Jul 18

Jul 18 Pooka-riding gypsies, horned boys, and pirates masquerading as scientists

Dearest friend-readers of my most esteemed cyber acquaintance,

It's no fun to realize that your last post didn't well... post.

Obviously, everyone is on the edge of their seat for all of my updates, so I owe you my most sincere apologies at leaving your bottoms in mid-air for the better part of a week. While I've been having the spins, I've been most remiss in my duties to barge in on your perfectly respectable feed of cat memes with my romance novel reviews, excessive sentence length, and generally sassy nature. Actually, I believe it's a violation of article X, stipulation B in the Friends Who Occasionally Write blogs For Their Own Vanity contract, that I make at least one bombastic and self-deprecating statement every other day. So, good readers, I hope you'll forgive me for the absolute treat (read: piece of crap) of a post that I'm re-spinning right here right now.

Yours in total seriousness because this is a post about horned boys and pooka-riding gypsies and there is nothing more serious than horned boys and/or pooka-riding gypsies,

Kristen

PS. Squiggly squiggly hand motions a la Scooby Doo

PPS. Squiggly squiggly hand motions a la Waynes World flashbacks

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A few days ago I was held hostage on a stopped Caltrain by faulty electronics, but I wasn't upset about it. I happened to be sitting next to a totally normal sized person who didn't sweat profusely, smell badly, or insist on talking to me... and I had a bunch of half-finished books on my fantastic electronic reading machine. These half-finished books quickly became finished books, which I just remembered to add to the Big List, and which combined make one hell of a title. And when you've got a great title, it's worth writing about, no?

So, let's have some speed reviews! (The kind of reviews where I tell you what I thought, don't try to provide any sort of useful summary, will probably focus on some weird fancy I had while reading said book, and will likely be devoid of anything resembling deep insight. Enjoy!)

Gratuitous and Unnecessary Note: As I might have mentioned on The Facebooks, I've had something of a streak: picking up books that aren't bad, but also haven't held my interest long enough to keep me from picking up other, more interesting books. You know what I'm talking about because you've probably done it yourself with some media, even if you haven't done it with books. You pick up <insert media type here> and you read/watch/listen to half of it. It's alright, but maybe the book is serious and you've had a tough day. Shit was cray at work and you can't handle that latest installment of that thing even though you love it. Or, you've been tearing through romance novels (cough), but one day you wake up and realize that you're not living up to your full potential as an esteemed product of San Jose State's illustrious English department (ahem, cough, cough) and decide that you need something with considerably more obscure metaphors and veiled references to the bible. Like I said, who hasn't been there?

So yeah, though I do finish many books, it was alarming to note that I was starting to collect a veritable graveyard of half- finished books. Housecleaning was in order, but because I'm actually a pretty busy person who likes to think her time is valuable, I also decided that if I picked a book up again and still wasn't into it, I'd write it down on a list somewhere and archive it on my Kindle app. That way I could stop feeling guilty and actually restore clean accounting to the backlog of unread books to my Kindle. Three of these books I picked up a second time and completed.

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

Holly Black writes one-off fantasy stories in the YA genre and her book covers are always to die for: interesting, visual, alluring, swirly. (I think that's a word, right?) These covers are black magic talismans... when you see them on the table at your local bookstore they call to you. They make you pick up the book, walk to the checkout counter, and throw money indiscriminately in the direction of hapless cashiers.

I hope Holly Black's cover illustrator is filthy rich.

I found Darkest Part of the Forest to be similar in pacing to the first book I read by Ms Black: The Coldest Girl in Cold Town, which is to say SLOOOOOWWWW. I think this is her thing. Very slow development of characters, plot, and really, everything. Not meticulously slow because she's describing every single hair on a character's head, or every single detail on a leather pouch (a la George R. R. Martin, who has entirely too many Rs in the middle of his name) though.

