Queer is a book that’s on my From the Stacks Challenge list and I really wish I’d just left it on the stacks, unread.
I thought about putting it down, but I kept thinking it would get better or at least slightly less weird. Why I would have thought that, since I have read The Naked Lunch (which I liked) I dunno. But this is the kind of thing that usually prevents me from quitting a book, especially a short book.
Maybe I should have read Junky first? Oh well, too late now.
I have decided a couple of things, now that I’ve finished The Gathering.
First, I rarely like Irish novels. In fact I like them so rarely that I think I should stop reading them.
Second, Booker Prize winners are highly over-rated and I should stop reading those, too.
I didn’t care about any of these characters. At. All. I didn’t understand any of these characters. At. All.
Boring, boring, boring. A lot of pretty words combined in such a way as to bore me to tears for a full week.
Someone please remind me of this next year when I’m reading the Booker short list.
I thought it would get better. And it was short. So I kept reading Vagabond Virgins and when I finished it, I wanted to chuck it across the room. Ho hum. It could have been awesome. Anything with Virgin sightings could be awesome and SHOULD be awesome. Anything that mentions Carlos Santana should also be awesome.
This book. Wasn’t.
Oh brother. Why did I read Me and Mr Darcy? Oh yea, I wanted something quick and easy and light. Well this was all of those things. It was also pretty boring, pretty predictable and pretty ridiculous.
Do Jane Austen or Mr Darcy fans enjoy this sort of thing? Sassymonkey? I am pretty sure you read this but don’t remember whether you liked it or not. I sort of doubt that you did.
Yuk.
It was bound to happen, I should not be surprised. I should have known it was going to happen when my library did not have Darkmans even though it made the Booker short list. I should have known it was going to be like this when the thing came really quickly – all the way from Alabama via ILL. I should have known.
Darkmans. Sucks.
I tried, I swear I did. I get that it’s supposed to be weird and quirky and Gravity’s Rainbow-like (which in case you don’t remember, I never finished either because GR sucked the life out of me after 100 pages.) It’s far easier to read than Gravity’s Rainbow and for that reason alone, I attempted to stick with it. But as I started Part 2 I started thinking about just how old I am (Michelle will be 18 tomorrow, which makes me much older than dirt) and just how many books are on the shelf that I’m aching to read and the fact that I dislike every single character in the book – except maybe the lurchers (aka dogs).
So. I closed Darkmans. Gave it a little sigh. Put it back in the library bag. Today I’ll send it back home to Alabama. (I’d like to meet someone from Alabama who likes this book… I can’t see it.)
I have one more book two more books to read from last year’s Booker short list… and one is the book that won the prize. I’ll probably hate it, but at least I’ll know why it beat out Darkmans. (shudder)
Aye yi yi. I was so desperate for a book with an X in the title for the A to Z challenge that I immediately jumped at the suggestion by Framed and Booked to read Asimov’s X Stands for Unknown. I should have known this was not a great choice when I couldn’t get it from my library and it never appeared from my inter-library loan request. I should have really known this was not going to be my kind of book when I couldn’t even get a used copy on Amazon. But still, I was desperate to finish so I tracked down a used copy somewhere else and I started reading it a few days ago.
Or if I’m honest, I started skimming it a few days ago and just finished skimming it.
It’s non-fiction and not science fiction. It’s full of math and science. It’s boring as hell. Except for the introductory essays of each chapter – those, I liked. I also enjoyed a few of the chapters on The Bible indicating the earth is flat, ungilding gold, and one about comets. Otherwise… bored stiff.
But, this leaves me with just two books from my A to Z challenge, one we’re halfway through on audio and the other is also on audio, just waiting for us to listen to it.
X Stands for Unknown Read More »
I don’t know how or why I added Just In Case to my A to Z challenge list – if YOU were responsible for this, you should be shot. It felt a little like Gravity’s Rainbow for young adults. Weird. Weird. Weird. The only really good things I can say about it are – it was short and quick and I can scratch another book off of that darn A to Z list challenge.
OK. Well. I finished Fathers and Sons: Autobiography of a Family. I don’t really recommend it – unless you are a fan of one of the Waughs. I am not. Why I spent more than a week reading this is really beyond me.
I thought it would be interesting. And I guess it was. But it was also tiresome. The Waugh men – ugh. Just, UGH. That’s about all I can say. Some woman in their lives should have just shaken them – or shot them. (I should say that the author of the book I don’t necessarily include in the shaken or shot idea. He seems like a nice enough guy and he survived generations of Waugh fathering. I’ll reserve judgment though until his children write their books.)
Fathers and Sons: Autobiography of a Family Read More »
Alrighty then, that pretty much sums up my feelings about Raw Food Life Force Energy: blah blah blah. But, I’ll expand on that.
