Review: Two Against The Odds

Two Against the Odds

by Joan Kilby

I don’t normally read romance novels – no, really I don’t! Well, except for King of the Desert, Captive Bride which was from a school fete, and the hilarious brain-candy one that was an internet freebie from my internet freebie phase1 and which I have actually read at least twice due to the hilarious brain-candy nature of the plot.2 But despite reading them for minor hilarity, romance novels are not my genre of choice.

Which is not to say I don’t appreciate either pulp fiction or romance plots – fanfic certainly falls into the first category, and Bujold’s Sharing Knife series certainly fall into the latter – but romance novels are just not my genre. I think it’s the ‘real world’ aspect that throws me – I find it hard to suspend my disbelief to a sufficient level while reading real world fiction.3 I do however follow the RSS feed of a romance novel book blog [http://dearauthor.com/]. And that’s how this particular gem came across my radar.
Two Against the Odds stars an artist… and an Australian Taxation Office auditor.4 Having just started working at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) a scant few months before, I just could not resist. One online purchase and a couple of days later, and my copy arrived in the post.

It was hilarious. Now, I haven’t worked for the ATO for very long, and I don’t work in audit at all, but oh dear…

We’re not like this, I swear.

I certainly don’t recite parts of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 to lessen unwanted arousal – and dammit, if I did, I’d get it right! There ain’t no ‘party of the first part’ in the collected tax Acts – and I searched both the ITAAs, the TAA and the other various pieces of taxation legislation.5 I'm also almost certain that ATO auditors don't get bonuses for successful prosecutions. Mind you, I am pretty certain that any ATO auditor who behaved like this one would have been fired. That part of the book was accurate.

As far as the plot goes – well, it was all fine. Like I said, this is not my genre, so I didn't really get that into it. Lexie is an artist, who likes new age things and doesn't like thinking about realities. She certainly doesn't like thinking about the notices the ATO keeps sending her that mention something about a $20,000 tax bill. Rafe is ten years younger and would rather own a boat than be an accountant, but he's a far more practical soul and knows he needs the money. Naturally, they are thrown together in the course of his audit and the inevitable consequences ensue. (Which is not so good in terms of ATO impartiality.) There are added complications involving Lexie's quest to win the Archibald Prize, the terrible state of her parents' marriage, and her awareness of her ever-ticking biological clock. However, I think it will not be a spoiler to say that – eventually – they all live happily ever after.

This is not a very serious review, but that's because I didn't read this book for the fiction. I was entertained, but I was entertained mostly because of where I work. If you want a more serious review from someone who appreciates the genre more than I do, then check out the review that turned me on to this book here.

'You're being audited.'

That's hardly his most winning opening line, but Rafe Ellersley isn't here to make friends. He'd promised himself—and his boss—that this audit would be different. This time, he would be the consummate Australian Tax Office investigator. Cool, detached, professional. He'd bring Lexie Thatcher, tax-dodging artisan, to justice with ruthless efficiency. No more bending the rules. It's the only way to save his job.

But Lexie proves a far greater challenge than he's been prepped for. Her world is a crazy canvas of chaos and confusion, complexity and color, unlike anything he's ever known. So who can really blame a tax guy like him for what happens next….

1I also acquired two pairs of latex rubber gloves, which have been useful in various hair-dyeing experiments.
2OK, well there’s this girl whose father has gambling debts, so he sells her to a disfigured nobleman; meanwhile, there’s this irritating Yankee, who is the despised cousin of the disfigured nobleman. So obviously she falls in love with both of them, and OMG! trauma! – she calls out the name of the cousin while having sex with the disfigured nobleman. Only it turns out that he was actually in DISGUISE and was the Yankee ALL ALONG! So there’s no problem with being in love with both. Meanwhile other vaguely plot-related stuff happens and her father is not really her father after all. They all live happily ever after, even her wastrel brother, who has to stick with having the horrible gambling father.
3Same problem I have with the theatre. I can’t watch plays; I get upset because they don’t spontaneously burst into song!!
4DISCLAIMER: I work for the Australian Taxation Office, but this review (and my entire internet presence, for that matters) reflects my personal views. I in no way represent the ATO, nor the views of the ATO, and frankly I’m not sure that the ATO really has a lot to do with literary criticism anyway.
5In fact, based on an Austlii search, there is only one Act in the entirety of Australia that contains the phrase 'party of the first part' and it's not even Commonwealth legislation. It's in the Bungendore to Captain's Flat Railway Agreement Ratification Act 1937 (NSW) and only in the Schedule, not even in the main body!

