The Girl Who Became a Beatle by Greg Taylor(original review) I had originally taken this book off my to-read shelf, then put it back when I saw it was at my local library. I should have left it off. It’s so uninspiring and meaningless. It has nothing to do with The Beatles. The main character encounters no obstacles, then decides to give up her great life because a Disney ending demands it. I hate books that have a great concept but don’t use it. Breath by Jackie Morse Kessler(original review) Speaking of great concepts never used… I also read Loss this year and could have put it up there. But Breath…
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Top 3 Books I Read in 2013
This year I read forty books. Down three from last year. Granted I had a few re-reads, but the idea is to go up, not down. I also decided, since I love the Channel Awesome year-in-reviews so much, I’d talk about the best and worst books I read this year for the first time. Now remember, these didn’t necessarily come out this year. And they’re not necessarily indicative of the star rating I gave them. Eleanor & Park (original review) The more I think about this book, the better it gets. Reflecting on Eleanor makes me fall more in love with her. I recall Park as a tragic figure, both…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2013 (Part 2)
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett The second in the “Tiffany Aching” series. I read and really enjoyed “The Wee Free Men”. But I have to be honest: this one is not as good. Maybe because there’s not as much wee free men. No Granny Aching. Maybe because it suffers from “sequel syndrome” where, since her first goal was already accomplished, now the story struggles with achievements. It’s about Tiffany living with the witches, and now she has to go to “witch school”. She meets colorful characters, but suffers from annoyances and problems. Rather than something to achieve, to reach for. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner(unfinished)…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2013 (Part 1)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick It’s definitely unlike the movie. I’ve complained before about Blade Runner, and that it’s all style and lacking cohesion. The book feels a little more satirical, a little more biting, and not so concerned about looking and feeling cool. It’s really steeped in allegory and metaphor and THE MESSAGE. It’s interesting how the director saw a movie in this. The portion that made it into the film is quite minimal. He probably could have saved some money by filing off the serial numbers. The book itself? Well, it’s hard to put an opinion on it. It’s a novel to be…
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Books I Never Finished But Wish I Did
In case you can’t tell my attention span is very squirrel. The only times I’ve not finished a book is if I strongly believe I’m not going to get anything out of it: books that are terribly written or outdated non-fiction. It’s not them, it’s me. There are books I simply cannot get through. I cannot find a way to get them to work for me. So this is my apology to those books. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy I know, I know. Me, a fantasy author. Never read all the books in the trilogy. I saw the movies, and I love them, but the books I just can’t…
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What I Learned From a Seminar on Marketing (Part 2)
Last time, I left you with tag lines. Today I talk about “sticky stories” (this is the term the guy delivering the lecture used). Stickiness refers to remaining in people’s minds. The lecturer used the example of the “wake up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney gone” urban legend. My problem with this example is it doesn’t apply to a book. You haven’t written an urban legend for a novel, obviously. It shows you the destination without the map or compass. The idea of the sticky story is to create a mystery. To stop the audience from evaluating and think. To illustrate this, you’re creating some kind…
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The Books I Read: September – October 2013
Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines Jim C. Hines is good at set dressing, but less so with character + plot combos. I wish I could come up with overall ideas like him, but that’s about all I wish for. The story, like his other stories, are very linear and take all place in the immediate present with little thought to backstory or contemplation. I feel like his characters don’t drive the plot, events do. And the result is I don’t have much sense of character. No sense that this matters to the character personally, only immediately. So there’s no literary devices, no foreshadowing, no flashbacks, no Easter eggs, no moments…
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What I Learned From a Seminar on Marketing (Part 1)
I went to an author’s meeting the other day about marketing. This is something that I think a lot of people in my place need to learn about — self-publishers or going with a small press. The thing is, no matter how big or small, from John Scalzi and Stephen King to the author of that “Sex with Dinosaurs” erotica, they all do some kind of marketing. And there isn’t some bigwig telling them what to do. They push their own agenda. The thing that I learned is that a proper marketing push is more than saying “this is a book: you could read it” or buying ads on Goodreads or…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2013
The She-Hulk Diaries by Marta Acosta I had high expectations for this book — a novel about a superheroine who usually doesn’t make it past the comic books. I was hoping that, since Jennifer Walters is a lawyer, the book would be about some courtroom drama, a la John Grisham, but with the added complication of superheroes. Despite it being The She-Hulk Diaries, She-Hulk is barely in it. It’s more about Jennifer Walters, her human form, and her “girl problems”. The crux of the story is Jennifer tooling around, talking to her friend, and trying to get a job. She spends way too much time obsessing over boyfriends — past,…
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The Books I Read: May – June 2013
The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by D.C. Pierson You might remember this story from the famous “Yahoo! Answers” response to someone who asked for a summary, wanting to skip the summer reading. The D.C. Pierson himself responded, saying how disappointed he was trying to avoid it because it sounded like work, when the book is much better than other classics that could pop up on such a list. (Christ, Charlie Brown got assigned War and Peace, and that was just for Christmas vacation!) But the book is everything Pierson said it was. The thing is it’s really rather… how do I put this… The title promises…
