Brian Jacques, You Are Dead to Me. Dean Koontz… You Might Be Next

Oh Lord, now how long has it been since I posted? 

That long, huh.

Well… sorry.  I keep going off to my job to “work” and “be a nurse.”  It’s fun sometimes and it’s really tough at other times, but I do love my patients and I rarely leave without learning a lot of new stuff.  Plus I have taken to listening to audiobooks on my commute, so even if I work on a particular day I can get in almost two hours of reading time.  It’s like magic! 

I read a bunch of books over the summer, of course, but one stands out as the most irritating book: Redwall by Brian Jacques.  I purchased this book long ago (possibly as far back as the late 1990s, when I used to work at a Barnes and Noble store).  It came highly recommended as young adult fantasy.

And… I hated it.  Pretty much the entire thing.  I thought the narrative was entirely predictable, the characters were cliché (and when they weren’t cliché, they were obnoxious), and the main character – the hero of the book, Mattias the mouse - was a sanctimonious twit.  The leader of the antagonists in the story, “Cluny the Scourge,” was equally annoying.  It is never a good sign when, as a reader, I am laughing at the stupidity of the bad guys and I want to stomp on the heads of the good guys.  On top of all of that, the sexist treatment of Cornflower, Mattias’ love interest, was just… ugh. 

Admittedly, I am not a huge fan of fantasy writing.  A few years ago I read a book that was about fairies that nearly put me into a coma.  I struggled to get through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (although I love the movies and the story). 

But it is also very unusual for me to not like something about a book.  In this case, all I can say in its defense is that, despite being written for children, the author does not shy away from interesting vocabulary choices.  Otherwise… I hated it.  And I will never read any of the ten zillion sequels.

So.  Onward to the Dean Koontz book that I read earlier this year, Brother Odd.  I really enjoyed the first book in this series, Odd Thomas, and I liked the second book, Forever Odd well enough to not be horribly annoyed by it.  Brother Odd, though… meh.

Dean Koontz has always been a wildly uneven writer.  I remember the first book I read of his, Strangers.  It was great for the first half – what a build-up! – but then the second half, with the explanation for what was going on, was total crap.  Later I read Watchers and loved it.  Intensity was pretty good, as long as you can suspend your disbelief long enough to believe that the smart main character would do something profoundly stupid in the middle of the book instead of doing the sane, sensible thing to save herself and others.  (SO annoying!)

Like I said, I liked the first two books in the Odd Thomas series, at least enough to keep reading.  The concept is solid; a man who sees the dead and sometimes works to avenge their deaths, and who also sees other supernatural creatures that portend terrible violence.  Odd is charming and quirky and has interesting friends, and he is truly heroic in Odd Thomas, the first book in the series.

But… Brother Odd is just kind of meh.  The writing in the narrative veers from quirky and fun to overwrought and dramatic and back, which is jarring.  But worse… not much happens in the first hundred pages or so.  The book is over four hundred pages long, but with proper editing it could have been much shorter.  (Not to mention better written.)

I will no doubt read Koontz again, because sometimes his books really are written well and they can even be scary.  I just can’t recommend Brother Odd.  And, like Redwall, it is going on the donation pile and leaving my house for good.

Thankfully I have been reading some fantastic stuff lately, and I hope to blog about it soon.  Not kidding.

Promise.

The Inevitable _Fifty Shades of Grey_ Blog Post

Okay work has been busy and life has been busy, but really... how it it July already?  In 2012, I mean. 

For the two people that ever look at this blog, apologies for once again going weeks without writing... life gets in the way of our best intentions, doesn't it. 

I have finished reading Blockade Billy by Stephen King and Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah, as well as two more volumes of the Walking Dead graphic novel series that Robert Kirkman writes.  All were interesting and had some good moments.  The Stephen King book is staying, Kristin Hannah goes to whomever wants it (takers?), and the graphic novels are going on loan to another nurse on my unit at the hospital.

Really, it's just way more fun to write about books that I don't like.

