End of the Road

I have finally finished The Road by Catherine Jinks. It was good but it was way too scary for me.

The characters said "Oh my God!" a lot, and that was fair enough. They went through a pretty gruesome and gruelling time. The scariness, though very skillfully done, caused problems for me:

• I kept thinking about it when I was trying to get to sleep.

• I kept listening to it when I should have been going to bed/work because I couldn't stop.

To help recover from the scary thriller I am now listening to The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith. And if any severed heads turn up I'm going to be pretty pissed off.

The Road

I'm loving The Road by Catherine Jinks. It's not just murderously scary, it's also supernaturally spooky - not my usual story tape scene. But it is very good. It is so tense and absorbing that even my partner - who often pretends to find story tapes annoying - has been caught listening with interest.

I'm not surprised because I am a big Catherine Jinks fan. When I was a teenager and going through my "All YA is beneath me, because I've read Wuthering Heights" stage I made an exception for Catherine Jinks' Pagan series. I loved those books with an hysterical passion that saw me ending friendships if someone didn't like them, or even just didn't love them.

When I was a teenager I believed that the books you liked defined your identity. (In my view, anyone who didn't like reading wasn't even a proper person.)

It reminds me of the great video serious Talking Faiths presented by the Immigration Museum. Students pair up to talk about their faith and identity. All the participants are very respectful and keen not to judge the other's perspective.

But in this video there is a sudden moment of discord. Two girls are cheerfully discussing Harry Potter (1:50) when it is revealled that one of them is a Twilight fan and the other one isn't. No amount of awkward giggling can disguise the fact that this budding inter-faith friendship has hit a rocky patch. The Jewish/Muslim thing was fine but the Twilight/non-Twilight divide might be a breaking point.

Fortunately later in the video they're back on less controversial topics and chatting happily about wearing the hijab (4:35).

So my point is - if anyone doesn't like The Road then I don't like you. (Same goes for John Brown Rose and the Midnight Cat.)

Lessons learned

I'm listening to The Road by Catherine Jinks read by Kate Oliver, described as a "chilling thriller". I borrowed it because I love Catherine Jinks but I am highly affected by scary things (I find Midsomer Murders gritty and disturbing).

The Road is becoming quite tense and that is causing problems. Yesterday before work I became over-engaged in the story and just sat on the edge of the bed for 15 minutes listening instead of putting on socks etc.

I should have known this would happen after the whole Murder on the Orient Express debacle. Unfortunately I am not a very good learner by experiencer.

Yesterday I also went to a session to learn about sports nutrition. It was all about a frightening 1kg tub of protein. The fact that I found the catch phrase, "train harder more often" unappealing and would have preferred "train less hard less often" suggests that that the product was not really aimed at me.

However, I did learn something useful about nutrition yesterday after all. Don't eat a chicken and mayonnaise roll at 5.15 and then go for an energetic run at 6.30. Lesson learned. Although, I did previously learn a very similar lesson involving yogurt and a big piece of oat slice.