Currently Reading: Hardly Working

Betsy Burke

Like a bad Harlequin romance, only twice as long and with so much dreary exposition about fundraising and the environment that it's less than half as interesting. Help.

Currently Reading: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl

OMG, YAWN. It's not a good sign when your dog destroys the book you're reading and you feel a sense of relief about it. The last time my dog chewed up a book I was reading, it was John Grisham's The Client, and I felt exactly the same way, like, "Oh, thank GOD, I don't have to waste anymore of my life wading through that DRECK." And back then, I was only 7 pages away from the ending. I'm currently on page 156 of Pessl's 514 page first opus - in hardcover - and I could kiss my dog for risking his digestive track to save me from the horror. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite as thorough as he could have been, and the damned thing is still readable. As I am a glutton for literary punishment, that means I must keep reading. But I don't know how much longer I can last. I've already reached the skip-mass-portions-of-text angry reading phase, and generally when that happens, there has to be something about the text to motivate me - an oft-repeated word or gimmick I can distract myself by counting its number of occurrences, for example. Unfortunately, Pessl isn't annoying in that way. I could count constructs in pretention, but the universe doesn't provide a number that goes that high, so I'll just have to keep pushing through the jungle of holy-crap-does-this-stink-or-what until I can't take anymore.

See you then.

Update: Bras & Broomsticks

It's been weeks, and I'm still slowly ploughing (or plowing, if you will) through this thing. If Mlynowski had put half as much work into plot as she did into trying to be clever, it'd be a much better read. As it is, I'm forcing myself to get through it. I seriously weep for teens, that books like this are what they have to choose from.

Note to self: stop reading books the covers proclaim screamingly funny. Srsly.

Currently Reading: Marked

I'm halfway through it and still no conflict. It's like a Disneyland ride, with vampires - excuse me: vampyres - instead of adorable, fluffy bunnies. Vampire Kisses had more depth.

Oy.

Currently Reading: Sweep, Book 1

Book of Shadows. Could go either way, book fans. Already, the obvious foreshadowing for the cheap seats in the back is coming perilously close to making me start flinging objects. It's the literary equivalent of a bad actress in a worse melodrama flinging herself back against the set as she presses the back of one hand to her forehead and announces for the umpteenth time in the worst Southern accent imaginable that she just doesn't know what she'll do if Jed doesn't come home from the war, making it totally clear old Jed will never be seen again.

Still, no spoiler comments, please!