Which brings me to Fifty Shades of Grey, the uber-popular first book in the Fifty Shades trilogy, penned by E.L. James.  E.L. James began this series as Twilight fan fiction of a (far) more adult nature, and then it got really popular online, so she edited it and published it and it got to be a huge hit.  (At least that's what I understand.)

Now, I haven't read any of the Twilight novels.  I don't even want to, even a little bit, especially after reading Fifty Shades of Grey.  The only thing I think Fifty Shades has going for it is some decently written sex scenes (by no means all of the sex scenes even qualify as "decently written," though).  Everything else about it is uber-annoying, in particular the main characters, Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. 

Christian: he's a super rich, super damaged person (apparently), who is very into being a Dominant in the sense of consensual sado-masochistic sex.  He's not interested in any other kind of relationship with a woman.  And he won't let Ana touch his upper body for some reason.  But at least he's up front about what he requires in a relationship.  He's also annoyingly controlling, especially about Ana and what she eats (what woman can resist being repeatedly told to eat all their food?), and about... well, kind of about everything. 

Ana: Oh lord, where to even start with this woman.  She's 22, graduating from college, and she's not only a virgin who has never even been curious enough to masturbate, but she's never been attracted to any man before she met Christian.

Now... I know very well that there are 7 billion people on the planet and we are all different, but really... that just seems crazy to me.  But okay.

I would have less of a quarrel with the story if it wasn't badly written, poorly edited, and sometimes inadvertently hilarious.  There's a sex scene in which Christian takes off his watch and his jacket (I'm with you so far, Ms. James), but then the text specifies that he takes off his socks "individually."  First of all, this is a sex scene and there is just nothing sexy about men's socks.  I'm sorry, I don't want to hear about them in this context.  I've been around the socks that men have been wearing all day.  Please don't write about them in a sex scene.

Secondly... how else would one take off their socks?  Go put some socks on.  Now try to remove them "individually..." that is how you always do it, right?  Put them back on.  Try removing them simultaneously.  It's not even sexy in a funny way... you just look like an idiot.  Now put your socks in the laundry and forget you ever tried this experiment.

There's a series of hot sex scenes toward the middle of the book that take place over the course of two or three days... which would work better if in the text, Christian hadn't just had Ana examined by a gynecologist right before all the sexual activity starts.  I know there are a lot of different people on this planet, and I'm not shocked or whatever by the S&M content in this book, but I do not even want to understand a woman who feels like having a lot of sex right after a pelvic exam. 

 The upside of this book is that some friends and I have had some great laughs while looking through it.  It's also a fast read.  I actually have a short list of friends who want to borrow it now that I'm finished with it, so I don't have to feel like it's going to stay in my house forever, taking up space.  AND, if I want extra lolz, there is a blogger called Jennifer Armintrout who has read through the entire series (I think) and hilariously complained about each chapter:

http://jenniferarmintrout.blogspot.com/p/jen-reads-50-shades-of-grey.html?zx=bf3a8545c6541106

And... that is it.  Fifty Shades isn't good, but it is kind of in the So Bad It's Good category, at least if you are paging through it with hilarious people.  

It's not going to stay in my permanent collection, but I'm not sorry I read it.  I am somewhat disturbed by the occasional Facebook posts from my friends, wishing they would find their own Christian Grey.  But hey, maybe we just have really different tastes in men.

The next book I'll be finishing is Dean Koontz's Brother Odd.  I have a feeling I will be blogging about it in the near future.

Red Mars, You Kind of Suck

Is it May again already?  No one has called an RRT* on this blog? It's still breathing... barely.  I'll try to get it stable again here, I don't want to have to move it to the Intensive Care Unit for blogs (wherever that might be), or - God forbid - have a funeral for it.

I guess I should start by making my excuses.  I've been training at a new job that is in a city an hour away from the one I live in.  I'm tired a lot and busy a lot and I haven't been reading a lot.  And the book I have been reading, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, left a lot to be desired.  It took me two months to get through it.

I've been wanting to read Red Mars for many years.  It won a Nebula Award for best novel in the early 1990s and the concept is compelling: this is a story about how Mars is colonized and the different personalities who envision different fates for the planet.  Robinson does a great job of imagining what the science and politics might look like in that eventuality and he creates a lot of conflict.  So you might think this five hundred-plus page book would be a page turner.

