2010 reading list

I am late and probably going to forget a few books but ...........

City of Bone Cassandra Clark - January 1st

It was an OK book and an easy read. Definitely YA and it seems to write down to it's audience a bit though

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy Douglas Adams - Jan 2

Funny and entertaining. Definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a quick amusing read.

Blind Alley Iris Johanson - Jan 4

The Clerics Quintet R A Salvatore - Jan 12

Salvatore usually makes me have a vested interest in all his character including the antagonists but somehow this series fell short in that regard. I just wanted them all to die, and not because they were bad and deserved it but because they bored me to tears. The Protags were interesting and amusing but beyond them I was very disappointed that he didn't live up to my admittedly high expectations. Maybe I should have read this BEFORE I read his really good stuff

False Memory Dean Koontz

Breathless Dean Koontz

Wizards First Rule Terry Goodkind

Outlander Diana Gabaldron

fun for everyone

Ethan has recently discovered the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. At first glance I thought it was stupid but hey if it get him reading who am I to complain.

So I started reading it to him the other night and OMG both of us were laughing our asses off. Billy even quit playing a game to come listen to the book.

It isn't the best book ever written. A lot of it is done with silly comic book pictures the kid (who is actually a grown man of course) drew in his diary and it is a bit choppy (not bad) but that is what gives it its charm.

It is so simple I was kicking myself saying "why didn't I think of this" when I was done.

Hands down it is the best grade school book I have read ........ well probably ever.

D&D, Magic and the fifth circle of geek.

So we are settled into our friend Ryan's place where we will be staying until the end of the school year when we will commence looking for a more permanent residence. That's going quite well and most of our free time is being filled playing Magic cards or D&D. Really I thought it just didn't GET any geekier than that but alas, I was wrong.

On Sundays a bunch of his friends come over to play Star Wars, a tabletop game similar to D&D. While waiting for the festivities to commence three of us got into a rather heated argument about whether or not Blade would be classified as chaotic good or chaotic neutral. It struck us that when you get into an argument about the D&D alignment of a comic book character you really no leg to stand on if you ever try to deny your geekdom. Lucky for me I don't even try.

Writing is coming along slowly and transcribing even slower. It is my own stupid fault because I picked up new books. One was Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King. It was pretty good although I was less than enthusiastic about a few endings. The other was Northern Lights by Nora Roberts. I only picked up the latter because it was lying on a counter at work and I was bored but it sucked me in. I ended up reading it in less than two days but that was two days of virtually no writing.

So now I am on a self imposed reading sabbatical and will not read anything else until I finish transcribing what I have done and write at least two more chapters. That should light a fire under my butt. Unless of course Lori sends me something in which case I will break my own rules and read it.

EEEEEEK. It's a pervert!

well perverts actually. If these two don't behave I am going to have to give my male lead erectile dysfunction. Every time I turn around I am hitting backspace or scribbling something out because my leads won't keep it in their pants. I promised them they could have sex later in the book but I guess I forgot I am dealing with horny teenagers here. Even when I am not writing but just mentally tweaking the plot they keep trying to find a way to get out of their clothes.

Other than that it is coming along OK.

In real life my van is in the shop because I broke BOTH my front doors in separate and completely unrelated bouts of stupidity. I am house bound and going stir crazy. I didn't think it would be this bad because I never go anywhere anyways but I had to give up the gym for 4 days just when I was getting back into my after Christmas groove. Last night at work one of our regulars either told me I was fat or asked if I was pregnant. Not sure which as my sign language is quite basic but either way I feel I need the gym more than ever.

One of my new years resolutions was to fit in my skinny jeans. the other was to read less and write more but Lori keeps sending me stuff and then my mother in law gave me vampire porn to read.

It is the Kiss of crimson series. by Laura Adrian. She really needs to take an anatomy class. You can not touch someones sex. you can't rub it or suck it or do any of the other crap you tried to claim because .................... it is not a tangible object. I checked and double checked and then enlisted some help in the search. Get a dictionary!

