Category: Can You Tell I Hate This Book?

The End Of The Line

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

I adore and respect Monica Dickens. I think the Samaritans are an amazing group who do wonderful work and have helped so many people. I’m grateful that they and other groups like them have helped people I care deeply about. But <small voice> I really don’t like Monica Dickens’ Samaritans novel The End of the Line. I know…I am a total savage and not fit to read anything. But I don’t like this book. I tried, I truly did. I kept putting it down, vowing to shove it right into the depths of the library bag and then tried to read a few more pages and well…let’s just say for a book it’s size? I should have been done much sooner. It’s the same problem I had with Barbara Pym’s Quartet In Autumn. I can’t stand the bulk of the characters and don’t care what happens to them once the book ends.

I want to yell at Paul to ditch his drunk wife, take their son and run like hell before he gets any more trapped then he already is. And then say “Told ya so” when his wife has  a stroke. Victoria only became interesting after she got boinked on the head and should just hook up with Billie already. Tim bugs.  And Jackie…oh Jackie…he might have been better off in a place like the Southbury Training School with all its flaws then stuck with his mother. The only character I didn’t want to weep tears of rage and/frustration over is Sarah and that’s only after she proved to be more than a wet blanket.

Like so many other books I’ve read, I am certain a perfect reader exists for The End of the Line just like there are people out there who really appreciate Barbara Pym’s Quartet In Autumn. It’s not me and that’s okay. I’m not going to love everything Monica Dickens ever wrote just like I don’t love every thing from the pens of Lovecraft, Stephen King and Shirley Jackson.  The problem for me may lie with wanting more of Monica Dickens’ personal Samaritans experience. Perhaps her non-fiction Befriending: The American Samaritans is the better book for me. Or maybe I  should just curl up on Mr Couch with my stuffed cat, some lovely hot tea and the Follyfoot series…

My Fair Lady

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Blacklight: <looking at the library books piled higgledy-piggledy on the dining room table> “Dickens? I thought you hated Charles…”

Me: <shrieking>: “Monica Dickens! M-O-N-I-C-A! Never say that other name. EVER!”

Blacklight: “How can you hate Char….”

Me: <head explodes>

A few months ago I discovered the author Monica Dickens. And have been requesting every Monica Dickens title available through the inter-library loan system. I may or may not have the Follyfoot series requested (I totally do!). But there comes a point where even a completest such as myself (Blacklight: “Don’t you mean crazy pants OCD?”) breaks. Now I have slogged through the Slough of Despond, I have gone through the Valley of the Shadow of Death (and read Rae Lawrence’s Jacqueline Susann’s Shadow of the Dolls). I have read Tooner Schooner and the first two Meg novels. I have read every single Beany Malone novel my library system has. I have read Eloise Takes a Bawth. But there is nothing and I mean NOTHING (not even the 1918 HP Lovecraft knocking on my door wanting to go for a brisk 16 mile hike holding a crate of Magnum Double Caramel ice creams) that can make me read the abomination I found waiting for me at the library yesterday. You would think I might have gotten a clue from the title but lots of books can have the same title right? And if Ray Garton thinks writing In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting was a career low…oh honey…I think I might have found something even lower….

MONICA. DICKENS. NOVELIZATION. OF. <choke> My Fair Lady…

I can’t even. No, you can’t make me. Even if you paid off all my bills. The cover alone (a washed out watercolor of Eliza in a pink dress getting gawked at by men folks) is awful enough. The artist was trying to pain Audrey Hepburn but ended up with a zombie Winona Ryder a few years before Winona Ryder was even born. Zombie Winona Doolittle wants to eat my brains and soul. Also isn’t that stupid dress suppose to be white? Have never seen the movie My Fair Lady and have no intention of doing any Google image search to get a definitive answer. Also why in the name of Great Tulu do you NEED a novelization of My Fair Lady says the person who bought The Abyss and Iron Man novelizations. And why drag Monica Dickens into writing it. Did she need crack money? School fees for her daughters? Did the price of hay for her beloved horses go up?

This…horror…this thing that should not be is going right back to the library this afternoon.

Tigers In Red Weather

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Ever pick up a book because of cool cover art, read the inside flap and added it to your book bag, crawled onto your bed and read said book and then closed the covers after you’ve finished and asked “Why the bleep did I read this?”

