Made of Library

Georges St-Pierre has always been one of my favourite fighters, ever since I first started following MMA. As long as he doesn’t decide to come out of retirement he will always remain one of the greatest fighters in the sport. I’m not entirely sure what I expected from this book. I didn’t know if it was going to be an autobiography or a training manual. It was really either. There was autobiographical stuff in there, but it wasn’t a story of his life. It wasn’t a training manual either. St-Pierre talked a lot about his training practices and his philosophy on how he trains, but there wasn’t any practical training material in there. I think I expected the book to be inspiring and motivational. Instead, it was just vaguely interesting. Georges St-Pierre is always very self-effacing and humble and his book was like that as well. Yes, he had to go through some hardships to get where he is, but he doesn’t make a big deal out of it. For him, it’s just what you have to do to be a wo...

Spending a year living in a cabin on the edge of a lake in the woods sounds pretty much like a perfect year to me, an introverts dream come true. A year to sit around and read and write and enjoy nature. I don’t think I’d want to repeat Thoreau’s year in the woods though. A lot of the book was about the practicalities of Thoreau's life in the woods. Building his cabin and growing his food. I didn’t find this particularly interesting as he did it all with the safety net of civilisation right there. I don’t know that there was much to be gained from reading it from a survivalist perspective either. It all seemed a bit too easy. Another good portion of the book was just his opinion about how he thinks people rely too much on modern conveniences and if they would only do what he’s doing they could save themselves a lot of money and be much better off. I found his opinions to be forceful and brash. There was no possible way that he could be wrong and anyone who disagreed with ...

I remember when I was a kid looking at a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and being intimidated by how big it was. For that reason, I never got around to reading it. I think it must have been a compendium of multiple Narnia stories, because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t that long at all. I decided that I wanted to read the Narnia series for myself, because I had never actually read them, only seen film adaptations of them. Most of what I’d heard about them was that it was shoving thinly veiled Christianity down children's throats. I’d never picked up on that from the adaptations that I’d watched, so I wanted to see for myself. Deciding which order to read the books in was more difficult than I’d imagined. There’s the order in which they were originally published or the internal chronological order. I chose the original publication order. The writing is what I expected. The delivery is the somewhat stuffy style typical of the time and place in wh...

This read was a huge step outside of my usual reading habits. I don’t really read romance novels, so I’m not really up to speed with all the sub-genres and naming conventions, but I think this one falls into the erotica category. If there are books of this genre that have plots that are actually worthwhile please let me know. Every time I’ve tried, I just get frustrated at how the story is just a very loose vessel to pad out the page count between sex scenes. The plot is flimsy, there’s no character development because the characters are all just caricatures and the sex scenes themselves are just ridiculous. I don’t feel like it’s very fair of me to speak negatively of this book. It’s a very popular genre that a lot of people enjoy, it’s just not for me. So much of the actual content was sex scenes, which I don’t enjoy reading anyway, but almost all of these involved coercion of some kind, and that made me quite uncomfortable. I’m not averse to being uncomfortable when re...