Twilight is over, so is 2008

I finished book four of the series last night. It took me 5 days to read the entire series so I think it is pretty safe to say we aren't dealing with foundation shaking literature here.

For anyone who has never read the book but intends to, you should probably stop reading here. In case you are slow that was your spoiler alert.

I knew a lot of the problems with the book going into it thanks to Lori and Papercuts but I turned off the part of my brain that listens to them and decided to judge the book on its own merit. After all they were (sorta) wrong about Eragon.

Lets start with my biggest problem a certain irritating twit named Bella Swan. I actually wished I was a fictional character so I could eat her. I don't even have to be a vampire I would go cannibal just to silence her constant whining. So yeah she is whiny did I also mention she is stupid? How about her serious Daddy issues?

"Oh I'm SO in love with Edward. I love the way he bosses me around, never lets me out of his sight, and sneaks into my house without my knowledge to watch me sleep. It makes me feel so safe and secure and loved." ok that's the end of my swooning Bella impression, but really her psycho vampire boyfriend does these things and she is cool with it. She is everything I hate about female leads. Bella is dependant, whiny, needy, insecure, and helpless and even worse she was created by a woman.

Edward come here a moment please. Surely you didn't think it was only Bella I had issues with. You are my second biggest issue with the piece of fiction. I can get that you don't wanna eat humans and sacrifice to save them. That's cool and even kind of endearing but you are also a psychotic control freak. Any man treated me the way you treated Bella and I would smack him into the next state (or province) with a restraining order. What vampires can ignore them? Well then I guess I would just to have my shape shifting friend deliver the message. Oh and what is with the virgin thing? I mean I get you not wanting to break Bella and all so I can see holding out on her but surely in the 99 years you have been trapped in the body of a 17 year old boy you stumbled across at least ONE promiscuous vampire girl. I mean from what I gathered you are hot enough to melt solid rock and you have women both mortal and immortal throwing themselves at you like groupies and you abstain because? Oh yeah because you are old fashioned .... no wait they had premarital sex back then too hence the gunshot weddings. Sorry you are not a believable character for me either.

NEXT .....................................

With the notable exception of Alice the rest of the coven seems to just stand around and with their turn to be useful to the plot. I mean for three books Rose was about as fleshed out a character as the dining room table.

Now on to the technical side.

You know I can swallow the whole daytime vampire thing as soon as I pointed out to myself that I had made the (IMO inexcusable) mistake of confusing vampire lore with Dracula lore. Yeah Dracula could be destroyed by sun and holy relics and a whole bunch of other things but vampire lore is much older than that and varies throughout the world. Most of us are familiar with the European version so that is what we set all our preconceived notions about vampires by but it is not all there is out there and in much lore they are simply nocturnal the same way an owl is not because they CAN'T go out during the day but because they don't wanna. Why they had to sparkle though is beyond me.

Stephanie Myers writing though is a different story all together. She is NOT a gifted writer and she does not make up for this short coming by being a spell binding story teller. Her story is very linear with many characters being two dimensional until it is their turn to take the spot light. She abuses, the, comma in a , way I haven't, seen since second, grade. For a while I though speech impediments ran rampant in the town of forks. I mean if I put all those pauses in the conversation there was no other assumption to make. well that's not true I could have assumed she lacked technical finesse AND that her editor is an idiot both of which would have been correct. I actually honest to go almost threw the book after reading this

Hey, Edward. Skipping, Bella?

ARGH!!!!!!

Sometimes she changes tenses in the middle of a sentence or from singular to plural. I shut my eyes and shook my head to clear it but the evidence was still there when I was done.

So yeah all that annoyed me but do you wanna know what the worst part was?

I read three full books and part of a fourth (over 600 pages) full of mistakes that a 10 year old would catch. I did my best to swallow that a woman not suffering from munchausen syndrome could seriously fall in love with the vampire stalker. I even did some of my own research so that I could read about a vampire going to school during the day without getting a side stick from laughter.

