An Attempt at the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge

Hello! I haven't done too much with this blog yet, other than type into the wild spaces of the internet, but I thought that it might be fun to try some reading challenges for next year! I am not totally sure how to effectively find them, but I saw one on drifting drifting..., a blog kept by fellow cross stitcher Star, and figured that it would be as good a place to start as anywhere. The challenge, hosted by Gina at the nifty looking blog Book Dragon's Lair, is called the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge! In it, you read two or three books each from a relatively basic list of genres, depending on how ambitious you feel, and and then make sure that each book from those aforementioned genres fits in a different sub-genre. I'm not sure that I'll be able to categorize everything properly as I'm going, but it sounds like it could be fun, so I'm going to try it, and go for the three-book-per-genre level of the challenge, too! Plus, it starts today rather than on January 1st, so if I can figure out where The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I'm currently about a third of the way through, would be categorized, I have a decent head-start on the challenge.

If you'd like more information on the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge, you can find it in this post from Book Dragon's Lair. I'm really hoping to pass it, since it's only 15 books, so I wish everyone else participating good luck, too!  If I can find four more interesting challenges like this before the end of the month, I think that I may be more than set in terms of reading goals for next year.

A Catch-Up Post for My Recent Reading

Hello! I have been remiss in posting here lately, so this is a little bit of a catch-up post. Since the last time that I posted here, I have been subbing a lot and reading a lot, so I have seven novels and novellas to write about. Because of the sheer amount of books I have to cover, I won't be writing all that much about any of them, but regardless of that, it should be a fairly long post.

Sakuri
Jacob Henzel
This was a book that I found for free on Amazon.com, though I think that it was a special offer that day, and then proceeded to read five or six months later. Though I haven't read any since starting this blog, I really like reading light novels, or usually fluffy Japanese novels that have four or five manga-style illustrations and sometimes get turned into anime. However, none of those have been quite as much like an anime as this Western novel was. To be fair, the sort of anime it resembles is an early to mid-90s hour long OAV, like they'd run on Friday nights on the Action Channel, right down to the quirky characters, gratuituous technobabble, bizarre sci-fi set pieces, and somewhat rushed ending with an odd and vaguely preachy last minute twist, but things could certainly be worse than that. Much like those OAVs, I can't say that this is one of the finest pieces of literature that I've read in my life, and I'm not sure that I'd recommend it to friends who weren't into that sort of anime, either. If Sakuri sounds like it would be up your alley, though, and you can get past a few typos in the Kindle edition, it's an entertaining novel.

The Vampyre: A Tale
John William Polidori
As I'm sitting here and trying to remember all of the stuff that I've read for the past couple of weeks, I am having a lot more trouble remembering this 19th century vampire novella than I am remembering the contemporary homage to sci-fi anime, which I don't think speaks well for the author, who happened to be Lord Byron's doctor. It isn't a bad story, really, but compared to a lot of other vampire stories, even from the 1800s, it's a little boring. It's still worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing. Since it was the first story of its sort, it has some historical significance, and it's short enough that even if you do get a little bored, you'll be done with it soon. Plus, the foreword and afterword on the Project Gutenberg text of this, which are trying to convince the reader that Lord Byron probably isn't as awful as they've heard he is, are pretty interesting.

Monsters: A Bloody Love Story
S.M. Reine
This was a novella that I found for free on Amazon.com, and my second piece of Halloween reading. I think that the subtitle's classification of it as a love story may be misleading, since, despite the two leads having something of a romantic connection, it's more of an incredibly bloody action story. I certainly don't have any problem with that, and had read that it wasn't a mushy romance or anything of the sort in the largely positive on-site reviews, but I'm not entirely sure that it's a good thing to finish a book and be reminded more of Daybreakers than anything else in pop culture. Still, if you want to read a vampire story with a tough heroine and a vividly described de-gutting, I can't think of anything else that would fit that description.

