3/26/2013- The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame

Yesterday, perhaps because I hate myself, I read The Shadow of a Sin by Charlotte M. Brame (though it is sometimes credited to Bertha Clay). It was a lovely Victorian melodrama about the young and fair Hyacinth Vaughn. The poor, sweet Hyacinth is raised in seclusion by her loving, but staid grandparents, and she longs to experience the brightness of life in the outside world. That's why she decides to elope with the first handsome young man to profess his undying love for her. Though Hyacinth repents of her rash plan before having the chance to go through with it, her plan to sin casts a sinister blot upon her young life.

Though there are plenty of things that I could complain about in The Shadow of a Sin, my biggest problem with the book is that Hyacinth Vaughn is one of the stupidest heroines in any novel that I've ever read. In her case, I'm not going to complain about how outdated the social mores depicted in this novel are, and I'm not going to say any more than this about how every book that I've ever read by Charlotte M. Brame has had at least one idiotic character in a leading role that could have solved every problem suffered by every character in a thirty second speech. I am, however, going to spew a couple of slight spoilers, so if you get upset about people ruining plot points in books from the 19th century, you may want to skip my next paragraph.

First of all, if you find a dying woman in a field, saying over and over again that a man is going to murder her, I think that Hyacinth's plan of, "Oh! My handkerchief is too lacy to bandage her wounds, so I think that I need to ask my boyfriend to lend me a better handkerchief, with his name on it, to leave on her body before we leave her lying in the field!" would not be the first one that sprung to the minds of many people. The fact that he also leaves his address with the dying woman is his fault, not Hyacinth's, but he wasn't in the novel enough for me to get infuriated with his character, so he doesn't get to be the subject of this rant.

Once all that is over with, if you have a fiancee who says that he'll love you no matter what, and you find yourself having to testify in court to save your last boyfriend from the gallows, it might be a good idea to mention this to the fiancee. Hyacinth does not do this. In fact, she runs screaming from the fiancee, assumes that her having a previous boyfriend will spoil his heart against her forevermore, goes crazy, and goes into hiding. At no point does it occur to her that, having saved someone's life, the new fiancee might be willing to forgive her for having spoken to other boys. If Hyacinth did assume that people weren't constantly willing to throw her in a ditch and ride away in their carriages, though, there really wouldn't be much of a story, though, so her mind-numbing stupidity is necessary to the plot.

The one thing that I can say for The Shadow of a Sin is that, although it is insane nonsense, it is interesting and fairly well written, like the rest of Charlotte M. Brame's work. I know that, whenever I start one of her books, I'll be ready to stomp my Kindle to pieces during at least one part of it. While her books are ridiculous, though, and involve foreshadowing as subtle as beating the reader in the head with a tree branch, most of the melodrama is actually pretty page turning. Since I'm not a reader of the Victorian era, I can't say for certain that her books seemed any less insane then, but I can see how they kept selling.

If you too would like to waste a day on The Shadow of a Sin, it is available as a shiny new eBook from Project Gutenberg. A Fair Mystery, another of Brame's books, was made available alongside it, but, for the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to wait a while until I read that one.

3/18/2013- Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter

I finally came across a book that's easy to summarize, which feels like quite an achievement. Gamers, by Thomas K. Carpenter, which I downloaded for free from Amazon.com, is a sci-fi YA novel and the first book in a series. It's about Gabby, an improbably brilliant young hacker who lives in a futuristic world in which life has been turned into a video game. Though she primarily uses her hacking skills to help her friends, rather than for selfish reasons, she becomes concerned upon discovering that the LGIE, a governing organization that keeps track of the game, has been digging around in her personal files. When Gabby decides to investigate this for herself, she discovers, ever so shockingly, that her lovely, idyllic life may not be all that it seems.

Snarkiness aside, I thought that Gamers was a fairly entertaining book. It's nothing that I'd go crazy recommending to people, but it wasn't a chore to read by any means. The characters were likable, the world that they lived in was well thought out and littered with references to old-school gaming, and the story was suspenseful enough that it was easy to keep picking up for a few minutes of reading. I did, however, think that it had a few major issues.

My first problem with Gamers, and probably my biggest one, is that I'd feel charitable saying that it was a bit derivative. I don't want my finger pointing to be too specific, but the last chunk of the novel is about a high stakes competition where the students at Gabby's school are forced to compete in a ruthless game, where the losers may be killed and the winners are given grand rewards. This game is created by a ruthless agent of the aforementioned LGIE, it forces, at several points, the students to fight one another, and the stealthy, antisocial girl is named after an animal. No mass audiences sit and watch the Final Raid, as it's called, but it makes parallels between Gamers and certain other series easy to draw.

