Don’t Read This

The Favorite Sister

2018, Books in Bed, Don't Read This, Fiction /

Gah. I wasted hours of my life reading The Favorite Sister for what turned out to be no damn good reason. It had ZERO redeeming qualities and I’m so annoyed by whatever LGBTQ pride month list I found this book on. Whoever put that book on a PRIDE list should be shot.

Also, it was just a bad book. Not a single good human being in the bunch AND worse yet, the twist on the feminist reality show just plain pissed me the hell off.

Don’t read this. And if you read it and liked it, I’m not sure we can be friends. SO BAD.

PS. I will publicly apologize to TW because I questioned her hatred of the book and didn’t believe it could be that bad… I was wrong. I was mislead by a horrible PRIDE month reading list.

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The Best Things in Life are Free

2 Comments / 2018, Books in Bed, Don't Read This, Non-Fiction /

Total impulse pick from the library, The Best Things in Life are Free is a travel book with a bunch of ideas of free (or really cheap) travel experiences around the world.

I’m not really planning on doing much traveling any time in the next couple of years but I thought it would be fun to flip through. And it was, until I got to Chicago and it’s listing for the Logan Hardware Arcade Museum. It was completely 100% wrong. I was going to let that go, thinking maybe the book was older than I’d thought… but no, it was written in 2016 and the info they provided would have been completely WRONG for a very long time. I would guess that they just grabbed some info from some old Chicago travel guide and didn’t bother to check to see if it was accurate. Whatever. At that point, I pretty much just quit the book.

For the record… Logan Hardware Arcade, in Chicago, is an amazing place. But it’s a Barcade, not a museum. The games are not free to play. You don’t have to buy anything in order to play them. They have awesome and relatively inexpensive (for Chicago) drinks (I recommend the Gin & Chronic). You should visit but you should know what you’re visiting. Also important to note, the vinyl record store that used to be Logan Hardware and DID (at one point, before the Logan Hardware Arcade opened) have a back room of pinball machines has also closed down. (That actually happened pretty recently, and it’s too bad.)

Nothing worse than a relatively newish travel guide with old (very old) info. Really bad that it’s a Lonely Planet publication.

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Have You Filled Your Bucket Today? A Guide to Happiness for Kids.

1 Comment / 2018, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Don't Read This, Non-Fiction /

I can’t remember where I saw Have You Filled Your Bucket Today? but I thought it might be worth checking out for JMP.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite right. Besides the illustrations that portray people of color and disabled people as those who need help rather than those being helpful… the overall premise just doesn’t quite work for me. I think talking about these concepts with kids is important but I think there’s an awful lot of dependence on other people filling your bucket and we all know that doesn’t necessarily happen. (The co-dependence aspect is also potentially troubling, depending upon your child’s overall nature.)

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#FakeReadathon: 7 Books

2017, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Don't Read This, Favorites, Fiction, Sci Fi and Fantasy, Young Adult /

Sharon and Chris joined us on Sunday for #FakeReadathon and it was fun. I also managed to finish seven books, which was also fun.

Happily Ever After: short stories about characters from The Selection series. It wasn’t bad, a lot of repeat of what happened in earlier books so the stories could be read as a stand-alone.

The Crown: The final book in the selection series. I’m glad it turned out the way I thought it would turn out.

There Is No Darkness: I finally finished this ebook that I started months (a year?) ago? I generally just read a chapter or two every time I traveled, while waiting for inflight wifi to kick in. Yesterday, I decided I was doing to finish it and I did. I don’t really love Science Fiction but I definitely enjoyed it. An interesting coming of age story. (Someone in an Amazon review said the Haldeman brothers wrote this in 1955, almost 20 years before Joe wrote The Forever War. I’m all… Wait, what!?! Goodness… Lorena wasn’t even born? Wait, what?!!! Is this true. Someone remind me to ask Lore about this.)

I checked four children’s picture books out of the library, two picture books and two board books (both Cybils), because I thought I might have a chance to read some new books to Pippin and Squshy when they were hear a couple of weeks ago. I also thought even if that didn’t happen, these might be books I would want to buy them for Christmas. Turns out… it was a mixed bag.

