Get Lost in Literature

Booklover and scholar, Edward Glyver, starts his story with murder and delusions of grandeur. To his own mind, Edward Glyver should have been a great man, but that future was stolen from him by his arch-nemesis Phoebus Rainsford Daunt. Now nothing will deter him from seeking out vengeance against the man who ruined his life. It was okay. It started great, don't get me wrong. The plot, the long winded descriptions, the well timed confrontations or lack there-of... If you like Victorian storytelling this started in brilliant style, like a firecracker set loose in a library. But by the time I hit page 500 or so, I began flipping forward to see how much longer I had to actually read. I began having to psych myself up to make myself keep going. Instead of being pulled along, I started clawing at the pages, looking for a way out. And when I finally hit the last page, I thought "Thank you God! It’s over!" The problem isn’t that the book was slow. Most of the Victorian-s...

The year is 2071 and everyone is being watched. A revolution is taking place and Spurious a state worker for Tisia, is on a mission to find out the truth after the love of his life, Lana, gets into trouble. Obi is the leader of TDU, a rebel army trying to bring down Tisia at any cost. Then there is Alexander Augustus and Tinus, leaders of Tisia and Tisia's Knights (a squad of elite military enforcers). I think this story had a decent concept idea--a futuristic society under heavy government surveillance, after a nuclear war over a newly discovered fuel. The choices the characters had to make were moral quagmire in a good way; naive State-workers must choose between staying loyal to a dictatorship, or supporting the TDU who aren't any better than terrorists. The TDU had to struggle with cost of collateral damage that came with trying to achieve their end game, while the villainous Knights had to commit horrible acts on orders from above or have their loyalty questioned. Mea...

If your edition of this book is anything like mine, it'll be decorated with rave reviews from critics who throw about words like "thrilling" and "sexy" and "addictive". These critics were clearly on the take. This book's only saving grace, is its characters. I love flawed characters and this book had plenty of them. Mikeal Blomkvist, adulterer, bad father, yet somehow still tortured by morals. Lisbeth Salander, no morals, frequently victimized, hacker extraordinaire. Not to mention the rapists, murderers, anti-semites, and traitors. Unfortunately, most of the characters aren't fully developed until halfway through the story and by then you're bored bonkers, waiting for the good stuff to happen. The book starts -- skimming over important things like character introductions -- by presenting you with a character dialogue about another character dialogue. Basically this story starts by having a character you don't really know, tell...

Countdown: A Newsflesh Novella   by Mira Grant This was an ok novella... A bit of a let down after reading the Newsflesh Trilogy. What worked: I liked seeing the doctors who created the virus and the jerk who set it free as far as understanding how it all began.  And despite the peeks at the Mason family before Shaun and Georgia became a part of it, the POV of Marigold was most effective at explaining how innocent lives were being affected.  I liked at the end of each "chapter" they showed the news reports.  What didn't work: The writing was frantic and vague; I know it was supposed to be a short story, but if a prequel is going to be invented it should add to the story somehow--it needed a little development.  I wish the cause and effect had been built upon a little more; the Mason's are lovely before the infection and despite the devastating loss of their son I don't really see how they transformed into rating-hungry villains. Rating: 2/5...

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...

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...

A friar, a poet, an epileptic psychic, camping on a battlefield. Searching for a knight to guide them through the gates of Hell... The book starts dark and mysterious and quickly pulls the reader in. Pestilence is ravaging the countryside and three friends on a mission from God, are looking to descend into Hell... But here the book loses steam. The prose is decent, dark and to the point; but David Wisehart makes a couple story-structure errors. First the Latin; no translation is offered with the Latin, and the sentences don't necessarily arrive at "Those Moments". You know those moments, the ones where the characters could speak any language they want and the meaning would be perfectly obvious. So if the book had been written without the Latin it would be almost exactly the same as the book with the Latin, except maybe a few sentences shorter. Second complaint about structure is in the poetry. Its cheesy. I skimmed the first few lines of each poem before moving on. P...