Saturday, October 27, 2012

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.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

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.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

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.