It is not.

The major problem I had reading through this book is that, despite a huge cast of characters, I felt indifferent toward all of them.  Much more time is spent on what the characters are doing with their work than anything else.  It's hard to feel anything for anyone when all you know about them is that they are brilliantly intelligent and hard-working. 

The book does try to hook you in with a love triangle between three of the protagonists, Frank, John, and Maya.  Within the first thirty pages or so you know that Frank is angry about something, enough so that he kills John.  This frames the book and we are taken back to the beginning of the colonization, but it's never clear why Frank committed murder (was passion or jealously over Maya?  professional envy?  politics?  who knows!).  Neither is it clear to the reader why any of these three characters would be attracted to the others.  The descriptions of sex on the flight to Mars or on Mars read to me like really boring robots engaging in sex.  No offense to robots but that is just not hot.  Or interesting. 

Other characters in the book have strong points of view; Ann believes Mars should be left alone entirely and merely studied, while Phyllis, a business-minded Christian, pushes for it to be utilized as a new resource for the overflowing population of Earth.  There is a woman named Hiroko who creates a secret, hidden colony on Mars. 

Part of the problem is that there are so many characters that you get to know very little about any of them, and part of it is that so much is written about what they do that the reader never understands why they feel how they do. 

There are two further novels in Robinson's Mars trilogy, Green Mars and Blue Mars.  I'm curious to see if they are better than I thought Red Mars was, but that assessment is going to have to wait.  I have a lot of other stuff right now on my Shelf of Ten, and a lot of it looks a lot better than reading more of Robinson's vision.

The next book on my Shelf is Stephen King's Blockade Billy.  It should be a much faster read.


*Sorry, I really can't give up the health care metaphors at this point, apologies to anyone reading this blog, most of whom probably have no idea what I'm on about.

The Other Side of Nonsense

When last I blogged, I was responding to Julia's "eight books by March 14" challenge. Austin has, of course, already read well past eight, and is being appropriately gloaty. Julia has read five. I'm... slower, but my books are longer (really) and I have this whole "new job as a nurse in a town an hour away" thing going on. So every day is an adventure, but I try to get a little reading done anyway.

I finished Stephen King's 11/22/63 weeks ago, and damn... this one is a good one. I feel in love with Stephen King's work when I was fourteen and I have never given up on him (no, not even after Gerald's Game). 11/22/63 is probably his best work in years, and I say that as someone who really enjoyed both Duma Key and Full Dark, No Stars. Did I have some quarrels with the new novel? Yes. The basic concept is a time travel book - the protagonist goes back in time to try to save JFK from being assassinated. Most of the story is set in the past, and most of it rocks along compellingly. It drags a bit at times when King offers too much detail about Lee Harvey Oswald's politics and associations, and I have a quarrel with the heavy-handedness of aspects of the end of the story, but overall this one deserves an A. Note to those of sentimental disposition: having several tissues handy for the last few pages is helpful. This book will have a permanent spot on the bookshelves at my house. Not surprisingly.

I moved from the sublime to the ridiculous next, picking up The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon. I remembered enjoying it when I was in high school... and it is compulsively readable, but for all the wrong reasons. It's entertaining but stupid, and I spent most of the book wondering just who the protagonist was even supposed to be.

There's nothing particularly believable in this (or any book by Sidney Sheldon, as I recall); it's full of rich, beautiful, wildly talented people, all of whom are having an unrealistic amount of badly described sex. The main character, Noelle, becomes rich and famous with almost no effort, and of course she's luminously beautiful, a fantastic cook, and no man she's ever been with can forget her. Her only motivation in life, though, is to get revenge on Larry, the first man she ever loved, a cocky playboy womanizer pilot. This book is set mid-twentieth century, and much of it is set against the backdrop of World War II. There's one minor character that can be described as a hero (a doctor who fights against the Nazis), but everyone else is consistently out for themselves. This flaw might make the characters likable if they had any other flaws... they just seem like paper dolls.