Or is it just me? It can’t be just me…

This afternoon, a book with cover showing a retro siren in red beach togs with a slash of matching red lipstick lured it’s way into my stack of library books. I could blame the general awfulness of the day (unexpected mission critical car repairs for Mr Saturn that drained my NecronomiCon 2015 savings and a big chunk out of our personal checking accounts, headache from dealing with said car repairs, feelings of failure for not being able to pay for everything myself and having to ask Blacklight to pay his share, etc) for picking up Liza Klaussmann’s Tigers in Red Weather. I could blame PMS. I could blame my brain being addled by finding the brand new Margaret Atwood just sitting in the general fiction stacks unmarked as brand spanking new vs in New Fiction where it truly belonged. Or I could blame the Agent of the Random because sometimes books just aren’t awesome or the right book for a reader. I firmly believe every book has it’s reader and Great Tulu knows I’m not going to love every book.

I’m sure for the right person (IE not me) Tigers in Red Weather would be a treat. It’s the tale of two cousins, the darkly handsome Nick (a lady) and lush (in more ways than one if you get my meaning hic hic hic) Helena. Nick is rich, bored, and non traditional lovely with flashing green eyes. The men just love themselves some Nick. Helena is the lovely blonde cousin who feels second best from their childhood days on Martha’s Vineyard (her mother didn’t marry as well as Nick’s mother). We first meet the cousins in fall 1945 as they break up house (Nick to head south to her Navy husband, Helena to Hollywood and a second marriage). We then skip to the late 1950s, meet their children (Nick’s daughter Daisy and Helena’s son Ed), bad stuff goes down one magic summer and then we skip-a-doodle to through the 1960s, learn some secrets (I would have totally pegged Nick’s husband Hughes as a deeply closeted homosexual vs the true secret) and then the book mercifully ends.

I plugged along through everything, wanting to shake Nick and Helena by the shoulders until their brains rattled. I also pictured Helena’s son, the not quite “right” Ed as a budding Norman Bates. The most shocking and interesting thing about the book was turning to the author info and discovering Liza Klaussmann is descendant of Herman Melville. Does my loathing of Melville extend to his distant family? If so, is my love of Monica Dickens, descendant of the dreaded Charles Dickens an aberration? These questions compel me more than the fates of Nick and Helena, Ed and Daisy.

In the right hands, again NOT MINE,  I firmly believe someone will adore Tigers in Red Weather. I imagine the right reader (NOT ME) to be someone who loves Downtown Abbey, cupcakes, wines and Martha Stewart. I can totally see Jen Lancaster reading Tigers in Red Weather on her Kindle by the pool and loving it to death.

In these undead raccoon paws?Eh…but kudos to the fine marketing geniuses at the Hachette Book Group and jacket designer Lindsey Andrews because I would have never picked up this book if it wasn’t for the cover, not even if I found it at the Simsbury Public Library book sale on $8 bag day.

I Give Up!

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

In my never-ending quest for a)  new things to read b) escape from my life and c) free stuff for my Kindle, I’ve been stuffing poor Mr Kindle with oodles of classic (hey there public domain!) children’s books. It’s at the point where I have more wholesome reading than Lovecraft. Then again aren’t wholesome, clean, upbeat children who respect their elders scarier than the Big Guy in R’lyeh? (Hmm…something to explore in another blog post mayhaps?).

Growing up, I was always a Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder girl. That snippy, twee little red-headed demon…sorry Ames, I mean, one Miss Anne Shirley, never made it into my bookshelves. And I was the little girl combing the library and every tag sale from home to the shores of Lake Michigan (hey there Grand Rapids circa 1978!) for things to read. And I’m more than old enough to remember and have been the right age to watch the Anne of Green Gables miniseries in the 1980s.

Fast forward mumblemumbletwentysomethingmumblemumble years, I’m still re-reading Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder, I even have a friend (hi Ames! <waves hand like a mad thing>) who has read Anne of Green Gables AND been to Prince Edward Island. Me? I read the 2008  biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery (Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic by Irene Gammel) and….nothing…

Skip ahead to spring 2012. I have a HUGE hankering to re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It’s late one Saturday night. Libraries aren’t open until Monday. The hankering is so great I will even PAY to buy for Mr Kindle because the thought of going to Barnes & Noble is PAINFUL. I don’t want to be anywhere NEAR children. I just want to read some Laura Ingalls Wilder

Check Amazon. Discover that the Little House series is NOT a Kindle or e-book. Pout and then decide to see if there is any Louisa May Alcott I haven’t read. And then think, “hey why not download all these Anne of Green Gables books…how bad can they be?”

And download I did.

And start to read.

Over the past two weeks I’ve slogged through (in order) Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne’s House of Dreams.