Flash Gold: A Steampunk Novella
Lindsey Buroker
Like a lot of the other stuff I've been talking about today, this was a free novella that I'd downloaded from Amazon.com. I downloaded it the day that I bought my Kindle and, out of some inexplicable suspicion of free contemporary novels, didn't read it until just the other day. Since I'm not an expert on steampunk literature, I can't really compare Flash Gold to any other examples of the genre, but I can definitely say that it's the most charming novella that I've ever read in which a character has a bag of disembodied heads. It was interesting enough to make me want to read the rest of the series, which I suppose is the best thing that a free book can do, and, if you're also interested in reading it, it was still available for free as of last week.

Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss
Justin Richards
When I'm doing a reading catch-up post on a blog and the most specifically targeted novel that I'm writing about is not the homage to 90s sci-fi anime, I feel like there may be a problem with my reading choices. Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss is a fake pulp novel prequel to a book that the Doctor was reading in one episode of Doctor Who, starring a character from the show under a psudonym as she battles enemies from the show that the book never takes the time to explain. If you just read that description and thought, "Oooh, is that a book about River Song fighting the weeping angels?" and don't mind that it takes less than an hour to read, then my recommendation does not matter and you'll probably go and buy it anyway. If you are not a fan of Doctor Who, however, I don't see how this book would make any sense at all. At times, it's very good at emulating the style of pulp novels, and at the very least, it's not boring, but I can't say that I liked it all that much. I read the Kindle edition of this novel, available from Amazon.com.

Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle
Ishin Nishio
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I was a fan of light novels, which don't get translated into English and sold in stores that often, so when I see them for sale cheaply, I tend to buy and stockpile them, since it's a lot more practical to spend five dollars on a book to get my dork fix than it would be to pay 30 dollars for an anime DVD. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle was one of those impulse buys, and after my negative experiences with the Book Girl series, I didn't expect much from it. The first three-fourths of the novel, however, were very entertaining, and though the central murder mystery didn't seem to make much sense at all, it moved quickly, seemed to be well-translated, and was full of characters that were likable, interesting or both. In the last fourth of the book, however, things really seemed to stumble. The ending did not really make the murder mystery make a lot more sense, but the explanation of it and the detail that it goes into would make Sherlock Holmes walk into a room, smack the protagonist in the face, and tell him to get on with it so that the readers could get on with their lives. As if it weren't already plodding enough, the initial explanation of what happened is then followed by a second explanation of more stuff that happened and why everything in the first explanation was incorrect. At that point, I almost threw my copy of the book across the library I was sitting in and smacked my head against the desk. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle isn't a bad book, really, and I'm at least curious about the second novel in the series, but I have never read something that grinds itself to a complete halt quite like this does.

Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings
Annie Hamilton
In a case of complete whiplash, I followed all of the contemporary and not quite critically lauded sci-fi that I'd been reading with a 1916 romantic comedy, though I can't say that the writing quality of Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings was any better or worse than what I'd been reading before it. It does have some entertaining parts, and the lead couple in the novel, which is not a spoiler because it would be nearly impossible to read this and not expect them to get together, fits together very well. The fact that it is sugary enough to make you vomit and unapologetically decisive about what a woman's place is, however, right down to one character complaining that all modern women think about is trying to get their right to vote, makes it very difficult to recommend. If you would like to read it, though, I found it on Project Gutenberg.

I've finally caught up on writing about what I've read here, so I'm done posting for now! Currently, I'm in the middle of reading Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World by Fanny Burney, so I'll probably write about that in the next few days. So far, it's very enjoyable, but in an 18th century novel, I never can tell what could happen to needlessly infuriate me and cause me to spend several paragraphs of text complaining about it.

Two Books That I Don't Spend Paragraph After Paragraph Complaining About

Hello! Since my last post here, I've read two books, though the fact that both of them were short makes that fairly unimpressive. As is not the case with most of my posts, however, I actually enjoyed both of them, so I guess that I don't get to complain as much as I usually do tonight.