Curiosity compelled me to finish, and it is amusing, but this book is going in the donation pile. A better title for it would have been The Other Side of Nonsense.

I'm currently reading two more books; Diana Gabaldon's The Scottish Prisoner and Max Brooks' World War Z. I'm still hoping to get those eight books read by March 14... three down, five to finish.

The Bad Mother's Handbook and Julia Challenges Me

So I finished reading The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long; cute and has some great moments. Not as hilarious as the title's premise might suggest, but still... three generations of women in one house, all of them sort of trying to figure out their lives... not bad. The worse thing about it is that each of the women acts as narrator at times and that means that figuring out who is "speaking" can be a challenge. I find that distracting. It's also by a British author and the characters are Brits, so that's also a bit of a challenge sometimes if you, like me, are unfamiliar with Britisher slang.

This book isn't going to have a permanent home with me; either it will be donated to the big Northfield used book sale that we have here every April (which benefits the local hospital) or I will pawn it off on a friend.

But anyway. Finished a book, moved another book onto the Shelf of Ten and on we go.

Julia, my energetic 9 year old, has been pining to go to our public library lately, and I'm planning to take her tonight. She is required to read books off of a Maud Hart Lovelace list that her teacher gave her - and J's goal is to read 8 of these books by March 14. We'd better get to the library, stat....

I showed J my Shelf of Ten, and she and I cooked up a plan for me to also read 8 of the books by March 14. I'm in, but did I mention that a lot of these books are really, really long? I'm currently into Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63, which is over 800 pages long. I have Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars on my Shelf right now... that one must have 500 pages. And the new Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner, which will likely have great moments (swoon-worthy Jamie is in it, not just interesting-but-gay-so-somehow-less-interesting-in-a-romance-series Lord John), but sometimes her focus on historical detail takes time to absorb. Added to all this is the fact that I actually start a new job on Feb. 15, in a different city, and orientation will be full time.

But... I agreed to the challenge and I'm weirdly excited about it. Julia wants Austin to participate, too, and he seemed willing (it's a little difficult to know just what he is reading, since half the time he's using a Kindle at this point, but whatever). Julia did not want to invite Alex, which is just silly brother-sister stuff I'm sure, but it's not like Alex needs the motivation anyway. Alex is more interested in reading than in eating. (Alex is more interested in almost everything than in eating, but nevermind.)

So. The gauntlet has been thrown down... and I'm in. We'll see how far this takes me.

Oh Hello, Blog. You're Not Dead Yet? a.k.a. Shelf of Ten

No, my blog isn't dead. I've just been super busy with my Real Life for the past few months - giving vaccinations and trying to not starve to death or let my family starve to death and executing the necessary holidays that everyone expects (because we all know that the world will end if I don't send the right number of Christmas cards or whatever). So my writing time has been limited and I haven't been reading nearly as much as I should. My most utilized recreational activity has actually been working New York Times crossword puzzles (another obsession) lately.

But here I am, back at this blog, administering Blog-CPR and doses of epinephrine and atropine and whatever else I'm supposed to remember from that ACLS class I took last May.

So. Where am I? Well... I actually acquired four or five books for myself (yes, I said I wouldn't, but hey at least some of them were gifts!), so I'm probably not moving in the right direction in that regard. AND the last book I read was actually a re-read (the fourth in Stephen King's Dark Tower series; Wizard and Glass... which wasn't as astonishingly awesome as I remember it being, but it's still my favorite in that series up to that point). So no progress on that front, either.

But new hope has arrived somehow, as it always does, and I have a new scheme to get reading the giant stash of books in my home (and get rid of many along the way). I was reading my Twitter feed (yes, I know, shut up) and one of the many people I follow is Joe Hill. Hill is an entertaining writer (check out his Locke and Key graphic novels, stat) and he is also quite funny, so his Twitter feed is often full of good thoughts and ideas. And the Shelf of Ten is an idea I stole from him.

