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.