Friday 5 April 2013

My review of the excellent Mary Roach is below, I've also been re-reading Sandman by Neil Gaiman along with the Hy Bender companion and am finding it a richer read, both due to the companion and the fact that I'm much more widely read than I was the last time I read it. I'm even more in awe of Neil now!

I've signed up for http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/4171/these-pages-fall-like-ash/ which is pretty exciting as a concept and the fact that it has "creative input" from two of my favourite authors makes it even more exciting.

This week I've also attended the latest Word of Mouth to watch Tania Hershman, Nick Rawlinson, Kevlin Henney and Holly Corfield Car performed with the theme of the evening being the Bristol Short story prize (there's still time to enter here http://www.bristolprize.co.uk/) best performance of the night goes to Nick Rawlinson's very entertaining The final whistle but the best short story I feel was Holly Corfield Car's Cockles closely followed by Kevlin Henney's So you think you can cook.
It was a varied and very entertaining evening.

 
Review:
 
Gulp by Mary Roach

Good

If you were going to go on a journey along the Alimentary Canal the person you should take with you is Mary Roach. From the back of the book Eating is the most pleasurable, gross, necessary, unspeakable biological process we humans undertake and Roach takes us through pleasure, disgust and fascination usually on the same page. In this book I learned everything I didn’t know I needed to know about spit. Lots about fistulation, all about pet food science, Fletcherizing, whether dinner can eat you back, dining unto death, too much information about how prisoners smuggle things (euphemistically known as “Hooping”) Elvis’s colon and the gaseous and other products of the long strange, varied and, in Roach’s company, utterly fascinating tube at the centre of our existence. Roach is unafraid to ask questions and her enthusiasm is infectious here and she gets to speak to all sorts of folk who work in science and medicine that is of interest and she again displays the knack of bringing what could be dry science to life. She also manages to bring the often bizarre history of eating research to life.

Overall – An educational and entertaining look at the science of eating - highly recommended

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