This Week in Books – 04-09-24

This Week in Books is a feature hosted by Lipsy at Lipsyy Lost and Found that allows bloggers to share:

• What they’ve recently finished reading
• What they are currently reading
• What they are planning to read next

A similar meme is run by Taking on a World of Words.

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I finished The Actor by Chris MacDonald, and then moved on to The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi.

TO ACHIEVE GREATNESS, HE MUST SACRIFICE EVERYTHING…

At long last, Adam Sealey has an Oscar within reach. Working with his controversial former mentor, Jonathan, he’s given the performance of a lifetime, and he almost believes it might be worth the cost.

Because Adam subscribes to “the method”. It’s the secret that the world’s greatest actors swear by – digging into their darkest, most personal traumas to bring a role to life.

And Adam’s greatest trauma is worse than most. Losing his mother when he was just a boy. A forced choice between the success he craved and the girl he loved. And that night back in drama school, the night of Adam’s darkest secret, when everyone knows about the dead body, but nobody suspects the truth.

And then he gets a message: someone knows. And if they tell, everything Adam’s worked for will come crashing down.

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They’re big, they’re bad and they’re about to become extinct…

Jamie’s dream was to hit the big time at a New York tech start-up. Jamie’s reality was a humiliating lay-off, then a low-wage job as a takeaway delivery driver. During a pandemic too. Things look beyond grim, until a chance delivery to an old acquaintance. Tom has an urgent vacancy on his team: the pay is great and Jamie has debts – it’s a no-brainer choice. Yet, once again, reality fails to match expectations. Only this time it could be fatal.

It seems Tom’s ‘animal rights organization’ is way more than it appears. The animals aren’t even on Earth – or not our Earth, anyway. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures roam a tropical, human-free world. And although Kaiju are their universe’s largest and most dangerous animal, they need support to survive.

Tom’s ‘Kaiju Preservation Society’ wants to help. However, others want to profit. Unless they’re stopped, the walls between our worlds could fall – and the consequences would be devastating.

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I’m currently reading To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey.

Winter 1885. Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester accepts the mission of a lifetime, to navigate Alaska’s Wolverine River. It is a journey that promises to open up a land shrouded in mystery, but there’s no telling what awaits Allen and his small band of men.

Allen leaves behind his young wife, Sophie, newly pregnant with the child he had never expected to have. Sophie would have loved nothing more than to carve a path through the wilderness alongside Allen – what she does not anticipate is that their year apart will demand every ounce of courage of her that it does of her husband.

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My next read might be Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken.

It’s not you, it’s the food.

We have entered a new ‘age of eating’ where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, food which is industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we really know what it’s doing to our bodies?

Join Chris in his travels through the world of food science and a UPF diet to discover what’s really going on. Find out why exercise and willpower can’t save us, and what UPF is really doing to our bodies, our health, our weight, and the planet (hint: nothing good).

For too long we’ve been told we just need to make different choices, when really we’re living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible. So this is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.

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And that’s my week in books! What are you reading this week? Let me know in the comments! 😎