I had a couple of smaller problems with Gamers, but neither of them were nearly as distracting. One of them was that there were a few errors with grammar and verb tense, but, for me,  those were only momentary issues. I also hated the cliffhanger of an ending, since, in the interest of getting people to continue with the series, it left absolutely nothing resolved. It's possible to end some aspects of a story while still keeping readers interested in the characters, but Gamers actively created new plot points in the last few pages of the book. It wasn't horrible, really, but it was frustrating.

Even though I may not seem to have the nicest things to say about Gamers, I did sort of like it. It wasn't boring, I didn't hate the characters, and, even though the vast majority of characters that lived there were doomed, the novel's world seemed fairly cool as far as dystopian societies go. If you're looking for a few hours worth of fluffy reading material that's appropriately perilous to the cast, you could certainly do worse than to read Gamers.

Showcase Sunday #1

Hello! The last meme type thing (though it seems a bit odd to call them that) on here was fun, so it seems reasonable enough to try another one! This one is called Showcase Sunday, and is hosted by the lovely blog Books, Biscuts, and Tea. In it, you're supposed to talk about all of the books that you accquired over the past week, whether they be physical books or eBooks. I'm going to cheat a little for this post, partially because I got a really cool book last Saturday and want to write about that. Also, if I counted the free eBooks that I racked up last week, both from special offers and public domain stuff, I would be working on this post for hours. Because of these things, I doubt if this will be a very good Showcase Sunday post. I've finished my introduction paragraph, though, so I might as well just go for it!

Drury Lane's Last Case, by Ellery Queen (which I know is a pseudonym), is the only book I took a photo of, because it's the only one that looks out of the ordinary. I got really excited about finding an old mystery novel at Goodwill, especially for $1.99, so I got it, despite the fact that it's in that plastic bag for a reason. It's in very readable condition, though, so as long as I keep it in that bag when I'm reading it, the whole thing should stay together. A few of the pages are coming out, but in chunks, so it's easy to deal with.

Sherlock Homes vs. Fantomas, by Pierre de Wattyne and Yorril Walker, was a Kindle purchase that I made to celebrate the fact that the University of Illinois Springfield raised no major objections to my attending grad school there. However, the fact that it's about both Sherlock Holmes and Fantomas meant that if I didn't get into their grad school, I would have purchased it to make myself feel better.

At the start of the month, I ordered a couple of used books from Amazon for a penny each, and the 18th Robotech book, The End of the Circle, is the one that showed up first. I heard it was a really strange attempt to tie up all of the loose ends that result from shoving three different TV shows together in order to create one, so I hope that, even if it doesn't end up making a lot of sense, it's at least entertaining.

Soulless, by Gail Carriger, is the last book on my list, and since I found it in a real life bookstore, I'm guessing that it's the least strange one to have on the list. I'd read about it before and thought that it sounded cool, though, since Victorian London and supernatural things are both cool, so I'm hoping it's good.

This week, I got far more books than usual, so I might try to keep track of the free eBooks that I get to include in a post next week. I'm done with this post for now, though, so I'm leaving this blog! Have a nice week, everyone!

3/13/2013- Fast One by Paul Cain

Eventually, I'm going to read something that's easy to summarize for this blog, but today, I didn't manage it. Fast One, by Paul Cain, is a 1933 hard boiled crime novel about Kells, a criminal who gets framed for murder after refusing to help another denizen of the underworld, Jack Rose, with some trouble on a gambling boat, and has a rather strong reaction to it. After he gets double crossed over and over again, he somehow comes to the conclusion that he needs to be in charge of all of the gangsters in town. Once Kells achieves this, things escalate quickly, and he proceeds to get double crossed for over one hundred more pages.

Fast One really should have been an exciting book. There are gangsters, gambling, political conspiracies, some inexplicable episode in the middle with boxers, and enough dead bodies that I think a sheet of notes would be helpful in keeping track of all of them. For all that goes in the book, though, I was bored during a lot of it. The characters, other than a few that spend the entire novel in the forefront, lack personality and come and go quickly, making it somewhat meaningless when a more important character kills them off. Beyond that, there are so many nonsensical plots both by Kells and engineered against him that at some points, the book stops making sense entirely.

Though I have plenty of complaints about Fast One, it wasn't totally without its merits. Some passages, especially towards the end of the book, were actually quite exciting. It also had the perfect ending, one that was very logical and made it hard to imagine another way that the story could have possibly ended. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I have other, more outlandish pulp novels.

If Fast One sounds like it would be more your cup of tea than it was mine, an eBook of it can be found at Munsey's, which is a super-nifty eBook database for out of copyright novels. There are some bothersome typos in it, but nothing that affects its readability. Most of them are simple capitalization errors or strange bits of punctuation resting where they couldn't possibly belong.