I did all this for two reason

1. I hoped Bella would eventually get eaten
2. I knew the sex was coming.

Well I was wrong on one *tear* but number two was looking promising. Edward promised to have sex with her while she was human as long as they were married. Like a good little puppet she went along with what she wanted and then came the honey moon. FINALLY this book gets a redeeming quality ------------------------ WTF do you mean it's the next morning? I spent 600 pages in purgatory and I don't get ANY details? How did you get those bruises? What happened to the poor pillows? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

SO not fair.

In review:
The book was poorly written.
The characters were unbelievable.
There was no sex.
There was minimal violence.

Since I would hate to end 2008 with THAT literary catastrophe I am reading some Steven King now. "The Dead Zone" has to be better.

Comma abuse

Comma abuse is right up there with apostrophe abuse when it comes to things I can't stand to see in a book I am reading. It is only bested by seeing the word alot in a professionally published book.

I mean do there people not have books proofread before they are published? I recently showed a few sentences from New Moon to an eight year old and she immediately spotted the incorrect comma usage. That is pretty sad IMO that an eight year old caught it but some overpaid editor who probably has a degree in this shit can't manage to figure out there should not be 2 commas in a 5 word sentence. Brilliant.

New moon doesn't abuse apostrophes but lost of other books do. Apparently it is hard to remember 5th grade language arts.

Oh and there is some horrid sentence structure in the Twilight series as well. To the point that sometimes I had to read a sentence three times to be sure of what she meant.

If it was a blog I was reading or an email or even just a letter someone wrote me I probably would not even notice there flaws but I find I am seeing A LOT of them in recently published books as if both authors and editors have forgotten the basic rules.

My Inferiority complex

Since Lori is showing me up in the writing department I decided it was time to get down to business and take a day off from using my screen time to read Sins and get some more words on paper/screen.

My biggest issue is when transferring work from one medium to the other I tend to edit in the process and that slows me up.

I am however making slow but steady progress. Once I learned to read my own hand writing I had to convert my short hand scribbles into coherent story. I think tequila may have helped with this but alas I have none.

Santa can you bring me an extra 3 hours a day of quiet?

I prefer the devil you don't

I have heard many people say "better the devil you know than the devil you don't" I have decided that is just a cliche used to avoid making necessary changes in you life because I really preferred the devil I didn't know.

When I first moved to my current town I thought it was lovely, I lived here 2 years thinking people were nice, and friendly, and compared to my home town OH SO normal. Then I took a job at a corner store and figured out this town is full of Alcoholics who like to drive around drunk, wife beaters, pot heads (which I can deal with) and perverts.

Now I have always believed a dirty mind is a wonderful thing BUT I prefer to save my lewd comments for those willing to listen to them. The people I have met around here just creep me out and have made me consider painting my windows black.

Also I live in a good sized community but every pervert I encounter knows where I live. If it was just one or two I would assume they were the problem but since it is a dozen or more that have told me where I live (and I have never been more specific than up the street) I assume I must be the problem and have a perv magnet in me.

Seriously I was happier living in oblivion where I didn't have panic attacks in the night and want to make sure the door was locked.

Writing has all but come to a stand still lately between time constraints and reading but I am hoping to get another chapter or two done on Monday while I have an empty house. I have a billion quick notes that I need to transcribe into long hand so very little creative juice will be needed just grunt work.

Hey life, leave me alone

Why is it whenever I get into a good groove for something life comes along and demands I do something else?

Take yesterday I was reading "Camera Shy" for Lori and my phone rang like a BILLION freakin times. Oh and of course it was not telemarketers or people I could otherwise ignore It was my boss and husband and my other boss.

Then after I finished reading I set out to make supper and do the house work I was supposed to do during the day, HAH yeah right. My cat came in covered in sheep manure. Kitty bath time :) let me tell you King Kong (yes my cat is named after a gigantic fictional ape) does not like water. What I wanna know though is where did he find sheep shit to roll in, I mean really I am stuck in the middle of suburban hell, there are no sheep around here.