The first of the two books, which I read on Monday, was Net of Cobwebs by Elisabeth Saxnay Holding. I'd downloaded it on a whim from Munseys.com without reading much about it first, so, from the title, I'd expected it to be some sort of ridiculous horror novel or something like that. Instead, it was a murder mystery where the crimes committed parallel the mental breakdown of a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In a lot of pulp novels that I've read, it seems like they're old or cheesy, but that wasn't the case with Net of Cobwebs at all. It was an interesting book where the solution to the mystery wasn't obvious at all, and I liked it so well that, after everyone else had left the teachers' lounge, I sat and read it until my lunch break had ended. It's not a lengthy novel at all, either, so if you enjoy mysteries and are looking for a good free ebook, I would recommend it strongly.

The second of my most recent reads, Jennie Baxter, Journalist, by Robert Barr, is definitely not as good as Net of Cobwebs was. It was, though, at least as entertaining. Although it sounds like a boring and typical woman-with-a-nifty-career novel from the 1890s, and certainly starts like one, too, at some point, things in the novel just go a little loopy. This may bother some readers, but when I start to read a book thinking that it is going to be about the newspaper business and end up reading a book with princesses, mad scientists, and Sherlock Holmes knockoffs, I am not disappointed. At times, it does border on "get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich" sexism, and it has a really idiotic sudden resolution. Jennie Baxter, Journalist was not boring at all, though, and the fact that it ended up being so bizarre and over the top didn't hurt it at all. If you'd like to read it, too, it can be found for free at Project Gutenberg, Amazon.com, and Munsey's. The ebook of it from Amazon does contain a couple of typos, but they're nothing that harms the story as a whole.

The Timelessness of Insufferable Romantic Comedies

As you may remember, in my last post, I said that I was reading, and would soon complain about Excuse Me!, a 1911 novel by Rupert Hughes. The other day, I finished reading it, and my opinion of it didn't improve any as I was reading, so I at least have plenty to say while I'm complaining. My problem with the novel wasn't at all that the plot and all of the convoluted rubbish that it was made of were dated. I have no problem reading about people who travel by train as a matter of necessity, and I'm smart enough to use a magical Internet machine to find out about the turn-of-the-century American divorce laws that so much of the novel hinges on. In fact, if you're interested in that sort of thing, you may even find the book interesting, which is why I brought it up.

As interesting as the uniquely old-fashioned parts of Excuse Me! were, they couldn't at all outweigh the things that I disliked about the book. The worst part of it, I think, is how wildly hateful it was. In 1911, the whole thing may have been par for the course, but the author seems to have been not only incredibly racist towards African Americans and Jewish people, but also had a deep, abiding distaste for British people. Whether this was all meant satirically or not, it was nearly unreadable by today's standards, partially because it was shockingly mean, and partially because the author was terrible at writing dialects.

The other thing that inflicted massive harm on the novel was the fact that Marjorie, the female lead, is a fictional character that I hated more intensely any other. She's supposed to be cute, sweet and demure, a shining example of comedic womanhood, but instead, she came off as a jealous, racist, and perhaps schizophrenic idiot. She fawns over a stupid little dog in a basket, throws hissy fits because her fiancee had a girlfriend before her, and has to steel herself for the possibility that she may have to be married by a Jewish justice of the peace. This statement may not mean much to a lot of people, but when I read, I pictured her as Katherine Heigl, which is not a compliment to either the character or the actress.

To make the whole thing even more ridiculous, Excuse Me! isn't just an idiotic romantic comedy with an improbably convenient ending. Excuse Me! is an idiotic romantic comedy where the improbably convenient ending is a train robbery.