3/11/2013- A Nest of Spies by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

I was going to start trying to start each of my posts here with a summary of the book that I was writing about, but A Nest of Spies, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, may not be the best book with which to begin that. This novel, released in English in 1917, is the fourth book in the Fantomas series, which I've written about here before. What I've read of the series so far is about a super-detective, Juve, and his journalist friend, Jerome Fandor (though his identity is way more complicated than that) going after the inexplicably resourceful super-villain, Fantomas. I'm not sure what I can say specifically about A Nest of Spies without inadvertently spoiling the whole thing, but am pretty sure that I can safely say that it's about a remarkably complicated plot against the nation of France in which, shockingly enough, Fantomas happens to be an instrumental figure.

Despite some slow parts in the middle, A Nest of Spies is a very entertaining novel. It is only barely plausible, and the number of footnotes that refer back to massively convoluted plot points from earlier in the series gets really ridiculous, especially towards the end. Having read the last three books, however, I thought that reading this one was quite fun. It had stolen bears, bands of anarchists, and a royal ball, with all of that just within the novel's final stretch, so I'm not sure what else I could have possibly expected from it.

As entertained as I was by A Nest of Spies, however, I can't deny that it had some issues. First of all, if you read this without being willing to keep track of the characters' extensive lists of aliases, you'll have to be prepared to get quite lost. Since the novel is about spies, some of that is unavoidable, and, to be completely fair, most of the characters keep their false identities down to just one. There were some points, though, particularly when I was reading late at night, where I had to backtrack like crazy to remember who I'd been told, particularly among the secondary characters, was pretending to be who or was working for who. Fandor's disguise, which becomes one of the central parts of the book, is clearly presented, but some of the others just get ridiculous.

My other problem with the book, which is more superficial, is with the disguises themselves. I'll grant that Juve and Fantomas get to be awesome at putting together disguises that no one could possibly see through, since I bothered to put "super" in front of both of their character descriptions. When it comes to Fandor, though, who admits that he's a bit iffy on the quality of his disguise, I feel that I can say without spoiling too much that, if he's spending days on end with someone he knows, and they're spending the night in a hotel room with him on top of that, they should probably be smart enough to recognize him, especially if slightly later in the novel, they can spot him on a crowded street. Since we're not supposed to believe that this character is a total idiot, I couldn't get past his or her apparent inability to recognize faces as anything but a major plot hole.

Even though I'm complaining a lot now, I did really like A Nest of Spies and am disappointed that I'm almost out of Fantomas books. If you'd like to read this one, or any of the other books in the series, for yourself, all five of the translated volumes in the public domain are available at both Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com.

3/7/2013- Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Hello! I'm back in the high school library today, and I just finished reading another off-the-shelves lunch break book! Today's choice, Coraline by Neil Gaiman, went much better for me than Game Over (see my post from Monday) had. A few years ago, I saw the movie that was based on Coraline and really enjoyed it, which was why I decided to read the book. I can't remember the movie as well as I should, but I remember it well enough to know that the book is quite different. It's very short, so there are fewer characters and fewer things that happen, which isn't a bad thing at all. The basic story, about Coraline getting bored and wandering into an alternate world where she finds strange versions of her parents that want to stop her from leaving and replace her eyes with buttons, is pretty much the same. As the book is more streamlined than the movie is, however, that makes it even more creepy and disturbing. Without the minor characters and showy scenes, the whole thing focuses strictly on Coraline and how she manages to work through being terrified to solve some major problems, which is very effective.

It probably doesn't need to be stated directly, but I'd have a much easier time recommending Coraline to a student that wanted a quick book to read than I would Game Over. It may not have all of the Satan-opening-an-arcade murder flashiness, but by actually being about its main character and how she feels, it manages to be much more unsettling. Of course, it also helps that Coraline isn't nearly as idiotic as Game Over is, which didn't hurt matters. If I find another book even close to as interesting on my next high school library lunch break, I will be happy.

Wishlist Wednesday #1

Hello! I sort of stole this from Topcho, at Bla Bla Bla Books, but Wishlist Wednesday sounded like a cool blog hop to participate in, so I wanted to give it a try! Wishlist Wednesday, which is hosted by the big and fancy book blog Pen to Paper, is where, once a week, you write about a book that you would very much like to own. As I am fantastic at wanting things, I figured that I'd be a shoo-in for doing well at this. Anyway, here is the lovely link button for the blog hop, followed by my actual entry. (I will also have you know that, being the advanced computer user that I am, it took me 10 minutes to make this button show up.)