Hugh Jackman and Neil Patrick Harris

...doing a comedy medley of show tunes at the Tonys. Need I say more?

And there were fumes...

I've been meaning to clean my horn1 for about the past year, ever since I noticed that it was the leadpipe and not the mouthpiece that smelled a little interesting.2 But since cleaning the leadpipe requires substantially more effort than cleaning the mouthpiece, I've been putting it off and putting it off and then justifying putting it off because I didn't want to risk completely screwing it up. But then there was the period in which I didn't play from the end of October to the middle of March…3

When I finally picked up my poor horn again, all the valves had frozen – copious amounts of valve oil got them going again but the Bb valve did kept getting stuck (which was inconvenient since I was playing something with a lot of middle Gs and F#s). Talking shop during rehearsals with a friendly fellow horn player convinced me that washing the horn out wasn't beyond my capabilities – so after putting it off for another couple of months, I took advantage of the long weekend and rehearsal-free Monday to take the plunge.

Some brief web-trawling provided some helpful hints on horn-cleaning and the recipe for a potent cocktail of leadpipe disinfectant: 5 parts Dettol, 1 part Listerine and 4 parts water.4

Gathered supplies + disassembled horn.

Once my supplies were gathered, I disassembled my horn and submerged it in my conveniently sized mini-bath.

Bubbles!

The slides were all snaked out with the bendy botttlebrush. I was actually kind of crushed that no goop came out of the leadpipe. After all, the first time I ever cleaned out my student Yamaha 567, I ended up with a 6-inch piece of green slime! (That sort of thing does give you bragging rights of a kind…) But, since the leadpipe stank so much, I Dettol-ed the horn anyway. And the slides too for good measure.

(Please ignore the accidental cleavage in this shot.)

Then I was quite excited to find that the shower head actually came off my flexible shower head attachment. Which meant that to clean out the Dettol mixture from the horn, all I had to do was whack the pipe onto the leadpipe and turn on the tap. (That part was fun!)

(Then, I thought "why not?"… and brought out the Brasso. Meaning that not one, but TWO cleaning products were endorsed by the Queen!5This was the point in the process where the window was opened up wide and the fan was put on. Dettol + Listerine + washing up liquid + Brasso = OMG! FUMES!!)

Finally, I oiled and greased it all up and put it all back together.

End result: shiny horn! (Plus cat.)

The valves work better than they have in ages and, once I actually used the Unibal oil on the key mechanisms, they are quieter than I remember them being in years!

There is of course a downside – there's still a definite odour of Dettol. (I'm leaving it out to air in the hope that the fumes will have dissipated by my next rehearsal.)

1It's an Alexander 1103. It's somewhat battered but it's mine :)

2It wasn't completely festy and disgusting, but it wasn't altogether pleasant either.

3Shh. I had exams. And a hideous essay. And then work. And I was between orchestras. (OK, I'm a Bad Musician. I know.)

4See How not to clean your horn… for hilarity, good advice and some pain in sympathy. Also Adventures in horn hygiene for more good advice.

5Dettol is too.

Spoiler tags

I finally worked out my spoiler tag system so that it works in Blogger and when feeds are displayed in a feed reader. It's not as pretty as the design I wanted to copy, but it works. Finally.

Script is as follows:

This goes in the css style section:

.spoilerz { color:#ccc; cursor:pointer; }
.despoilerz { color:blue; cursor:pointer; }

This script goes somewhere before </body>:

<!-- spoilerz scripting -->
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.4.js"></script>
<script>
$(document)
.ready(function() {
$('.spoilerz')
.live('click', function() {
$(this).toggleClass("despoilerz");
});
});
</script>
<!-- END spoilerz scripting -->

Then the text is formatted as follows:

<div style="color:#ccc; background-color:#ccc;">
<div class="spoilerz">
Text to be spoilerified.
</div>
</div>

Like I said, not brilliant, but it should at least work.