Last night I flung Anne of Ingleside onto the floor, not giving a damn or a gram it was a library book* and snatched up a book on Hammer Films in the Bray years to stare at pictures of Sir Christopher as tasty hot why couldn’t I be alive in 1950s England to tap THAT total babe Dracula.

Mmm..mmm..mmmm…Sir Christopher Lee…so…tall…SO VERY HOT…huh…what?

Oh yes, Anne of Everyone Lurves Me and People Who Don’t Are Total Dumbass Meanies. And Anne of All The Guys Want Me Because I Am THAT AWESOME. And let’s not forget that classic Anne of ZOMG Some One Doesn’t Like Me BUT THEY WILLLLLL OHHHHH THEY WILLLL WORSHIP ME!

Once I can pry myself from the loving grasp of Mr Couch, I am going to march over to my work desk, snatch up Mr Kindle, cover him in a bazillion kisses for ever exposing him to Lucy Maud Montgomery and delete EVERY SINGLE DAMN ANNE BOOK CACKLING SO WILDLY THAT BERTHA ROCHESTER WOULD SAY “Damn girl! You need HELP! Git A Grip!” before scamper dampering off to try to burn Edward alive…AGAIN…

Usually once I pick a series to read, I READ THAT melon farmer. I read that melon farmer so hard that I will spend the whole day on Mr Couch with the series stacked up next to me IN ORDER! I will get 4 hours of sleep if it’s during the work week. I will “cook” with Mr Book in one hand while I’m plucking the Success rice bag out of boiling water.

I have read every scrap of Miss Read’s Thrush Green and Fairacre series (that was hard reading…Mrs Pringle and Betty WEAR on a person).

I have read every single Angela Thirkell Barsetshire series right down to the ones where you think “okay….there are twenty pages left…who is going to marry whom with a special license?”.

I have read EVERY SINGLE FROSTED POP TART MARY LASSWELL AND BEANY MALONE BOOK THAT MY CENTRAL CONNECTICUT LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS!

But I will never, ever, not even if I can group marry Thomas Jane, Dylan Moran, NPR’s Stephen Thompson, Garret Dillahunt, movie Thor AND Christian Bale, finish Anne of Ingleside or read Rainbow Valley or Rilla of Ingleside.

There is no way.

You can’t make.

You’re not my mommy!**

*all the librarians out there can stop worrying. The book wasn’t hurt by saying hello to Mr Floor. It’s now safely jammed deep into my library return bag next to the I will never watch it in a million years first season Game of Thrones Blu-ray.

** okay, two things I liked in the Anne books. Katherine Brooke (Anne of Windy Poplars) pre “ANNE IS THE MOST AWESOME AND I OWE MY LIFE TO HER” makeover. And Leslie Moore (Anne’s House of Dreams ) until she is all “ZOMG ANNE I AM THE WORST PERSON FOR HATING YOU AND EVERYTHING PERFECT IN YOUR LIFE” . Damn it, Katherine and Leslie! Hate away! You two ruled for a brief and shining moment.

A Gift from The Lonely Doll

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

***And you thought the Eloise series was….INTERESTING….behold…THE LONELY DOLL May 2011 backlog posts!***

Another Lonely Doll book!

Another bazillion dead brain cells!

It’s Christmas time!

And just how do Lonely Dolls and Bears who appear to live in a luxury apartment in New York City celebrate Christmas?

Why they go out to the country!

To visit Mr Bear’s cousins!

(Blacklight: “Sure….Mr Bear’s cousins…”)

But Edith wants to make sure Mr Bear has a very special Christmas! So she decides to make a present! She’s going to knit Mr Bear a scarf!

Cue Blacklight and Little Brat Little Bear “sure….”.

So Edith knits and knits and knits. She even smuggles the scarf to THE COUNTRY and knits some more. And what does Mr Bear open on Christmas Day? The world’s biggest striped scarf! Little Brat Little Bear is quick to point out the flaws in the scarf (too long, holes, dropped stitches).

Edith cries. I would have wrapped Little Bear up in the scarf, poured a pot of honey on him and left him in the woods. Edith is the nicer person. Edith also gets a brilliant idea (no, NOT THE HONEY ONE).

By story’s end all three Big Bears (cue Blacklight cackling madly) are wearing a scarf each…AWWWWWWW….and Little Bear lives another day (DANG IT!).

If I was stuck in an elevator with only one kiddie Christmas book to read and the choices where A Gift from The Lonely Doll  or Eloise at Christmastime, I’ll take the Lonely Doll. The elevator shafts are well too maintained at The Plaza to realize my Christmas miracle wish of Eloise in free fall.