Anyway, my one wanted book out of dozens for today's post is Fantomas in America by David White. (Here's a nifty website from the publisher that has a pile of information about the novel!) I have an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm for turn of the 20th century French pulp novels, and am on-purpose-slowly working my way through the five translated and available Fantomas novels, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, that are available in the public domain. (I got them from Project Gutenberg, but they're also free downloads for Kindle from Amazon.com. Either way, the text is the same, so it doesn't matter which eBook source you use.) Fantomas in America, however, is a 2007 novel about the titular supervillian coming to America, apparently after he was presumed dead in the wreckage of the Titanic, which is awesome, and causing all sorts of trouble. Rather than being a brand-new story, however, the book is based on a lost American silent serial from the 1920s, and also contains some stills from those movies. I only found out that this book existed last night, which means that it's in the front of my mind and easy to write about today, but at some point, I really hope to read it.

I am not sure if that was a proper Wishlist Wednesday post, but it was fun to do, and I don't see myself running out of things to write about in posts like this anytime soon. Hopefully, I'll participate next week, too! Until then, however, I should have another normal post sometime in the next week, and there's another blog hop type of thing that I'm hoping to participate in, too. I'm hoping that these things end up going well.

3/4/2013- Game Over by Joseph Locke

I mentioned in my last post that I planned to read a bad and outdated novel about video games that I found as I was subbing in a high school library, so, over my lunch break, I did just that. However, Game Over by Joseph Locke is not just an outdated book about video games. It is also, without any warning whatsoever from the outside of the novel, an outdated book about Satan opening an arcade where angry teenagers pretend to kill each other so often that they actually start doing it. It was every bit as bad as I expected, and I don't really see how, with so much focus being on either the promise of God's salvation (or the power of a possibly magical local youth pastor), the author could have justified the fact that this book contains some of the most bizarre and horrific murders that I've recently seen in print. True, the fact that it was as subtle about its Christian leanings as a cereal commercial is about the benefits of getting up and eating a pound of solid sugar is makes it so there was no mistake about what side the author fell on in the God vs. Satan debate, but the uses of household tools (and the axes that all of the parents in this town seemed to decorate with) hardly made me think of spending a morning in church. I was also, admittedly, disappointed in the fact that, since the games were powered by Hell itself, there were no details about the technology used to run the devil's own arcade.

I cannot say much in defense of Game Over, since it was an oddly written and bizarre plea for specifically Christian salvation that ended more quickly than any of the free eBooks I've read that seem to exist solely for the purpose of getting you to buy the rest of the series ever have. If you feel the need to read a book about the devil ripping a small town to shreds with an early-90s video arcade, however, I have no way of preventing you from finding Game Over for yourself. At the very least, it's short enough that sitting down to read it won't take up too much of your time.

3/4/2013- The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted by Lindsay Buroker

A few months ago, when I was sitting in the teacher's lounge and waiting for my next assignment on a very odd day of substitute teaching, I read Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker, a steampunk novella that I'd found for free while browsing Amazon.com's bestseller lists. I'd just finished another free novella I'd found that was so bad it was a bit puzzling, so my expectations for Flash Gold were not remarkably high, but I was pleased to find that it was very enjoyable. It took me a while to get to it, but after that, I actually bothered to buy the second and third books in the series for my Kindle (which wasn't very expensive at all), leading me to believe that the author's making the first book available for free was an effective tactic.

Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.

Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.

3/1/2013- Robotech #11: Metamorphosis by Jack McKinney

I am not sure that reading novels based on weird dubs of 80s sci-fi anime is the best use of my time, but I do it anyway. I've been reading the Robotech novels like crazy lately, though I've been doing it wildly out of order, and on Friday, I finished Metamorphosis, the 11th of them. (The last one that I read was the 7th, so that should tell you my high regard for logic in this case.) It was something that I found at a used book store, so after I started reading it, I realized that it was the second book in the New Generation story arc. The story still made as much sense as it would have anyway, though, so it didn't bother me.

Like the other based-directly-on-episodes-of-the-cartoon Robotech books that I've read, Metamorphosis is decently written, if not occasionally a little dry, but full of parts where it seems like the author, constrained by the source material, is ready to pound his face into his writing desk. There's one part of this book in particular, where the book tries to explain why, if all of the Macross stuff took place in the same area just a few decades before, the characters come across a primitive society that prays to a dam that's almost worth every page of the novel. It's all sort of ridiculous, and this one, more than the other books in the series, is incredibly episodic. Seeing as I'm irrationally fascinated with Robotech, though, I really enjoyed it. It had enough sci-fi nonsense to last me through breaks on two less than thrilling days of subbing, and the characters in this story arc were really likable, too. Given the extremely specific target audience of this novel, I'm not sure if it would be proper for me to recommend it to anyone else. Still, for my own purposes, I'm way too excited that I've still got a stack of Robotech books to get through.