First, the book itself – once you take the jacket off, the book screams Life! Force! Energy! Awesome color choice. Awesome texture, kind of soft but firm and smooth. Cool. Nice book to hold. I found myself wondering right off the bat why we needed “Acknowledgements” “Forward” and “Introduction”. Couldn’t we have just gotten on with things? I appreciated the index in the back. I think some of the other “charts” and such should have also been in the back, along with the 21 day plan with a better layout – but I’ll get to my issues with the 21 day plan in a second. The questions and answers were a nice way to tie things up and answer some situational type questions that obviously come up while reading the book.
Next, the writing. Life! Force! Energy! Ack. It read like an infomercial. Total and complete turn off for me. Anything that guarantees “Effortless abundant weight loss” makes me suspect and that’s pretty much the way I felt all of the way through the book. Bad idea to start the meat er flesh of the book with that statement. Very bad idea.
I must say that while I am not a “raw foods believer” I do believe that many of our weight and health problems are related to the SAD (Standard American Diet). As someone who spends the day talking about diet, I AM very interested in the raw food movement. So I’m not totally blowing off this book.
I do think claiming Life Force Energy is a bit much. And the whole vibrating thing just left me cold. Yes we should be taking in a ton of vegetables, preferably organic and yes raw would be ideal. Also whole grains and a lot less processed JUNK. Agree, agree, agree. I am also very interested in food combination theories and I can see how that might work for many, many people. Overall, the whole raw food movement goes just a bit too far for me.
They lose me, and this author lost me specifically, in these areas:
1) Flesh, even organic free range chicken and eggs and such, have the aura of death and so they should not be eaten because of the negative effect on the human spirit, body and “Life Force Energy”! Cheese and milk from these poor DEATH FLESH creatures is bad but cheese and milk from goats is great! Okkkk then. Also apparently FISH don’t have the DEATH FLESH or as much DEATH FLESH so fish is OK! That makes absolutely no sense to me. Either you go all out or you don’t.
2) Juicing. Ack. No thanks. I don’t do juice for any reason. Ever. Really. I don’t want to drink my vegetables and I don’t want to drink my fruit. An occasional fruit drink is fine, no problem, but all of this push to JUICE! is INSANE! (I’m using a lot of ! because the book used a lot of ! INFOMERCIAL!) Drinking my breakfast of vegetable juice until 1/2 hour before lunch just doesn’t work for me.
3) Colonics. No, I’ve researched this and researched this and I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that we need to use colonics for any reason. Eat raw foods or more raw foods, I can get behind that. But as soon as you start to tell me to take an enema or have a colonic, I’m done.
4) Don’t keep selling me stuff in your book! Probiotics are something I can get behind until you tell me that the only ones that really work are the ones you sell on your website. Nope! Done! Infomercial!
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at the 21 day program. Waste of paper! Every single day is exactly the same except for day one when you’re told to “eliminate” first thing in the morning and do that every morning… and you’re given the option of a pre-dinner snack of a POUND of RAW carrots! And day 3, day 9, day something else when you’re told to use an enema or have a colonic. Yes, you’re given ideas for meals or for relaxation and you’re given homework as well. Those relaxtion tips and homework ideas – I’m good with those. But the layout for the 21 day plan could have been better, handled more efficiently and saved paper (not to mention my time.)
The recipes. I can take them or leave them. Mostly leave them because they didn’t knock my socks off. They weren’t BAD and I could see myself referring to a few of them from time to time. Even some of the juice drinks, excuse me, Elixirs!, were interesting. I think I expected more because I’ve read so many good reviews about Rose’s first book.
So – scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best vibration! I give it a 4. If it didn’t sound so much like an infomercial, it probably would have gotten a 6.
Technorati Tags: rawfood, lifeforceenergy, nataliarose
Life! Force! Energy! Read More »
I’ve been putting off reading Surveillance for at least a month, maybe two. The cover did not look appealing and I couldn’t remember why I had reserved it from the library or if one of us had just picked it up off of the shelf. I had better things to read. When I saw it was due back to the library this week and had already been renewed to the limit, I went ahead and picked it up. It was good, at first.
Actually, it was good through til the end. What the hell? I feel like I’m missing chapters or something. It ended like that? But, but, but. Huh? I don’t even get it now. I almost re-read the last chapter thinking I missed something by trying to rush through it this morning so we could hit the library early. But I didn’t. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have missed THAT much. It just ended badly. Very badly. Because of that – don’t read this book. Sheesh.
(Oh goodness, I should have read the Amazon reviews – they all were disappointed in the ending. What crap! The author should be shot!)
Technorati Tags: fiction, seattle, paranoia, surveillance, jonathonraban