Explding crabs

[venta]

There's nothing quite like covering yourself in black bean sauce from fingertip to wrist, and showering bits of crab shell all over your friends' front room.
Last night, I was supposed to be going out for dinner with leathellin, but I was feeling grotty and tired, so settled for trundling round to her house to eat Chinese takeaway. I surprised her by giving her her birthday present (only three months late), and got given a rather nice mirror that she brought me back from Tunisia.

The house turned out to contain metame as well, and also zandev and onebyone - though that's not very surprising, as they do live there. The people who hadn't already had dinner planned a takeaway, and the people who had had dinner decided they wanted a second one. We applied a revolutionary takeaway policy that we've had success with a few times... Everyone seems to like starters better than main courses, so we just ordered a whole bunch of starters. Including, of course, half a crispy duck.

Chopsticks still don't deliver (grrr), so I drove off to get the grub. "Are you having a big party?" asked the person who handed me two bulging carriers. "Are there lots of you?" Er... no, we're just fat knackers, actually...

Baked crabs. Baked with blackbeans and chilli or spring onions and ginger, according to the menu, but in practice apparently baked with all four in large quantities. And they're a fair bugger to eat. metame resorted to using nutcrackers, I nearly did myself serious dental injury cracking the shells. Nice, but... possibly not worth all that effort to eat. (No, we didn't have crab picks, or whatever they're called. Do they actually help ?)

Good company, and nice food. A plan with no flaws.


And for a complete change of pace, a book review....

Mr Maybe is yet another of those books detailing a feisty, 21st century career girl's search for the Right Man. You know the general score - too much worrying over calorie contents, wine-swigging on an Olympian scale, and a single-minded dedication to the hunt-for-a-husband which makes Mrs. Bennet look proffoundly disinterested by comparison. It's not really a genre to get wildly excited about.

But within the bounds of said genre, this book is awful. I began to read it out of curiosity, but think I must have finished out of sheer masochism. The central character is too self-obsessed to be likable, and not interesting enough to be appealingly unpleasant. The dilemma she finds herself in over two men is... well, reading it provides all the dreary discomfort of being in a difficult situation relationship-wise yourself, but without the ability to extricate yourself by stopping being an idiot. She doesn't.

It's got all the right lifestyle references - London restaurants, clothes designers and celebreties are relentlessly name-dropped. There's the suburban parents to sneer at, and the touching scene where the best friend has a crisis. But the whole is so relentlessly dull that by half way through I really didn't give a stuff what happened to any of them. Which was carboard-predictable: by the time Boyfriend B was developing an unpleasant streak (his first vestige of personality) to make him suitably dumpable, Boyfriend A was just rolling back on to the scene having mysteriously mislaid his fear of commitment and developed some empathy.

In the gaps when neither A or B is in evidence, she pursues men according to that mysterious set of rules which I always hoped everyone was joking about. Always wait for him to call you, appear disinterested, do such-and-such on the second date, don't do this til he's bought you an expensive present... in between spotting which designer labels he's wearing, and planning your dream wedding, of course. Please someone tell me these people don't exist outside of fiction.

On reflection, every character in the book needed at least one good slap, and possibly several. With the arguable exception of the protagonist's Dad, who remains silent through out the entire novel, and says something perceptive on the penultimate page.

And the sex scenes weren't even very well written either.

Pah. Nothing going for it.

Comments

[condign.livejournal.com]

Please someone tell me these people don't exist outside of fiction.

I'll happily tell you that. But then sadly have to say I'm lying. The Rules was a bestseller, and the satirical version made for men, The Code only slightly less so.

(Actually, I hope The Code was satire.)

And the sex scenes weren't even very well written either.

To which I can only offer this in torment:
The Literary Review Bad Sex Prize

Probably safe for neither work nor your sanity.