Get Lost in Literature

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales from the Jazz Age   by   F.Scott Fitzgerald I've got a lot to say about this book. First, I'd like to say, this was a pain in the ass to rate. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a fine example of why classic literature is classic... These stories should be able to hit the full mark easily. They didn't for reasons stated in my  hack job  rant, but in case you missed that or don't feel like reading it, let me reiterate. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales of the Jazz Age , as produced by Seedbox Press is a hack job. There are dialogues that merge into narration, words and phrases dropped from sentences leaving gaps in paragraphs, missing punctuation, and character conversations merged into block paragraphs of chaos. I was happy to get such a collection at a bargain price until I realized the reason they offered it had more to do with its poor editing and formatting. If you're a Fitzgerald fan or h...

Here's a little bit of what I'm currently reading: Battleship: A Daring Heiress, A Teenage Jockey, and America's Horse  by Dorothy Ours "Now, the New York Times would call Battleship and "old campaigner," although he was only seven years old and this was his second year of jump racing. A world that thought Battleship was old at age seven was the same world that saw a woman--even one so vital as Marion duPont Somerville--heading "over the hill" at age forty. Horse racing and the world at large, preferred a romance with youth. And yet some challenges were made for maturity." I'm thoroughly enjoying this story, as its turning out to be way more than a horse story, not that that wouldn't have been good enough for me. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and other tales from the Jazz Age  by F. Scott Fitzgerald ( produced by Seedbox Press, an independent butchering company ) "With the awakening of his emotions, his firs...

The Tuesday Top Ten, as invented by  The Broke and Bookish , and these are my picks. This week's list is Top Ten Sequels--I hope this includes books in a series, because it isn't often I read books written in a 1,2 format. 1.   Eldest by Christopher Paolini. When Eragon came out, I'd never been so inspired. An ambitious debut for young adults, written by a teenager! When Eldest came out...Suddenly Eragon was less impressive and Christopher Paolini more so. 2.   Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire. A lot of people didn't like it, the main complaints being that the story appeared to be slow and without direction. This book was the rare occasion I liked the use of directionlessness... Lack of direction was sort of the point. Liir didn't know who he was or where he was going... He had to find out for himself. 3.  Does The Lord of the Rings counts as a sequel? I'm saying it does. 4.   Fell by David Clement Davis. I read The Sight as a kid... I was...

1.       I'm still fairly new to the book blogging world and the more I explore the more ideas I get for improving upon my little corner of the bloggerverse. I'm noticing most book bloggers, have review policies and rules on what they read, what kind of interaction they want with their followers. Do they accept requests for reviews, do they participate in giveaways and ARCs... So I put some thought into what my blog is about "officially" and added a  Blog Policies  page under the Home link. 2.       The more obvious update; I added a background that better matched my banner. The soft blues are easy on my eyes...No harsh color contrasts for me. 3.       Book Memes. I notice a lot of book bloggers have something fun, book themed, thing they choose to do on the same day as whoever invented the meme in question...I am intrigued by the concept and looking into it...So add that to my list of maybes. If you know of a good one, feel fre...

...if you don't already know. If you haven't been on GoodReads today, or if you aren't a member of the Feedback group, you may have missed the memo. Apparently, GoodReads has been taking the accusations of bullying very seriously and have decided to update and enforce their policies. Hateful comments between venomous readers and spiteful authors are being erased; reviews, bookshelves, and booklists that personally attack authors are being permanently deleted even as I type this entry. Personally, I'm pleased to see that GoodReads is restricting negative reviews to book content, if only because I'm a very literal person, and GR is very literally a book review site as much as a social network... I was also a bit relieved to see Admins stepping up and trying to rein in the animosity...until this announcement spurred on a whole new round of whining. Who would complain? People who have the most to lose, the people who enjoyed flaming, spamming, and  bullying. The peo...