And I can always dream of Little Bear getting lost in the woods…

Eloise

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Every ten years or so, like bouts of malaria, Kay Thompson’s demon spawn from the inner bowels of hell alter-ego Eloise resurfaces in my life. Heck, I can still remember the unholy fuss the Today show made over the 40th anniversary. And don’t get me started on dropping several copies of Eloise: The Ultimate Edition  (collection of the four original Eloise books) on my foot, my frosted pop tart right baby toe is screaming in pain as I type and that WAS ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO! The latest run in with the undead little demon parading in human form Eloise was almost stepping on Sam Irvin’s Kay Thompson biography at the Book Barn Downtown and a few days later coming across original editions of some of the later works at the N-w B-t-n library. So I figured it was time to welcome Satan’s love child the little angel back into my life. I should have listened to my poor right foot that went totally numb when I touched Eloise in Paris. But sadly, I didn’t.

For those lucky souls (Blacklight) who haven’t meet THE MOST FAMOUS RESIDENT OF THE PLAZA HOTEL EVER (the Dadster, sibling Tichy), the most evil creature on the planet ever and that means more evil than Justin Beiber Eloise is a lively six year old who lives in New York City’s world famous The Plaza Hotel with her doting Nannie. Nannie is English and likes to drink and order from Room Service. Nannie must get paid a fair whack from Mama Eloise because honestly would YOU want to be responsible for this child? Eloise, whose mother must have pictures of The Plaza’s owner with an eight ball, an underage donkey and a chainsaw, has free run of the hotel. She commandeers the elevator, she scamper dampers here, there and EVERYWHERE. She scribbles on walls, peeks her nose into places she has no business…hello The Venetian Room is FOR GROWNUPS ONLY YOU LITTLE BISH! Yet somehow there are other guests who stay at The Plaza. I think the manager must drink heavily. Either that or Mama Eloise has pictures of him with that underage donkey too!

Now “Gwen stop being a bitch” you might say. Or “Eloise is just the most wonderful child ever, so free and creative”. Or “The Poor Little Thing Is Just Acting Out Because Her Parents Abandoned Her”. Interesting points. You know what? I was a creative little monster who got spanked when she colored Barbie’s hair with magic markers and food dye. And cross dressed Ken and GI Joe. And yup, we never do see the two unholy creatures each responsible for half Eloise’s DNA. We never hear about Eloise’s father. And Mama Eloise is always far far far far away. But can’t Nannie discipline the little monster? Come on Nannie DO IT DO IT DO IT!

Eloise almost ten years after I spent several weeks flinching every time I had to stock the picture book section has the same effect on me. Pain…oh the pain.  I can’t WAIT to return this particular book to the library! Uncombed hair and unbrushed teeth be damned!

Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters And Beasts From The Darkside

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Yes I’m the person who has Monster Quest on her Netflix Watch Instantly queue (every single bloody episode) and is getting Mystery Quest parceled out DVD by DVD. And I’ m the person who has intra-library-loaned every single book by Joe Nickell and James Randi that her library network has. And has every episode of Monster Talk on her iPod.

But Brad Steiger’s Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside? Bigfoot, aliens, chupies, Loch Monster monster oh my. No, no, no, a thousands times no.

Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey (gods of the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast) say in Episode 13 (Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family) a) why was it written? and b) there is finite time in all of our lives and there are better things you can be reading.  In regards to Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside I concurr fully with second statement. The first? I dunno know? Money? Preaching to the choir? Trying to convert evil skeptics like me? Who knows? What I do know? Back to the library with you Mister Book, back to where you came…

Blast From the Past: Palm Beach

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Cosmo magazine has a lot to answer for. The awesome amounts of hairspray I use to make my hair 80s big. Blacklight’s giggle fits every time we go to Stop & Shop…and the young Gwen snapping up … Palm Beach .

My excuse? I was thirteen and it was the novel excerpt in a Cosmo I had spirited home from the corner store and managed to smuggle up to my room without my mom seeing it. My mom wasn’t a wild one. Cosmo was hardcore porn to the mother who introduced me to the world of industrial strength undergarments when I was a very young teenager. Those Cosmo cover girls weren’t wearing Sears full length corset bras that left huge red marks for their double DDs.

So when I found the full novel Palm Beach at the library, oh yes I snapped it up and started reading it on the way home. (Okay… a) I don’t get carsick when I read as a passenger and b) tear a fresh book from me and lose your hand) I would have been better off taking the cover off and making paper dolls to reenact the whole Roxanne Pulitzer scandal. If you don’t know who Roxanne Pulitzer is? Google is your friend.