If you really want a short romantic comedy in the public domain to fill some space on your Kindle, I haven't come across that many yet, but I can't imagine many of them being worse than Excuse Me! was. Even though I read it quite a while ago, though, I can say that The Wall Street Girl by Frederick Orin Bartlett is a much more readable alternative, without all of the weird and unnecessary plot complications involving unlikable characters that the reader barely knows. It isn't an amazing, life-changing book, but it's at least as good as a pleasant, watchable romantic comedy that might pop up on cable TV on a Sunday afternoon. Both novels are available at Project Gutenberg, and The Wall Street Girl can also be downloaded for free from Amazon.com.

Retro Gaming Tech and Turn of the Century Telephone Tech

Today, as it has been before, I've read two books to write about here, though they are fairly different. The first of these is The Genius Guide to Classic Videogames Hardware 01, which seems to have been largely put together by Retro Gamer magazine. I found it for less than five dollars on the Kindle store after getting all excited that I'd found a copy of Retro Gamer at a mall in the Quad Cities, which had led me to search the magazine's title on my Kindle. I was very happy by the book, which was a lengthy and exhaustive history of video games in the United Kingdom. As such, it wasn't always entirely applicable to American gamers, but not even the most obscure gaming systems were made to sound boring. I really enjoyed reading about all of the 8-bit computers in the early parts of the book, and though I was disappointed that they didn't tried to defend the quality of the titles available on the Virtual Boy, since that could have been fascinating, I was interested in what they had to say about the machine. I also would have liked to have read about the Neo Geo, but, since it was also an arcade system, I do understand why they didn't include it. They did write about the Neo Geo Pocket Color, however, which more than made up for it.

The other, completely dissimilar book that I just finished reading is The Story of a Doctor's Telephone: as Told by His Wife by Ellen M. Firebaugh. This book is by no means as preachy as Daisy: The Autobiography of a Cat, which had so many miserable and torturous images of animal abuse as a means of combating it that it was repetitive and difficult to get through, but if you come out of this book thinking that the author wanted everyone to drink, burn down the forests, and get diseases so their children go blind, you were probably not paying much attention. To be fair, for the most part, it's a quick read and an entertaining set of antecdotes about being a country doctor in Illinois in 1912. It's sort of cool to read about how people reacted to telephones when they were new inventions, and the medical information isn't boring, either. The didactic nature of much of the book gets really tedious in spots, though, and while I appreciate the structure of the novel, in which you hear about the doctor's various phone calls and what sorts of house calls they lead to, it doesn't hold up throughout the brief length of the book. The Story of a Doctor's Telephone isn't totally without interesting parts, so if you'd like to read it, too, the full text of the novel can be found for free at Project Gutenberg or Amazon.com.

I just started reading another book that I'm not sure if I'll get through called Excuse Me!, but whether I finish it or not, I'll be here to complain about it soon! Until then, I hope that all of you have a nice week and find lots of interesting things to read.

The Mystery of a French Mystery Novel's Rapid Downward Spiral

Hello! Yesterday, I finished reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, which was my next book to finish in the early 20th century French series (though I'm reading it in English) about the "gentleman thief" Arsene Lupin. I have a lot of enthusiasm for the series, partially because it's very entertaining and partially because Adult Swim used to show an anime, Lupin the III, which was very loosely based on the books, so my opinions on the novel are probably pretty biased. That's not to say that I've loved every one of the Arsene Lupin novels. The Hollow Needle in particular drove me up a wall, since I really disliked Beautrelet, the brilliant and remarkably cocky young detective on Lupin's trail, and I thought the last half of it was a little boring, too. 813, however, was a fast-paced, entertaining and enjoyable novel until about the last fourth of the book.

