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!
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