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks I loved this! It was really well thought out, very smart. The formatting is very different from anything else I've read. It isn't written in a traditional story line and is a compilation of many mini-stories of the people who survived. The main character is faceless/nameless...He's not really narrating the story, he's just moving it along. The "chapters" are broken down into pivotal points during the zombie war: the first outbreaks, corner cutting solutions, survival, war, and revolutions... Each point in the story is seen from the point of view of many characters as opposed to just one. No "interview" lasts more than a few pages and each adds to the bigger picture. I think this book was beautifully done; it illustrates how far people are willing to go to survive, depicting desperation, ingenuity and at times, insanity. I think Max Brooks took a pessimistic and probably too tr...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales from the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald This is one of the books I'm trying to read at the moment. It was a free book, I got off of  Pixels of Ink . Its a compilation of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who is supposed to be one of the greats. So far I've read, Benjamin Button, Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Tarquin of Cheapside , and for the most part I'm enjoying them. But whoever did the compiling screwed up. Dropped words, phrases and at times whole sentences. I'll be reading along, reading along, and suddenly I hit a blank space. When the blank space ends, I'm located somewhere in the middle of a sentence. When I finally muster up a review, I'm going to review Fitzgerald favourably... But I'm gonna flame the shit out of the transcriber. The real question is, who takes classic literature and butchers it? Who does that? Seedbox Press, LLC apparently. Here we have a s...

The phrase, pull-to-publish is getting thrown around a lot these days. P2P is the act of taking a story that started out as a highly popular fan fiction and translating it into an original work of fiction. Fan fiction is basically amateur writers, showing their appreciation for the works that inspired them by writing stories based on those works. So if you like Harry Potter, maybe you write a story where Hermione falls in love with Draco...Or if you're a Twilight fan you write about what happens if Bella chose Jacob instead of Edward. And if you're a fan fiction author, who has chosen to P2P, you take the story you once offered for free, down off the Internet, send it to an indie-publishing house, and make money off of it. Stories like Fifty Shades of Grey come to mind, as does The Mortal Instruments . Two very popular stories that started out as something else entirely. Is this illegal? No. P2P is not illegal because plagiarism is considered merely unethical; it is mor...

I had to force myself to give this story the 5/5 rating. Don't get me wrong it certainly deserved the full score. It has all the things I love in a story: a richly detailed setting, engaging multi-layered characters, an outrageously addictive plot, great writing... I loved it while I was reading it. On the other hand, once the story ended, I thought through everything the story contained and its ending, and I admit it makes me slightly suicidal. It's one of those reads that is written well enough you want to climb right into the pages and at the same time makes you wish you hadn't. I loved this story, will probably never read it again, but will probably read the sequel. It is also one of those stories that is going to be difficult to review without dropping spoilers, simply because so much happens, but I'm going to try. This story can be broken down by major plot points. The Beginning of the End Characters of the beginning of the end include Carter, Wolgast, L...

I think this book was really strange and hard to get into. The plot moves fast but for the most part, it moves seemingly without a point to its direction. Quentin gets into magic school, graduates magic school, goes to the city to party it up, goes to alternate realities to have an adventure, comes home...He's always happy to find out he's getting what he wants, but once he has it, he's miserable. I keep asking what's the point, what's the point; at the end, the point is " never hope, never want, never love." I also think the author, while clearly LG knows how to write, he spends too much time thumbing his nose at Harry Potter, when he should be describing settings or people clearly... "The room was richly detailed..." How? Tell us about those details! "The room was like a hobbit-hole.. " Let's pretend I've never read Tolkein, how was it like a hobbit hole and what the hell is a hobbit? Why are the Fillory books so ridicu...

The Wise Man's Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle #2) by Patrick Rothfuss This was an awesome sequel, despite being over 1000 pages, I flew through it. I also laughed hard when I flipped past Chapter One Hundred and Eleven and saw there were quite a few chapters to go...Who writes a book over 111 chapters long? Patrick Rothfuss, that's who. As to the actual story: The story picks up pretty much where the last one left, Kote the Innkeeper, telling the story of his days as Kvothe the student. Kvothe is back at school, still looking for information on the Chandrian and the Amyr, trying to find the mystery of who killed his family. He gets in a bit of trouble (no big surprise) and is asked to take a vacation. He travels in search of answers and a patron, one adventure leading into another. I loved and hate that we got to know Denna...In the previous book, I noticed how many strong female personalities were involved in the story and speculated that Denna didn't really add...