Even though I said I wasn't going to do this, I tried to think of a ninja, nature, quicksand, man-eating plant metaphor to describe the slow death but only ended up going down the rabbit hole of scary plant lists provided by this Google search. <sigh>

Anyway... my point is that it took over 200 pages to get to something that even vaguely resembled conflict. The weird thing is, I can't decide if I'm mad that it took so long for me to realize we didn't have a plot, or if I'm impressed that this book somehow managed to put my need to keep track of time ALL THE TIME to sleep. I clearly time traveled. And while the premise itself was super interesting (horned boys trapped in glass coffins, sword-wielding, unaccompanied minors who sometimes eat dog kibble, dirt monsters, and faeries who torment a seemingly willing southern town), the pacing killed the squee of discovering pleasure nuggets hidden in the plot. Lame.

This book wasn't necessarily bad. I just think that I'm not the type of person who wants my adventures coated in molasses. If you're the type of person who likes their adventures to lope along at a leisurely pace, then maybe Holly Black is the fantasy writer for you. For me, I'd give this book *** for originality but -** for pacing. I probably won't pick up another of her books and will give all pretty covers of hers a 30 foot berth when walking into indy bookstores.

Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! by Gideon Defoe

This book appeared on the NPR book concierge last year and I thought it'd be a light, cheery listen for short car rides and walking the dog. And, I think it was. I mean, it certainly was light. And it certainly was silly. And it certainly had a narrator with an awesome British accent. But, you know what else? I can't remember anything about it... I mean, I kind of remember the most significant plot points... Or do I?

I mean, there were a bunch of pirates that didn't have names, and they were very stupid. I recall that Charles Darwin was a character, as well as a trained chimpanzee named Mr Bobo. There was also lots of ham, which I found enjoyable. Oh, and at some point there was a some pirates masquerading as scientists and women. And I didn't care about any of it. Like, at all.

And yet, I still finished it. Why?

Easy answer: it was funny. It was weird and totally outlandish and didn't require any brain power. Oh, and it was less than three hours long. Honestly, I'm pretty confused about why I'm not railing against this book. But I'm not. I wouldn't recommend it... but somehow I can't rally the energy to be mad at a book that is so committed to ham.

Mine Till Midnight by Lisa Kleypas

So look... so far I haven't held up my end of the bargain. I kind of promised speed, but I can't seem to write less than three paragraphs for all of these random reads. So, let me try to do better for you this time.

While I enjoyed Lisa Kleypas' Wallflowers and Bow Street Runners series muchly, this one left me cold. Maybe it was the bizarre accents in the audible narration for the Romany gypsy love interest? Maybe it was my inability to suspend disbelief that a character that seemed so dangerous and interesting when he was a minor character in the best book of the Wallflowers series (even if it didn't feature dangerous lawn sports like the last installment), Devil in Winter, could be so freaking boring when he was in his own book?

I don't know. All I can tell you is that it's through this book that I discovered the pooka. Pooka is a satisfying word to say loudly and out of context. Try it. Just say pooka in your next meeting, preferably while pointing to a chart in Powerpoint.

While I've generally come to enjoy Miss Kleypas' regency romances, this one was a miss for me. Probably because the heroine was entirely too serious and miss-ish, and because I didn't find the author's stab at exoticism to be at all, well... exotic. I am going to skip the next book, which I think follows on the same theme. (Really, two sisters in good society that fall for half-gypsies? Really?) What I will do is pick up the series with book 3 - 5, where the younger sisters--who are infinitely more quirky-- and the brooding, suicidal brother get their own books

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{Squiggly time travel, flashback motions}

Now I've done a cursory reread and made slight grammar and/or punctuation amendments to this post, I'm making sure that this really publishes. And then, I'm going to go admire this photo for a bit. Phil informs me that we messed up when planning our London sojourn because we missed the giant yellow douchcanoe balloon AND this fan-freaking-tastic Jurassic Grrrrr gem.