Tuesday, April 26, 2011 | By: Natalie

Meme: Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
"Bella sat down at her desk and breathed in deeply. Here it was, she thought: that cusp, that moment of maximum crisis she had always know would visit her at some point in her career."

--Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds


Review - Boxer Beetle, Ned Beauman

Title: Boxer Beetle
Author: Ned Beauman
Publisher: Sceptre
ISBN: 9780340998410

Rating: 5 baseball bats
Favorite thing: The hilarious awkwardness of Erskine
Least favorite thing: Sinner Roach

On the zombie how-to shelf?: No, but it'll be on some other shelf somewhere.

When I'm browsing in a bookstore, I give a book approximately one paragraph to capture my interest before I move on. This book passed that test with flying colors.

In idle moments I sometimes like to close my eyes and imagine Joseph Goebbels' forty-third birthday party. I like to think that even in the busy autumn of 1940, Hitler might have found time to oragnise a surprise party for his close friend - pretending for weeks that the date had slipped his mind, deliberately ignoring the Propaganda Minister's increasingly sulky and awkward hints, and waiting until the very last order had been dispatched to his U-boat commanders on the evening of Tuesday, 29 October before he led Goebbels on some pretext into the cocktail lounge of the Reich Chancellery. A great should of "Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!', a cascade of streamers, some relieved and perhaps even slightly tearful laughter for Goebbels himself as he embraced the Führer, and the party could begin.

Part scientific exploration (ish), part love story (ish), and part treasure hunt, the real meat of this story was in its utterly deplorable yet strangely lovable characters. "Fishy," who is imagining the birthday party mentioned above, is a modern-day lock-in, stricken with a condition that makes him smell like week-old fish; Seth "Sinner" Roach, a vertically challenged, strangely handsome, alcoholic, Jewish boxer; Philip Erskine, an utterly ridiculous entomologist, fascist, and Hitler admirer.

I'm guessing Sinner was supposed to be the star of this book, but for me it was Erskine. Sinner was angry, mean, vindictive, self-destructive, and utterly unrepentant. Erskine was a fascist and eugenicist and you don't want to like him, but he's so bumbling, so awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin that you can't help, at the very least, be amused by him. As it was, I grew to have the same affection you might have for a slightly retarded dog that continually ran into walls; that is, pitying. And despite the gravity that becomes very immediate in his relationship with Sinner near the end of the book, I could never quite take him seriously.

Several times, this book made me laugh out loud. The style of writing is simultaneously flip and evocative which makes for a very engrossing, very fast read. Watching Sinner's and Erskine's relationship--I almost want to put quotes around the word--develop is like watching a train wreck. Following Fishy's present day treasure hunt (did I mention the Welsh hitman?) lent an extra sense of mystery to what was happening back in '34.

This is definitely a book I'd recommend to friends... as long as they have a well-developed sense of humor.
Saturday, April 23, 2011 | By: Natalie

Horror & Urban Fantasy Reading Challenge!

So I figured, what better way to get things rolling than to join a challenge! And this one here is right up my alley!

I don't really have a clue what I'm going to read for it yet, but that's why the internets exist. Soon it will tell me what I want to read.

1. The Devil You Know, Mike Cary
2. The Infection, Craig DiLouie
3. The King of Plagues, Jonathan Mayberry
4. The Fall, Guilliermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan
5. Flesh Eaters, Joe McKinney
6. The Pilo Family Circus, Will Elliott
7. ...
Friday, April 22, 2011 | By: Natalie

The Friday 56


The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted at Freda's Voice.

If you want to play along, here are the rules:

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56.
Find any sentence that grabs you.
Post it.
Add your (url) post in the Linky at Freda's Voice.
:::::


Page 56:
He tapped back: "I love it when you compare people to food."

:::::

This page really works better as a unit with its other sentences...


The Silent Land - Graham Joyce




Rating: 3 baseball bats
Favorite thing: Two words. Unlimited. Wine.
Least favorite thing: Not being able to taste the unlimited wine.

On the zombie how-to shelf?: Nope

The cover of this book is totally fantastic. If you slip the dust jacket off, you're left with different letters of the title on the book and different letters on the dust jacket. I puzzled over the letters on each for a while, hoping to find a word hidden, scrabble-like, in the letters, but even my scrabble dominating life couldn't find anything interesting.

As for the book itself - it had atmosphere, I'll give it that. Unfortunately, we're stuck in our atmospheric setting with two two-dimensional characters. You'd think that with only these two in the book we'd get them flushed out a little more than they were, but what we get is a lot of them being scared and bickering. Which, fine, they're in a confusing, terrifying situation, but if I'm to care at all about the ending I need to care about the characters, and I didn't, really.

I did have a night, right in the middle of the book, where I was loathe to put it down. Things were finally happening! Creepy things, and I wanted more! Unfortunately, the book lost a little of its momentum in the latter third and came to a stumbling halt at the end, which was pretty predictable. I just wish it had had a little more oomph into the ending, rather than just dribbling away.

A minor pet peeve of mine was tweaked every page of this book. Dialogue with no indicators of who's speaking for lines. Sometimes, if you have two characters that are well drawn and different enough from one another, this works. But our protagonists aren't different at all, especially at the beginning, and several times I had to go back and count the lines off - him, her, him, her... Which, annoying.

Overall, I did enjoy this book and I might think to pass it along to someone if they mentioned they liked ghost stories. Other than that, I think it's going to be somewhat forgettable.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 | By: Natalie
I read trashies. I'm not ashamed of this. Award winning fiction, even award winning sci-fi, is a little too high brow for me. I like my stuff down and dirty. Cheese is delicious, be it on bread or in the pages of my current book. Military cheese is your mom's best gooey mac and cheese. Zombie cheese it a hot, gooey lasagna. Sci-fi cheese is a gooey New York slice. With pepperoni.

The point being, I like food. And reading. I avoid eating while reading, though, because I really don't like getting food on my books. But, luckily for all of us, I read much more than I eat and I'm kind of bitchy and occasionally funny.

So I'll show you my books if you show me yours. And in this way we will spread cheesy good will across the Earth and there will be less poverty, war, and all the -isms. And in its place will grow love and joy and happiness. And, in the event of the zombiepocalypse, we will be well-informed and our friends will flock to us because suddenly we'll be the ones who know what's going on and won't they be sorry for all the laughing they did when you enthused about Monster Island.

But our cheesy love makes us magnanimous and we will take them in and protect them. And then assign some reading.