’s not very good. I liked it because I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, including social anxiety, which is what the main character has, and I wanted to see how the story went when he started saying “Yes” to everything. It was interesting, even though the characters were not good or nice people most of the time, and were often selfish beyond comprehension. I took from it the activites of someone trying everything, and tried to ascertain the possible benefits thereof.

So if you’re looking for ideas about addressing your lack of social assertiveness, or you’re the type of person who doesn’t demand more of a film than the standard formulaic hollywood fare or perhaps anything with Jim Carrey in it, then this movie is for you.

This story has an interesting flavour to it. This story isn’t happy, and its beauty is more the stark breathlessness of a plain ravaged by weather than the spiralling grace of a field of cherry blossom trees. There is beauty there, but the protagonist’s life is hard, and that description is unrelenting. Green is stolen of choice, and that theme of trying to make one’s own destiny is the pervasive one. The character is interesting if psychotic. The story is strange, but not boring. Be warned that sexual choice is free in this setting world, and is not bound by the black and white of puritannical North American reinforcement almost always found in cough young adult books. The characters are not hedonists, rather just not bound by the judgments of choice that we in this society are in regards to who we share our bodies and time with.

Green is an interesting character, for all that she is utterly insane in a tightly-bound way. The story is harsh, as life is harsh, but not unrealistically so. Worth a read if you’re not going to get too shocked by a story that doesn’t follow every accepted norm for the market.

This book is worth at least attempting to read.

I love this author.

Normally, I love this woman’s books, and one of her series is on my final list of books I’d make other people read. Her descriptive narrative is wonderful, and gives you a real sense of time, place and setting. Her characterizations are simple yet engaging.

It only stands to reason that anything she writes badly would be just as good, but in reverse. In this book, the descriptive narrative is painful, setting the story then taking you along a terrible, sorrowful, tragedy-laden road. The characterizations are fraught with doomed spirit, and even before you realize this story ends very, very badly, you definitely get a sense of every character’s ultimate futility.

This is not a badly written book. It’s well-written, well-researched and well-described. But I hated this book for its pointless (to my mind) depressing storytelling, the interesting but unlikeable characters, and the horrid fate of the people of ancient Britain at the brutal hands of the Roman Empire.

Maybe I’m too sensitive; maybe I miss this author’s usual lightness of love for her normal stories about the peoples of Ancient Egypt. But it hurt me to finish this book, and I hope someone else will have more success liking it than I did. Because I really tried.

Perhaps there is something wrong with me.

Yes, I know that this author is loved round the world, despite her self-professed dislike of children. Anyoen who reads her books should be able to clearly see how much she dislikes them; deaht, suffering, torture, and sadness strike every character, in every book, and it actually gets WORSE as the story wears on.

As far as I’m concerned, you’d have to be a full-blown sociopath, incapable of any human empathy for the characters of this series, not to be profoundly disturbed by the awful, hideous fate the author delivers onto her main character. If you think Dumbledore being tortured to retrieve an ultimately useless relic is fun, please avoid me. If you think you’d like to live in this world, you require psychological help. This tale is a grim medley, punctuated with hatred, bigotry, racism, abuse of pretty much every kind, neglect and murder.

Oh, but it’s all set in the wonderful world of Chaotic Neutral magic, so it’s fun all ’round!