 I don't know what I could say about any of it without spoiling the whole thing, as spoiler alerts are very important to avoid with books that are nearly 100 years old, but during the last part of the book, I almost slammed my Kindle shut and shoved it back in my purse. My first problem with it was that, in the final stretch of the main story, there was a series of events that happened that, though it was perfectly logical, was so infuriating and depressing that it made me actively angry to read it. If that would have been the end of it, I would have been fine with the whole thing. After all of that happens, however, and a bit before it, too, there are so many false endings that it just gets to be sort of funny. I can think of at least four instances where the whole story could have ended, ready to go to the next book in the series, but Leblanc decided to keep going after each of them. By the time Lupin joins the French Foreign Legion (which is a spoiler, but not a very applicable one), I was not quite sure why the book hadn't ended.

Despite my complaints about the last part of 813, it was still an interesting book that I'd recommend with the same warning I posted above. If you'd like to read it, too, the full text can be downloaded in several formats from Project Gutenberg or as a Kindle book from Amazon.com.

Rubbish Sci-Fi and Spiffy Pulp Novels

Hello! It's been a bit since I last posted here, so I have read multiple books since the time of my last entry. Because there are several books to talk about, I don't have a fancy picture of a book cover to put up, for which I apologize. Hopefully, however, the tale of my treks through free book lists shall prove sufficient entertainment for all of you who have somehow stumbled across this blog.

Plenzes, by Chris Lang, wasn't the first thing that I read since my last post, but since it isn't a pulp novel, it gets its own special paragraph. I would very much like to be nice when talking about this sci-fi short story, which I found for free on Kindle through http://www.ereaderiq.com/, but it is difficult. The author did have a lot of interesting and well-thought out ideas about the future of social networking, and they didn't seem as far-fetched or terrifying as they probably should have. However, his main character was an unlikable and abusive jerk, the twist at the end came out of nowhere, and the whole thing was plagued with typos. I don't think that I would have gotten through the story had it been a full length novel.

The other two books that I read, The Big Sin by Jack Webb (which was also obtained as a free Kindle book from Amazon) and The Corpse That Walked by Octavius Roy Cohen (from http://www.munseys.com/), were much more entertaining. Admittedly, I really enjoy reading old pulp novels, especially if they seem to think logic and reality are bothers while telling a story, so I'll probably post quite a bit about them in the future. I have read some of them that are so idiotic that even I can't stand them, though, and luckily, neither of these novels falls under that category.

I have to say that of the two books, The Big Sin is undoubtedly the better novel. It's more realistic, more thoughtful, has more likable characters, and is bereft of any major plot holes. It was a quick read that never got boring for a page, and it would be easy to recommend to anyone who really wants to read a book from the 1950s about a priest and a Jewish cop solving the murder of a Mexican showgirl. The Corpse That Walked, however, is about a nice, honest, and not all that smart guy who gets plastic surgery so he can pretend to be a wanted criminal while people are trying to kill him and his intrepid go-getter girlfriend poses as a reporter to uncover the sordid truth behind his exploits. It is ridiculous, over-the-top, and never even tries to be plausible, so, naturally, it was much more entertaining than the more serious novel that took the time to think about religion, prejudice, and justice. The beginning of The Corpse That Walked is painfully slow, particularly if you're reading it a chapter at a time at 1 in the morning, but once it picks up at about the halfway point, its hard to argue against the borderline insanity of the plot being, at the very least, interesting.

Yesterday, I started reading 813 by Maurice Leblanc, so that will at least be included in an upcoming post. Until then, however, I'm hoping to at least keep this blog surviving!

There Are Two Different Versions of the First Bobbsey Twins Book!

The Bobbsey Twins or Merry Days Indoors and Out
Laura Lee Hope
Published in 1904 by Grosset and Dunlap, and currently available as a free ebook from Project Gutenberg

Last night, I finished reading The Bobbsey Twins or Merry Days Indoors and Out, which I had downloaded because, having earned enough to buy a Kindle, the best thing I could think to do with it was to start downloading kids' books from the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't that different from other ones that I've read, since it was mostly a cute book and very episodic, but in this case, it had some passages that were so wildly racist that I couldn't imagine it being sold today. I did like all of the stuff about how holidays were celebrated at the turn of the century, and was pretty entertained by Bert's almost Crime and Punishment-esque dilemma about having witnessed the breaking of a shoe store's window. It was just much harder to enjoy the parts about how sweet little Flossie used a big piece of cardboard to segregate the majority of her doll collection, with fluffy blonde hair and pink dresses, from the black doll in a spiffy red hat and blue suit that the household help, who have their dialogue written in a nearly unreadable dialect, had purchased for her.