I think he may have pissed off a mage kitteh

Moving on I get Ethan to bed and head towards a nice hot tub after which I will work on my current book. Along comes Billy and asks "are we watching Heroes tonight". So after unleashing a string of mental explicatives that would curl a sailors hair I gave up. I had to watch last weeks heroes on the comp (because I fell asleep last week) and then go up and watch this weeks episode.

So nothing of great importance (except Lori reading) got accomplished yesterday and since I am sitting in front of my comp at the moment I think it is safe to say nothing will be accomplished today either.

Well except maybe starting a chapter or two of my reread of "Camera Shy" well MAYBE just MAYBE I will start twilight today as well. After all it is better to mock - I mean criticize- a book that you have actually read because otherwise you just sounds like an ass regurgitating the opinions of others.

Lord of the Star Wars

So a few weeks ago I got Brisinger in the mail. I was NOT impressed despite waiting 2 damn years to read it I had no desire, I blame Lori. Seriously got to figure out how to make typing her name bring you to her blog so people will know EXACTLY who I am blaming.

I loved Eragon and Eldest with a passion normally reserved for uber hot celebrities and she ruined them in one fell swoop with a very simple phrase "lord of the star wars" At fist I backed up against the wall of denial, There was no way I would have missed something that major as the book being a rip off of star wars set in a middle earth style setting, she had to be full of shit. I may be a book whore but I like to think I am a book whore with standards!

****warning spoilers ahead, in fact if you don't want me to give away the entire plot you should stop reading now****

Her words stuck in my craw though , seriously what the fuck is a craw?

craw

   /krɔ/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kraw] Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun

1.	the crop of a bird or insect.

2.	the stomach of an animal.

—Idiom

3.	stick in one's craw, to cause considerable or abiding resentment; rankle: She said I was pompous, and that really stuck in my craw.

---

Origin:
1350–1400; ME crawe, prob. akin to crag ²

OK so now that I have that bit of Googling out of my system.

I thought about it and thought about it and started to see teh similarities.

When the story starts there is one known dragon rider in the world and he is evil, as well as fucking insane (Vader?) but then a young boy (skywalker) discovers a dragon egg and takes off with an old man from the village who just HAPPENED to be an old dragon rider (ObiWan). The evil dragon rider king Galbitorix controls everything but the varden (resistance) are fighting to overthrow him along with the elves. Eragon (young skywalker) falls in in love with an elf princess (leah anyone) and is trained by another old (freaking ancient) dragon and rider everyone assumes in dead (yoda). At the end of book two we find out that one of the Crazy evil dragon riders is Eragons dad. How did I NOT see the "I am your father" moment coming?

So this was where I was when book three arrived.

I am not one who ever to let words go to waste and since I owned the book I decided to read it. Before I could read it though I had to reread book one and two because I have a weird compulsion that forces me to reread the prequels if there is more than a month between books so that I don't forget any important details, in fact this is the main reason I don't read sequels until they are completely written but I thought this was a two book set when I first bought it.

So I am rereading Eragon and Eldest and discover despite Lori's evil whisperings I STILL like the books. I became engrossed in them again immediately and finished both books in four days and moved on to book three.

I was very impressed as he seemed to move away from the star wars comparisons (at least in so far as my weak Star Wars knowledge was concerned) he went into a lot of detail about HOW Galbitorix had the powers he did and we learned more about his family tree including the fact that his mama was incapable of keeping it in her pants and that Brom (obiwan) and not Morzan (crazy evil dragon rider) was his daddy.

The one down side though was that the book was NOT a trilogy as I had been lead to believe and there is ANOTHER book coming. I will let you all know my final opinion in a few years.

So after rereading I have decided that although Paolini obviously draws on star wars for inspiration and may have in book one and two shown less creative ability than I would have liked the books are still enjoyable and well written with few plot holes and very little left unexplained, there are no sub plots left to wither, and the characters are believable. I can totally wear my Eragon shirt in public with my head held high (now I have to GET an Eragon shirt)