Friday, January 25, 2013

1/25/2013- The Missing Link by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers

Hello! I'm on my second of two days of subbing for high school and junior high band, which has been a lot less traumatic than I initially expected. That really has nothing to do with my post for today, though, as I just finished reading another book, called The Missing Link, by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers. I have a habit of downloading free eBooks from Amazon.com and loading my Kindle with them before I forgot what it is that I downloaded and when I did it. Because of that, I cannot say with any certainty when it was that this book was free. Currently, though, it's $2.99, which also isn't a bad price.

It would take me ages to explain what goes on in The Missing Link, but to be overly simplistic about the whole thing, it's a novel split three ways between a bizarre takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, a pair of misfits road story, and a bunch of homeless people doing some post-apocalyptic demon fighting, all in the face of a worldwide Internet outage. I thought that it went on for way too long, with the chapters set in downtown Chicago occasionally feeling out of place, and at times, I suspect that four-letter words and bizarre comparative language that couldn't be comfortably quoted in polite company were being thrown around just for the sake of their presence. What The Missing Link did have going for it, however, is that it wasn't at all boring and constantly seemed creative. I can't say that I'd recommend it to everyone, and it won't end up on my all-time favorite books list, but it was interesting and, for quite a bit of it, entertaining. It also had several parts that I get the feeling will be very memorable, particularly the next time that my PC's virus protection decides that a game I've been playing for years has suddenly decided to launch the world's most ineffective attack on my computer.

If you have a solid attention span, spend a lot of time online, and aren't easily offended, The Missing Link might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you may want to find a book that's not tailored to such a wildly specific audience.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

1/23/2013- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

Hello, again! I realize that I just posted here earlier today, but, after a few more hours of uneventful library work, I finished reading The Castle of Otranto, which was written by Horace Walpole. Though I had a better idea what to expect from this novel than I had from Revenge!, thanks to a recommendation from the author of decay-proof record scroll, (who I've known by so many user names that I'm not sure which to use here) after I'd been talking about The Mysteries of Udolpho on Twitter, I really didn't think that it would be as entertaining or quick to read as it was. Though, as late 18th century Gothic novels, they're usually mentioned in conjunction with each other, The Mysteries of Udolpho is an incredibly long and plodding novel about a bunch of people who make bad decisions for hundreds of pages on end, while The Castle of Otranto is the sort of book that begins with someone being crushed to death by a giant helmet and is finished two and a half hours later. It was written over 200 years ago, so the language in The Castle of Otranto may seem dated to some, but in actuality, the plot moves so quickly, and with such bizarre supernatural soap opera plot points, that the dated language isn't noticeable at all.

The Castle of Otranto is the sort of book that, if you're in the mood for something ridiculous and aren't put off by older books, is very easy to recommend. The last time that I checked, it was not available as an eBook from Amazon, which seemed sort of weird to me, but a very nicely formatted and typo-free one is available from Project Gutenberg.

1/23/2013- Revenge! by Robert Barr

Hello! It's been a while since I posted here, since I haven't read as much as I should have lately, but, as I'm a substitute teacher in a high school library today, I just finished reading a book! Today's book was Revenge! by Robert Barr, which I knew absolutely nothing about before I began reading it. A few months ago, though, I was impressed by the general loopiness of one of his other books, Jennie Baxter: Journalist, so I didn't see why this wouldn't be worth trying to get through.

Rather than being a more traditional novel, Revenge! is a collection of twenty short stories, which makes it really convenient for placement on an e-reader. None of the stories are terribly long, and since, as you may have guessed from the title, most of them focus on the subject of revenge, there's plenty that happens in each of them. I have to admit that I wasn't very impressed by the two Westerns in the middle of the book, but that's more because I don't like Westerns very well than it is because they were poorly written. If someone is really into cowboys shooting at each other, I'd imagine that they'd be just as bored by the cheerful and cute romantic comedies that are also included in the book, with which I was happier.

Revenge! isn't a perfect book, especially if you, like I did, plan to sit and read all twenty of the stories right in a row. By the last few stories, the stacks of bodies and ruined careers, along with the carefully crafted plans that lead to them, start to get a little boring, but there's just enough humor and stories that stray from the darker parts of the theme to keep it from getting unreadable. Not all of the stories are that memorable, either, but they are good enough to hold your attention as you're reading them.

If you'd like to read Revenge!, it is downloadable as a free eBook both from Amazon.com and the more charitable Project Gutenberg, as are several of Robert Barr's other books.

With this post almost finished, I think that I'm going to try to post here more often, with a post for every book I read rather than one for every four or five of them. Because of that, the posts will be shorter, but hopefully, they'll be a little less irritating to read and to write, too.