And let me tell you…I was beyond tempted to do the same last night when I pulled Palm Beach from my stacks of library books.

The only thing stopping me? First edition and IT’S A LIBRARY BOOK, I don’t have REPLACE A LIBRARY BOOK MONEY! Even with Amazon and Abe Books. Also? The husband has borrowed my good scissors and now they’re lost in the depths of his lair.

What makes Palm Beach so bad? The cheesy writing? The constant refrain of “conical tits”? Take your pick. And I am NOT joking about the conical tits. Lisa of the Conical Tits is going to put out someone’s eyes with those things.

Here’s the basic plot. White trash/goddess/hot babe Lisa Conical Tits attracts the attention of former hooker turned trophy wife Jo-Ann and the scion of the Kennedy Stansfield family, the blue eye hunk Bobby Stansfield. Will Cinderella Lisa win Bobby? Will Jo-Ann’s past come to haunt her? Will Lisa’s perfect conical titties ever sag? Yes. Yes. NEVER!

The best part of the book? The end! You know a book is tragically bad when the publisher has a contest (Win a Trip to Palm Beach) to even get you to pick it up at the bookstore.(Wonder who won that prize?) Don’t believe me? Hunt down the first edition hardcover.

If you must read a book about Palm Beach, try Roxanne Pulitzer’s tell all The Prize Pulitzer: The Roxanne Pulitzer Story.

Better yet, hunt down Charlotte Curtis’s The Rich and Other Atrocities and Charlotte Hays’s The Fortune Hunters: Dazzling Women and the Men They Married. Trust me. You do not need Lisa and her conical tits haunting your dreams. Charlotte Curtis was the real deal, read her instead.

As for Palm Beach? This book is already in the library return bag!

Cult TV: The Comedies

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When people in the office talk about oh….American Idol or The Bachelor or The Big Bang Theory I’m the person mentally rolling their eyes and cranking up Mr iPod so high that the International Space Station is all “Hey, mind knocking up the Duran Duran fest? Got any Beastie Boys or something?” And no, it’s NOT because my co-workers have dubbed me “Girl Sheldon”…yes as in Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory….sighhh…

I do watch TV. Honestly, my Twitter feed for the last week has been ranting about The Brittas Empire on You-Tube….and yeah, okay so maybe that wasn’t the best example. I do watch Hoarders and Intervention and their ilk. But my fictional/scripted TV preferences aren’t on available with my Comcast cable package. So Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel’s Cult TV: The Comedies seemed like a good bet when I spied it on the library shelf. Notice the seemed? Good!

Photos of Rowan Atkinson as the Elizabethan Blackadder and a lovely shot of Red Dwarf crew circa Series 4 (so heart Chris Barrie!) aside, a large part of the entries just didn’t hit my cult tv radar. I grew up in the 1970s/1980s. I watched A LOT of television (network and PBS). I loved television. But perhaps my definition of cult tv is defective like so many other things in my life. Because have you ever heard of this tiny, barely known show called….The Cosby Show? Or The Andy Griffith Show? Golden Girls? Cheer? Green Acres? Happy Days? Barney Miller? The Simpsons? The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Bewitched? Family Ties? Night Court? The Bob Newhart Show? FRIENDS? SEINFIELD!!?!?!?! Freaking Nancy Sinatra admitted to staying home to watch the end of FREAKING SEINFIELD the night her father Frank died!

<cue Gwen’s head exploding all over 14 foot high living room walls leaving Blacklight to puzzle out how to clean them…>

How can a giant or classic hit be considered a cult? Cult because the masses adored them? That’s a major religion! Why not cull these hit entries and create a companion volume TV LAND Presents: Classic Hits or some such nonsense? Seriously? The Beverly Freaking Hillbillies? A show that had an episode that was one of the most watched television episodes until the mid-freaking 1980s? What’s next?  The inclusion of such hits totally takes away from reading about things that like Spitting Image or Dad’s Army or The Good Life that might have only hit our side of the pond thanks to public television.

The idea of a book devoted to cult television comedies is a good one, don’t get me wrong. But come up with strict guidelines (American cult television classics or British cult television classics) and then tell me all about them. Break down the shows season by season, get me to want to hunt down the DVDs on Netflix or scour the libraries ancient VHS collections or even YouTube to see what I missed. Don’t hand me something that dominated an era (am looking at YOU Cosby Show and Cheers and The Simpsons) and tell me it’s a cult thing. Turn me onto to something I’ve missed/longed for or don’t even bother. As the site tag line says “There is just NOT enough time for books…” especially when the book is a disappointment..