‘Is it really so bad?’ asked Olivia. ‘The countryside looks so beautiful and the people so happy.’

‘They’re having a hard time. We hear a lot these days about factory workers and conditions in slums. No one bothers about rural poverty – we deal with it locally of course as best we can but when there’s no money in land there’s no money for charity. No one cares about country people. All the attention goes to the towns.’

‘I should have thought that every English person’s deepest idea of England was of the country. Doesn’t England mean a village green, and smoke rising from cottage chimneys, and the rooks cawing in the elms, and the squire and the vicar and the schoolmaster and the jolly villagers and their rosy-cheeked children?’

‘It has not existed for many years now.’

‘It must exist. How could we all believe in it so if it didn’t exist?’

‘Exactly. We believe in it. That is why the idea is such a powerful one. It is a myth.’

Oh, I should have liked this book more than I did, I really should.

Isabel Colegate created a little gem of Edwardiana here. It's historical fiction, but doesn't read like it. Stylistically, The Shooting Party was fantastic. 

What turned me off was that the book is very short but tries to address so many aspects of the dying days of the world of Britain before the Great War that I thought it was all a bit crammed. When it wasn't trying to convince me that a house party would cover so many topics of conversation - while also spending a lot of time changing clothes, and getting to know each other, and conducting private affairs - I was fairly bored every time we got to the actual shooting. 

And apart from one character who haunts this book, I never got the feeling of ever getting to know the people who are coming together at this house party. Maybe this would have worked better if the book had been longer. Or maybe this was the author's intention - to keep the characters at a distance from the reader. But then, if Colegate had intended this, why give some of the characters interior lives and flesh them out? 

I really don't know. All I know is that I felt anxious about one character for the entire read: the duck.

It's Friday night after a crappy week at work, which saw a departmental restructure that can only be described as A Game of Thrones...but without dragons, and therefore just stupid. So, I have resorted to watching films (The Two Popes is excellent) for comfort since I've come home, and I am planning to make the most of the weekend before work brings another week of madness (I have some new people starting and need to travel abroad for a meeting with another colleague, while trying to keep an eye on goings on ... preparing for another new start and the company's big office move in three weeks' time). 

Anyway..... It's also Granite Noir weekend. So, I am out with friends tomorrow to see Dial M for Murder at the theatre, then have a guided walk around town which is lead by one of my favourite local historians, and lastly, I have finally managed to get a ticket to Katheryn Harkup's Poisoned Tea Party on Sunday. I've been to her Poisoned Cocktail Evenings before but have never been quick enough to get tickets for the tea party.

I am very excited.

As for reading, I really, really want to start the Kelly book, but I just can't at the moment - it's a mood thing. 

The C.S. Lewis biography has turned out to be surprisingly good so far. Nothing entirely new, but I very much enjoy that Duriez has included quotes from correspondence that gives much more insight into Lewis' life so far, and has refrained from giving meaning or interpreting events in his life against Lewis' later work and faith. This is something I very much appreciate. He is also not coming across as a "fan-boy" of Lewis', which puts Duriez at an advantage (imo) over other biographers I have read. 

And I know that I won't have much time to read anything else this weekend, but I really want to pick up something else. Something from the category of "comfort read".

And of course, I will need a book for the flights on Monday/Tuesday.

And this month's book club read is due on Wednesday.... Erm.

Target shooting is one of the biggest sports in the world, especially at the Olympics. With participants from 97 countries in its last edition and close to 400 participants, target shooting is a sport that requires discipline and finesse combined into one at all times during participation. A slight edge here or there can ruin a shot, not factoring in environmental factors can be the difference between a bullseye and completely missing the shot. With countless shooting ranges across the country and the world, target shooting in Florida and other places and is a commodity growing fast with more and more people picking up the sport for either fun or professional participation. Below we have listed some information regarding target shooting in the Olympics and what entails in the men’s 50m rifle event.

Frequency: Every four years

Last edition: Rio 2016

Next edition: Tokyo 2020

Number of shooting events in sports: 15 events across three disciplines

Athletes at the last edition: 390 athletes from 97 NOCs

The Olympic Programme includes 15 total events across three disciplines, namely Rifle, Pistol and Shotgun. Olympians compete in six men events, six women events and three mixed team events respectively.

Each event consists of a qualification phase, followed by a final round.

RIFLE EVENTS

50m RIFLE 3 POSITIONS MEN

The 50m Rifle 3 Positions Men is an ISSF event where athletes shoot over a distance of 50 meters or 54.68 yards in kneeling, prone and standing positions. This entails them using a 5.6 millimeters or 0.22 inches caliber rifle, along with a maximum weight of 8.0 kilograms or 17.64 libbers.

The center of the target is positioned at 0.75 meters above the floor and its total diameter measures 154.4 millimeters. The diameters of the fourth ring are 106.4 millimeters, while the tenth ring measures 10.4 millimeters.

Specialized clothing and equipment have been created for this purpose to help improve stability for participants when in their shooting positions.  