Thus, a test: click on the gray box and all should be revealed...

Please let this work.......

John Birmingham about trolls

I have only read one of John Birmingham's books -- World War 2.1: Weapons of Choice -- and, to be frank, I found it pointless and irritating. I believe it was intended to be pulp airport literature and that may have been my problem with it (although I zipped through three Dan Browns happily enough!). I do remember one of my main problems was that he kept introducing characters and then killing them off, without there ever seeming to be a reason for introducing them in the first place.1 BUT: I have never read any of his other books and I know some people love He Died With a Felafel in his hand and its subsequent movie. So, let's give literary merit the benefit of the doubt and that of other people's taste than mine and move on.

Now, Birmingham is someone whose tweets and articles are occasionally retweeted into my twitter feed. He's normally quite good, by which I mean to say: his political convictions are not too far from mine. (Also, he hates Andrew Bolt and that's all to the good.)

Anyway, there was an article that he wrote recently which I wanted to post. In praise of artful bludgers is from the Brisbane Times website and refers, among other things, to middle-class welfare, dole-bludging, and pathetic small-minded trolls. I think it's worth reading.

1Interestingly, it seems Andrew Bolt had a cameo as an SAS demolitionist. This does amuse me.

Off The Shelf Challenge 2011

I'm starting to think that I may well be signing up for too many challenges. But it's not like they don't all overlap anyway...and it's good motivation, so there.

So: new challenge = the Off The Shelf Challenge, hosted by Bookish Ardour. The aim is to read the books on your to-read pile. As mine is slowly reaching gargantuan proportions, this can only be a good thing.

I have chosen the second level -- Trying: Choose 15 books to read -- and, in a spirit of unusual optimism, I am going to list them all now:

1. The King's Daughter -- Mary O'Connell
2. The Planets -- Dava Sobel
3. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA -- Brenda Maddox
4. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell -- Susanna Clarke
• (These first four are all gifts from various years from my cousin, who is wonderful and gives books to an ungrateful relative who forgets to read them. Mea culpa.)
5. Rum Rebellion -- H.V. Evatt
• Rightly or wrongly, Evatt is my hero and so when I saw this 1936 tome in a second-hand bookshop, I had to have it.
  
6. The Prime Minister Was a Spy: an Australian mystery explained -- Anthony Grey
• About the mysterious disappearance of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. I'm suspect he's taking the "kidnapped in a Chinese submarine" line rather than the "abducted by aliens" line, but I live in hope...
7. A Woman's Place: Women and politics in Australia -- Marian Sawer & Marian Simms
• From my mother's collection of 1970s feminist literature. (To be honest, the main reason I'm reading this is because it's written by not one, but TWO Marians.)
8. The honest politician's guide to crime control -- Norval Morris & Gordon Hawkins
• Recommended by both my parents as an adjunct to my studies of law.



See. Gargantuan proportions. And this was taken back in July!!

9. The Devil's Advocate -- Morris West
10. Am I Too Loud? -- Gerald Moore
11. My Brilliant Career -- Miles Franklin
12. Birds, Beasts and Relatives -- Gerald Durrell
13. Bugles and a Tiger -- John Masters
• An Indian Army memoir, given to me by a friend. It promises to be hilarious.
14. Geomancer -- Ian Irvine
• A piece of trashy fantasy to round out the list. I read a series of his when in high school and enjoyed it, and this one was $1 at a fete. It's been sitting on my shelf for too long.
15. Uncommon Law: being 66 misleading cases revised and collected in one volume -- A.P. Herbert
• Legal humour. Yes, I know.

There's a link over at the hosting website for adding reviews and a link to declare completion.

Challenge: A Year of Feminist Classics (2011)

Another challenge! This time it's about reading a selection of classic feminist tomes, one (or two) for each month. The people of A Year of Feminist Classics are going to have discussion questions on their blog, so that should be fun. (And, you know, academic!)

The book list is:

• January: A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft AND So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
• February: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
• March: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
• April: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• May: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• June: God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi
• July: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• August: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• September: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
• October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks AND Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Anthology
• November: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
• December: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

I might not read all of them (hell, I might not read any of them -- or in fact, I might not be able to get hold of any of them) but it's an interesting concept.