What is the Shelf of Ten? Essentially it is a shelf you can create in your home that contains only the next ten books you plan to read. The idea is to read them in the order you choose, but not to deviate from reading them. I take that to mean I can still read other books simultaneously (as if anyone could stop me anyway), but I'm willing to commit to reading these ten books, in order. And it's weirdly fun to choose them and make a little shelf, and I have to say that I get enthusiastic all over again every time I see my "shelf" (really a section of the floor next to a bookshelf in my bedroom, but nevermind).

So this is my current plan and I'll see where it takes me. The first book I'm tearing through is a weird one, The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long. It was one the free book exchange shelf at the clinic I'd been working at and I couldn't resist that title. It's not what I expected it to be (sadly, it turns out that it is a work of fiction), but it's not bad. Happily, it's also not good enough that I'm going to feel the need to keep it on my bookshelf forever, either.

Okay, that's the update. Hopefully that's enough chest compressions and epi for this blog to last a few weeks.

Terrible Books That Need to Go... But Where?

Somehow it has gotten to be September already, and so obviously it's time for another blog entry. It took me forever to finish reading Catherine Coulter's masterpiece of idiocy, The Hellion Bride, but I finally have done so. This is the kind of book that I need to get out of my house, but where to go with it is a bit of a mystery. Yes, it really is that bad.

The first half of the book is bad, but the negative aspects of it are often humorous. The romantic hero, Ryder Sherbrooke (no, I'm not making that name up), is sort of fun, and determined to figure out what is going on with romantic heroine Sophia Stanton-Grenville. The year is 1803, it is a very hot summer, and Sophia is known as the whore of Jamaica, because she is alleged to have three lovers and everyone on the island knows it.

Sophia is actually a 19 year old virgin, being oppressed and beaten by her malicious uncle, who has ruined her reputation as well for his own nefarious purposes. Ryder is predictably intrigued when he meets Sophia.

Actually, that's not a bad start to a story, and parts of it might have worked if Coulter's writing wasn't so hilariously dumb sometimes. Perhaps my favorite passage (and when I write "favorite," I mean "the one that made me laugh the hardest") is as follows:

Ryder hated to brood. He'd done very little of it in his life for the very simple reason that he'd never felt the need to take himself apart from his fellow man and commit himself to brooding. It had always seemed to him to be a singularly boring way to pass the time. But now he felt the need and it was sharp and deep inside him. It was also unexpected and unwelcome and made him uncomfortable; nor did he particularly know how to do it properly. (p. 169)

I'm not even sure where to start with how absurd that passage is - it's both badly written and ridiculous in every way. It did make me chuckle, though, and it made me think - hey, maybe someone, somewhere should be offering classes in how to brood properly. Maybe there is money to be made here!

If this book had just stayed hilariously stupid, I would just donate it to next year's used book sale and not think much about it. But unfortunately the second half of the book evolves into being offensively stupid and it ceases being funny. Ryder somehow finds himself obligated to marry Sophia, which isn't a terrible romance set-up (it worked very well for Jamie and Claire in Outlander), but Coulter writes the absolute worst story for these characters that I can think of short of making them both into some kind of sociopathic killers.

First of all, Ryder leads Sophia to believe that he has taken her virginity while she was under the influence of a drug and he does not communicate with her that this is not the case. So already this is problematic. Worse, in the context of the story Sophia is terrified of sex, and Ryder's solution to this is basically to force himself on her every night until she likes it. Yes, this is a book that tries to make marital rape sexy.

Not only that, but (and maybe this is trivial), Ryder does something to Sophia that made me shriek "okay, so that's going to be an instant yeast infection!" to myself. And in 1803 I don't know what one would have done about that. But it freaked me out.

This is a romance novel, so of course everything eventually works out for Ryder and Sophia, but not before a lot of scenes that either made me angry or made my eyes roll out of exasperation.

I'm not a person who approves of censorship in any way, but this isn't the kind of book that I would want passed on to, well... anyone. It's just that terrible and offensive. And I would hate to think that young romance readers would get the idea that Ryder's tactics with Sophia would work.

So... do I toss it in the recycling bin or what? I'm still not sure. But I want to get it out of my house soon, because it is very possibly the most magically stupid book that I've ever read.