Tag: UK

ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 380: Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Geoff W

I’m torn on this one and not for any obvious reasons. I think MacAskill does an excellent job laying out the foundations of “effective altruism” and I think this is something fundraisers and nonprofits need to be aware of for the future. However, I feel like there wasn’t enough to convince me 100% that this is the best way to move forward, probably because I had questions about MacAskill’s own nonprofits and experience.

Let’s start with the good. MacAskill has created a solid evidence-based way of helping alleviate some of the world’s biggest problems. Learning what a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY, pronounced kwalee) challenged my perception of how to rate a nonprofit, but more importantly raised questions about whether things should be comparable when you’re talking about life-saving research. The answer is yes, with a bunch of caveats.

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Books

Book 370: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susanna Clark

Geoff W

What a journey! I don’t know what I was thinking waiting this long to read this novel. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for almost 10 months and has been out for over a decade! In the last few months I finally heard enough about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to pick it up and read the tome that it is. (AKA the boyfriend wants to watch the new TV adaptation and I said I couldn’t until I read the book.)

I am most definitely beating myself up for not reading it sooner. Sure I was a bit scared of the length, hello doorstop clocking in at 846 pages, but I was even more concerned with the comparisons to Dickens! How wrong I was; how wrong I was. For some reason I let this one comparison (I still think Dickens needed an editor) blind me from the wondrousness that was this book.

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Books

Book 351: Mad About The Boy (Bridget Jones #3) – Helen Fielding

Geoff W

And done. I’m not sure why so many people had such negative responses to the books. I thought this was an interesting follow-up, almost 15 years later, to Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Edge of Reason. The characters are 15-ish years older and so is everything else: technology, their worries and their troubles. I wasn’t sure how the frazzled frankness of the first two would translate into a different world completely, but I thought it worked.

Unfortunately, I did find out ahead of time what happened in the novel before I read it so it wasn’t as much of a draw dropping moment as it could have been. In all honesty though, it wasn’t that much of a plot twist when you think of everything that could happen in the span of 15 years! All of this being said, there will be spoilers after the cut so don’t read past the break if you don’t want to know what happens!

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Books

Book 349: The Edge of Reason (Bridget Jones #2) – Helen Fielding

Geoff W

If possible this one was even funnier than Bridget Jones’s Diary, or at least the ending was. There were parts in both books where I could not stop laughing, but this one ended with such a hilarious situation that I could easily find myself in involving wine and Christmas cards. I didn’t read this one quite as fast as the first, but I still read it in only a few sittings.

What I enjoyed most about this novel was the unapologetic sexuality and brashness of Bridget. This was evident in the first novel, but in this novel she takes it to a different level, primarily manifesting through keeping track of the seconds, yes SECONDS, since she last had sex. (It’s up in the tens of millions.) Now this might sound strange, but Fielding writes about issues that affect large sweeps of the population through this quirky character.

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Books

Book 346: Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones #1) – Helen Fielding

Geoff W

I picked up a copy of this and the sequel, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, back in January 2014 because they were like $2 each. I knew I wouldn’t read it right away, but what I didn’t know is that when I read it would take less than six hours, including a two-hour walk in the middle of it! I grabbed it to read as it was a quick read. I remembered hearing things around Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the third book released last year so I figured why not now.

Let’s start with the film adaptation: I LOVED it. The cast was perfect and what they changed was for a reason. It worked as a stand-alone, but even as an adaptation I felt it worked well. That being said, this book was hilariously funny and if you enjoyed the film you should definitely check out the book.

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