– Dinosaur Dance was boring. Unless your child really LOVES dinosaurs, in which case it’s still boring but your kid will still love it because dinosaurs.
– Look, Look Again was cute and interesting. It’s a fold out style book. The first page shows one… something (a mushroom, a strawberry, an apple, etc.) but when you fold out the connecting page, you see more than one something (and it’s actually a counting book.) Pretty cute. I liked it. I’d buy that.
– A Hungry Lion, or a Dwindling Assortment of Animals. This book is troubling… if you buy it or check it out of the library, read it before you share it with your child. It might be fine, it might not be. Great illustrations but the “hungry lion” eats the cute animals… after the story tricks you into thinking that’s not what is going to happen, it wants you to believe the little animals have just created a surprise party for the hungry lion. Jokes on you because, yea, the hungry lion at the cute animals after all. Very troubling.
– Strictly No Elephants was a good story. Again, great illustrations and nobody gets eaten. The beginning is sad because the child with the pet elephant isn’t allowed to go to the club or party or whatever that the other kids with pets go to. But the child with the elephant meets a child with a skunk who also doesn’t have anyone to play with. They build their own club and make sure EVERYONE is welcome. Really nice story. I’d buy this.

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The Goblin’s Puzzle: Being the Adventures of …etc.

2017, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Cybil Challenge, Don't Read This /

I finally read a book from the Cybils shortlist! Can you believe it? We’re almost nine months into 2017 and I think it’s my first. Ugh. Oy. I miss YA, middle grade, and children’s fiction. Sigh.

Worse yet, I did not love The Goblin’s Puzzle: Being the Adventures of a Boy with No Name and Two Girls Called Alice. In fact, I came close to saying I hated it. TW read it first and when I asked her how it was, she said it was “OK” but she made that face that means she didn’t/doesn’t like something. I see now why she felt that way.

I wanted to love it. It’s a CYBIL for goodness sake. I liked the kids, I liked the dragon and the goblin and even the ogre. The bad guys were well-written bad guys. But… the slavery storyline.

I understand why the author decided to write this (sort of) but I just kept picturing some middle school or late elementary school kid reading this and I do not think it was the right story. It certainly wasn’t the right ending. I mean do we really want to teach kids that the white powerful man only abolishes slavery because it won’t have any negative effect on his wallet or his kingdom because his kingdom doesn’t really have slaves anyway? (Yes, I know this is actually fairly true but the way it was told in the story actually celebrated the King’s decision without pointing out the problems with his decision. It’s a very shallow dive into this very complex issue.)

Also, the whole part of the story where the progressive white girl and the goblin (ugh) had to explain to the slave boy why slavery was bad and convince him (trick him?) into believing he shouldn’t be a slave boy. Really? We really need to perpetuate the idea that slaves liked being slaves and without the benevolent white folks dragging them out of slavery they’d still be there?

OK I didn’t mean to write all of this… clearly, since it’s a jumble. I could write more but I won’t because … whatever.

The adventure was fun. The kids, the dragon, the goblin, (and even the ogre) were fun. If you could strip out the underlying badly told aspects about slavery it would be a terrific book.

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The Whole Town’s Talking

2017, Books in Bed, Chick Lit, Don't Read This, Fiction /

I generally like Fannie Flagg. I also liked the other Elmwood Heights books so I thought I’d be perfectly happy reading The Whole Town’s Talking. Turns out, not so much.

I hated the style of the book. I hated that we didn’t get more of the early settlers and their early lives and instead got… what we got. (No, I won’t spoil it for you in case you don’t take my advice and decide to read it.) I absolutely hated the ending (and the only reason I kept reading it was to see what happened to the folks up on the hill. Ugh.)

I also found the conservative messaging to be more than I could stomach — at the end it got to be a lot MUCH.

Don’t waste your time on this one.

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2 Cybils Non-Fiction

2016, Books in Bed, Cybil Challenge, Don't Read This, Favorites, Non-Fiction, Young Adult /

There was a time when I never quit a Cybils book but this year, I’ve quit two. The most recent, Symphony for the City of the Dead was… I just couldn’t read it. I tried, I really did. TW read the whole thing, and I give her props for that. I cannot imagine any kid reading this who didn’t have to. (Unless he/she had some great fondness for Russian history or Shostakovich, I guess.) Ugh.

Thankfully, Bayard Rustin: Invisible Activist was better. In fact, it was excellent. Everyone should read this one.

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