What seemed the strangest about all of those parts of The Bobbsey Twins first book was that I was sure I'd read it myself when I was in grade school, but couldn't remember any of that. I know that I probably wasn't thinking too hard about political issues in literature when I was seven, but I'm sure that the book's heroine sorting her dolls with barriers would have left an impression on me. When I looked it up to see what happened, though, I found out that the version I'd read before was a revision from 1961 called The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport. It sounds like a few parts of the story are still the same, but it was completely rewritten as a mystery novel, which partially explains why absolutely none of it seemed familiar to me now. I wish that I could remember if they'd left in the part where a girl passes out while jump roping and Nan and Bert think she's dead, but at the very least, I know that some of the politically incorrect parts of the book were cleaned up for the 60s revision of the book.

If you're curious about revisions of old series books, Jennifer's Series Books has several posts with side by side comparisons of different versions of Nancy Drew novels. I haven't read about anything on her blog that sounds quite as extreme as what happened to the Bobbsey Twins books, but it's still interesting to see what changes were made.

Singing Robots and Exploding Hands Aren't Always That Exciting

Clover: Volume One
Clamp
Published in 2001 by Tokyopop, and in omnibus form by Dark Horse Comics in 2012


Before I go on too much, I have to say that Clover (Volume 1) is one of the prettiest comic books, or manga, if you want to be more specific, that I've ever read. Even with all of their empty spaces, the pages of this look lovely, covered in characters that wear flowing clothing and never have a hair out of place, even in the middle of a one-on-one army guy yelling and stabbing fight. The character designs are well done, the backgrounds, which are filled with a disproportionate amount of giant curtains and a lot of things that look fairly robotic, are really detailed, and, because of all of the aforementioned empty space, the panels look like they're floating, leading to a comic that's never cluttered or difficult to read.

As pretty as the first volume of Clover is, however, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I realize that, as the first volume of the comic, it has quite a bit of time left to explain things and fill in all of the blanks that the reader is left with after reading this segment of the story. For now, though, all that's evident is that Kazuhiko, who has a dark past and is involved with the military, has to escort Suu, a clueless, but, of course, super-cute robot girl to a location that is undisclosed, not just to the reader, but also to them. At some point before the story starts, Kazuhiko also got a robot hand that can turn into weapons and things like that, but that seems slightly less relevant to the characters and all of their massive amounts of mysterious despair than the un-directed journey does.

I have no problems with a story taking a while to get started, and, since I have the omnibus edition of Clover, I'll keep reading it until the end. For now, though, it seems much more concerned with being pretty and atmospheric than it does with telling a story. When I was first buying manga, I'd always look at it in stores, wanting very much to read it, but instead buying other books, since it was both the most expensive and shortest of anything on the shelf at Waldenbooks. Now that it's come out at a lower price and I finally have it, I think that I was probably better off reading Paradise Kiss after all. Still, I'm hoping that the next three volumes are better, and, regardless of their quality, will continue to write about them here.

About Me and This Blog

Hello! I already have a cross stitch blog, so it's probably not that interesting that I want to keep a blog about reading, too. However, Shelfari has not been behaving properly for me lately, so this seemed like it could work just as well. Most of the stuff that I read is sort of silly, so it's not like I'll be expounding on the wonders of great literature, or even recent stuff that's decently respected. If you would like to read about a bunch of strange books that I dig up on free ebook link sites, fluffheaded novels that get made into anime, comics that I find on sale, and things that I find at used stores, however, I hope that you enjoy this blog!