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!

3/1/2013- 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.

2/21/2013- Bianca in Black by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer

Hello! I'm in the high school library again today, which, as always, gives me a lot of time to read. This morning, my book of choice was a 1958 mystery by Elizabeth Sax Rohmer titled Bianca in Black, which I'd gotten for 50 cents from a used books for charity bin at Wal-Mart. It wasn't really a bad book, but compared to a lot of the books I'd read recently, it seemed very simple. In it, a beautiful fashion model named Bianca, who refuses to wear any colors other than black, keeps marrying men that she doesn't love, and all of them promptly drop dead. Of course, she didn't do it, since she's a lovely damsel in distress, and of course, Bruce Willoughby, the detective who stumbles upon her falls madly in love with her, meaning that he feels responsible for solving the murders and clearing his darling love's good name. It wasn't an awful book, and, as I read it, it was interesting, but the plot moved in an incredibly straight line, with no room for subplots or even red herrings that were addressed for more than a few sentences at a time. It drove me crazy that through the whole book, Bianca did nothing but ask for help and beg that Bruce stay away from her, as she was ever so dangerous and didn't want to hurt him, and it was also a little strange that the entire mystery wrapped itself up in the last four pages, with nothing from the characters but an, "Oh, it's really too bad that happened, isn't it?" in response to the whole thing.

I realize that I am probably being unfair to Bianca in Black, but at about the same time, I'd bought another used book from the same line (both were labelled as Airmont Mysteries) called Crime and Judy, in which a lady detective coming up against institutionalized sexism and her wheelchair bound brother fight a swamp full of Communists, so my expectations for this were very high. What is interesting about directly comparing the two books, however, is that they were both obviously formatted to fit in a 124 page book, which means that while Crime and Judy has a pretty reasonable text size, the print in Bianca in Black is so small that it makes old Bibles look like the large-print editions of magazines.

Bianca in Black probably wasn't worth the eye strain that I got from reading it, but since I got it for 50 cents, it's hard to be upset about that. Reading it was an okay way to spend the morning, and it's not like I have to sit and read through it again and again. If it sounds like the kind of book you'd be interested in reading, it is long out of print, but it looks like, at least online, used copies can be found easily and cheaply.