Qualification round

During the qualification round, every athlete fires a fixed, 40 shots in kneeling position, 40 in the prone position and 40 in standing position all within a set time of 2 hours and 45 minutes.

The qualification score consists of integer points, Maximum score per shot is 10 points and the maximum score anyone can procure here is 1200 points.

Final round

The top eight athletes with the highest scores from the qualification round advance to the final showdown or round, where each of them can get off up to 45 final shots.

The final score consists of decimal points, where the maximum score a shot can get you is 10.9 points and the maximum score a participant can gather in the final round is 490.5 points. All finalists in this phase start the final round with zero points. The qualification points gathered are of no use here and everyone must start from scratch again.

The final starts with three series of five shots in the kneeling position: each of them has to be fired within 200 seconds, the kneeling position is followed by a changeover time of seven minutes; Three more series of five shots in the prone positions are then fired: each of them within 150 seconds; the prone position is followed by a second changeover time of nine minutes. Two series of five shots in the standing position are then fired, each of them within 250 seconds.

At the end of the second standing series, the shooters with the two lowest scores are eliminated in 8th and 7th place.

The five final single shots are fired on command and within 50 seconds each. After every single shot, the lowest ranking athlete is eliminated until the gold and silver medalists are decided by the 45th and conclusive shot.

If there is a tie for the lowest ranking athlete to be eliminated, the tie will be broken by one or more additional shoot-off shots.

This adrenaline-rushing sport is garnering admiration from one and all across the world. But this is a sport that also needs some strong safeguards and careful administration and supervision due to the nature of the sport. Places like some Florida shooting range and even any others now are being more and more vigilant because the misuse of equipment could be a major issue and they’re doing their best to curb it.

Angela is a relative newcomer to the small town of Point. She moved in with her grandfather after her parents went through an ugly divorce. She figures that Point will be quiet and peaceful, but she's wrong. Angela is at a party when Mary, her best friend, bursts in and starts shooting people with a shotgun. It's horrific, but Mary doesn't seem out of control - she seems to have some kind of goal. She tries to make Jim, her own boyfriend, her final victim, but Angela and a police officer manage to stop her.

After the shooting (which is pretty graphic - be aware of this if school shootings and similar situations are an issue for you), Angela tries to find out why Mary did it. All Mary will tell her is that the people she shot were monsters. She warns Angela to stay away from Jim, but Angela feels herself drawn to him. She has secretly been nursing a crush on him, holding back only because he was dating her best friend. But now that Mary is a killer, Jim is fair game, right? Except what if Mary is right? What if Jim really is a monster?

I knew going in that I had probably read this before, just because of how familiar the cover looked, but I couldn't remember anything about it. Or at least I thought I couldn't. Early on, I pulled a wild guess as to what was going on with Jim out of thin air. I was right, so maybe I retained more of this book than I realized. And I definitely remembered reading the last few pages before.

I disliked Angela. Some of what she thought and did could have been blamed on Jim's affect on her, but not all of it. Angela's taste in guys was abysmal. Jim was the kind of guy who only cared about himself. At one point, his and Angela's conversations touched on the environment, and Jim made it clear that the world only exists for the pleasure of the current generation. Who cares about future generations and what they'll have to live with? He also dipped into potential rapist territory, as he tried to push Angela into sexual behavior she wasn't 100% comfortable with. When he literally bled all over her during a make-out session, I wanted to shake her in frustration. Even Angela knew, on some level, that was he was doing was worrisome, but she waited far too long before looking into what might be going on and trying to fight it.

There was another character, Kevin, who I suspect readers were supposed to interpret as the "nice guy" right under Angela's nose, who she'd have been better off choosing. Unfortunately, I didn't think Kevin was much better. When readers first met him, he and Angela did some kind of roleplaying inside joke where she pretended he was the "other man" sneaking into her and her husband's house for a quickie. WTF? They were teens. They weren't in a relationship - Kevin was interested, and Angela wasn't. And yet she still did this weird adultery roleplay with him? Who does that?

If you like weird Christopher Pike books, this definitely has weirdness. There are dreams of an alien world, one where blood rains from the sky. There's a so-brief-you-might-miss-it mention of a technologically advanced ancient civilization (humans!), with space travel and ray guns. And bat-like things.

Pike included something I don't see much in current YA: an adult POV character. Nguyen was a local cop and Vietnam War vet. I appreciated that he wasn't an idiot and knew enough to keep an eye on Angela - this was not one of those books where teens repeatedly outsmart supposedly experienced cops (genuine monsters were another issue entirely). I think Nguyen was the only on-page adult in the entire book, however. I still think it's odd that Angela's grandfather never had an on-page moment, not even right after the shooting. Even though he didn't seem to be very much into parenting, you'd think he'd still have been at least the tiniest bit worried about his granddaughter.

I can't say that I liked this, but I didn't dislike it either. Angela was frustrating, and I really could have done without the book's sexual aspects (Angela literally got turned on by oil wells, OMG), but I enjoyed the weirdness and wanted to see how everything was going to turn out. And hey, there's a standoffish collie named Plastic! Who survives, in case I have now worried you.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)