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Tag Archives: book review

Stuff I’ve Been Made Aware Of

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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book review, entertainment, Girls, internet memes, media, TV

Here are some important things I’ve learned in the last few days:

1. The book The Giver was the first of FOUR BOOKS.  Do you remember that book? The ending wasn’t very satisfying but I took it as  stand-alone text.  This is very exciting news.

2. The Bic Crystal for Her! OMG!  Read the reviews.

3. My favourite vice, Made in Chelsea, is BACK.

4. Lena Dunham is writing a book.  This news is a few days old, but will fill a feminist-book-shaped-hole in my heart.  I’m thinking of buying the hardcover.

5. The band Farewell Milwaukee is my new obsession, and not just because MKE is my hometown.  Check out my favourite song of theirs:

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Book Review: MWF Seeking BFF

16 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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book review, books, culture, England, entertainment, friends, MWF Seeking BFF, My Friend Lauren

Image courtesy TheDebutanteBall.com

A friend recommended MWF Seeking BFF to me a while ago, and I pre-ordered the British paperback off Amazon immediately.  Its a book about a woman who follows her boyfriend (subsequently, her husband) to Chicago, a city where her social network is a little thin.  After a couple years, she realizes that she hasn’t found her go-to girl in Chicago: she has a social life, but no one she can call on a moment’s notice.

The friend recommended the book to me because, obviously, I am also in the process of finding a social life in Cambridge.  The author of MWF Seeking BFF goes on a friend-date once a week for a year – meeting friends of friends, going friend-speed-dating, at one point even hiring a friend for an afternoon – and reports back.  The good news is, after a year of working really hard to make friends, she calls it a success: she’s met lots of people she really likes, and some have become close friends.

Its not exactly literature, but MWF Seeking BFF is a solid read.  I didn’t love the whining she did at the beginning – “I don’t have anyone to get a pedicure with!” – but I empathized just the same.  And I took heart from the conclusion: almost everyone the author, Rachel Bertsche, met was open to new friendships and was pleased to be invited on a friend-date, even though not all of them became friends in the end.

The thing that I did wonder the whole time was, what had she been doing the previous two years of her life? I have spent six months in Cambridge frantically trolling for friends, and while I’m not popular, exactly, I’ve met some people on whom I can call in a crisis and who have lifetime-friend potential.  When I mentioned the book to My Friend Lauren, I said I didn’t think the experiment – 52 friend-dates in a year – would translate to Cambridge, because its too small and because so much of the social life centres on the university.  She said “and its so un-English” – which was an important factor that I hadn’t even considered.

For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how friendly English people are, in defiance of cultural stereotypes.  Its been better than I was expecting – although when i said that to a Swiss friend, she said “What were you expecting?!”  We’ve made a commitment to being in the country for a long enough time that people are willing to commit to getting to know us.  And of course the advantage to living in a university town is that new people are always arriving, most of whom don’t have a pre-existing social network in the area.

That said, if anyone has suggestions for ways of making new friends, I do welcome suggestions…

Book Review: Adventure Britain and 52 Great British Weekends

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Uncategorized

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adventure, book review, books, holidays, travel, UK

I’m taking my first British getaway this weekend  – a climbing trip in Cornwall via Southampton – and I’m really excited to see some more of England, eat some pasties, and add to my very modest repertoire of outdoor climbing experience.  After ten days of absolutely gorgeous weather, I’m thinking about summer adventures, and I checked out two books from the library to get ready.

The first book, Adventure Britain, gives a summary of various adventures opportunities by region.  It lists hiking (“walking” in UK parlance), climbing, surfing, and mountain biking, which are fairly obvious activities to include.  It also lists parasailing (yes please) and wild swimming (really? that doesn’t seem that adventurous) and coasteering, which I’d never heard of but is basically cliff jumping and floating around in the ocean.  I was surprised that it didn’t include sailing or windsurfing.  It also had a couple opportunities for foraging, but didn’t include birdwatching, cross-country skiing, or any of a variety of other adventures I haven’t thought of.

Each activity listed is presented very cogently and comprehensively, with resources for more info plus nearby hotels and restaurants, and there are a whole lots of activities covered in the book (stand up paddle boarding, whitewater rafting, and paragliding, among others).  My biggest complaint, though, was the lack of maps.  There was not a single sodding map in the entire sodding book.  My biggest frustration with being in a new country is that I don’t have a mental map, and I hoped the book would help.  But no map!

The next book, 52 Great British Weekends, takes a more sedate approach to adventure, but neatly breaks the weekends up seasonally.  Each season has a variety of activities – from walking to serious eating to amusement parks – and covers a variety of regions.  I learned some things about the country that I hadn’t known.  I now really want to go to the Hebrides, for example, and I learned that I live near some really great birdwatching.  But as with the previous book, it was seriously short of maps.  As in, there weren’t any.  I really wish they’d thought to include some, but instead I read both books and then had to spend some time googling to figure out where everything was.  That being said, I’ve included some mobile-phone pictures of the books below; both made me really excited to be in England and to have all this new stuff to explore.

Hebrides: I want to go to there.

Fort William too, please.

**Note: I’ve started a new series of Fantasy Holiday posts.  You can see them all by clicking the Category to the left. Wheee!

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