Monkeyshines

Author: James

  • Present Tense Book Review – One Good Turn: Part 2

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    (Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) This was a fun book – lately I seem to be reading a lot of books that are written from multiple perspectives, and this was nicely done here. The characters are believable, and the plot is intricate and surprising. If you read enough thrillers and watch enough…

  • Present Tense Book Review – One Good Turn

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    One Good Turn is the follow-up to Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson. I like it better than that book so far; the characterisation is great, and there’s plenty of action, again delivered with a real sense of place (Edinburgh, rather than the former book’s Cambridge). That is all, I have no grandiloquent insights to offer,…

  • Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World: Part 3

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    (Part Two of this Present Tense Book Review.) In the last third of the book we hear from Ines, the young African whose story has been unravelling through the testimony of others. It’s interesting to have multiple points of view in the narrative, but they’re a bit too far apart for my (admittedly ropey) memory.…

  • Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World: Part 2

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    James
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    (Part One of this Present Tense Book Review.) My initial concerns about the book remaining fragmented have mostly been allayed; the middle chunk of the book concentrates on a few central characters, and you can comfortably settle yourself behind their eyeballs. The literary device of the (partially) unreliable narrator comes to the fore here, with…

  • CEB Journal Club: Andam et al. (2010)

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    Members of the Computational and Evolutionary Biology (CEB) group at the University of Manchester participate in a monthly journal club, where a paper of broad interest is discussed. Here, I briefly describe the paper and its context, and summarize our conclusions about the methodology and results presented. (I have attempted to represent the discussion and…

  • Present Tense Book Review – Hand Me Down World

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    This is a book by Lloyd Jones, a Christmas present from Mrs. Monkeyshines, bought because Amazon recommended it after she bought me Nemesis, by Philip Roth for my birthday. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and it’s quite good rather than amazing. In terms of subject matter, it reminds me of a book…

  • T1DBase: type 1 diabetes, and my part in its downfall

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    Apropos of a new T1DBase publication (Burren et al. 2011) (in which I am kindly acknowledged), I thought I’d write a bit about some of the work I did there (Hulbert et al. 2007). I envisage this being the first of maybe three instalments, so before going into detail about the specific projects that I…

  • Past Tense Book Review – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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    Again I have failed to write a present tense book review, although this time it’s more because I didn’t really have anything to say until I got to the end (although my slothfulness played a part too). If you’re not already aware of this book, then you probably won’t be interested in it. If you…

  • Past Tense Book Review – Nemesis

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    This was going to be one of my incredibly popular (i.e. read by Mrs. Monkeyshines and/or Binky) present tense book reviews, but a) I’ve been too busy doing nothing over Christmas to faff around on my website, and 2) it’s quite short, and also superb, so I rattled through it in no time. It’s by…

  • Present Tense Book Review – Lady Audley’s Secret: Part 4

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    (Part Three of this Present Tense Book Review.) Ok, so there is a bit of a twist at the end, and I didn’t see it coming; but still, as I whinged about in the last instalment, the end of this book sags badly. If the last 120 pages were condensed into 20 pages, it’d be…