Reading Wednesday
What did you just finish?
Busted Flush by Brad Smith. A comedic novel (supposedly. It's more low-key amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, even if you give it the benefit of the doubt) about Dock Bass, who starts out as a real estate agent married to a woman named Terri, whom he loathes for never-explained reasons. This is clearly supposed to make us sympathetic to a strong, independant man trapped by the rules of society.
Dock and I did not get off on the right foot, as you can probably tell.
Anyway, by page 15 Dock has quit his job (it made act like a hypocrite and Dock is too straight-forward for that, you see) and left Terri (not divorced, although that's his intention, literally "left", as in, "got in his truck and drove to another state without saying goodbye or having a fight". She is almost never mentioned again, so hopefully she filed divorce papers and lived a better life without Dock around to criticize her constantly). With nowhere else to go, Dock decides to answer in person a letter he recently received, informing him that he inherited a house in the town of Gettysburg from a distant relative. Once in Gettysburg, Dock fends off more evil real estate agents, who try to convince him to sell his property for less than it's worth so they can develop the area. Instead he decides to renovate the house on his own.
(Dock spends the rest of the book rebuilding a house from 1841. Literally rebuilds, completely by himself, by hand. Everything from tearing out the roof all the way down to the rafters, making new rafters, installing those, then shingling the new roof. Then he installs new drywall, does the electric wires, the phone lines, the windows, the doors, the flooring - everything. This seems like an implausible amount of skills for one man to have, even if he did used to be a carpenter, especially since it's implied he also knows how to do all of this in accord with 1840s historical restoration. But I barely know how to change a lightbulb, so I could be wrong.)
In the process of taking out the old walls, Dock discovers a long-sealed root cellar, which turns out to contain a huge collection of early photographs, including seven of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, as well as an actual sound recording of the same event. All of this, of course, immediately gets huge news attention, leading to various adventures with elderly Hungarian professors, shady antiquities dealers, millionaire collectors, competing claims to the ownership of the house, and more.
It's hard to decide what was my "favorite" part of the book. It could have been the main villain, Thaddeus St. John, who is a shockingly retrograde gay stereotype. He dresses like he's always at a costume party, wears makeup and perfume, lisps, has a barely-mentioned younger boyfriend who's clearly only there to establish the fact that Thaddeus like 'em young, is thin and weak and afraid of violence. Here's one particularly appalling line: They taped Thaddeus in front of the musket display - his suggestion. Apparently, he was going for as masculine an image as he could muster.
My favorite part also might have been that the book somehow manages not to actually take a stance on the Civil War, one of the easier moral questions out there, but rather drips with obsequious sympathy for both sides. Here's Dock raging at the corruption of modern times compared to the purity of the past at the emotional climax of the book: There’d been something gnawing at Dock ever since he’d opened up the doorway to Willy’s shop. He realized he’d been subconsciously comparing his world to that of Willy’s, and wondering why it was that 1863 kept coming out on top. And finally it came to him. Everything today had to be easy. And if you had to screw over your neighbor or your brother or your friend to make it easy, then get to it. Easy was the way to go in the modern world. Easy was the new God.
Yes, no one in 1863 ever cheated to make things easier, like, oh, say, OWNING SLAVES. What the fuck, Brad Smith. How did anyone let you publish this?
Also, for all of our sakes, I have not copy-and-pasted the scene where Dock tells a black woman she doesn't know enough about the Civil War and needs to have more sympathy for Confederate soldiers. Because they didn't have shoes. Shoes, you guys! Dock sure showed her. Somehow they end the book by hooking up despite this.
This is an unfunny, eyeroll-inducing book without a single sympathetic or enjoyable character to be found. On the other hand, it was a quick read?
....No, no, that's not enough to make up for the rest. Avoid at all costs.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander. Lady Emily is a beautiful, rich young woman in Victorian England who has a contentious relationship with her mother. She would marry anyone just to get out of her family's home. Luckily, she is quickly proposed to by Philip, who is perfectly acceptable if a bit boring. Philip dies on a hunting trip a few months after their wedding, and Emily's main problem after that is to hide the fact she's not grieving and is, instead, rather pleased by her new freedom as an even-richer widow.
However the constant repition by his mournful family and friends of what a great guy Philip was inspires Emily to learn more about him. She starts reading his journals and discovers that he was deeply interested in the Classical Greeks; this leads to her reading the Iliad, frequently visiting the British Museum's Greek wing, and even studying Ancient Greek. Slowly she begins to fall in love with Philip - who, of course, has unfortunately been dead for over a year.
OR HAS HE? Because this is a mystery novel, and so Emily sets off to Paris to investigate a conspiracy that involves several forged antiquities hidden in the British Museum, Philip's possible continued existence and/or the revelation that he did not die accidentally but was murdered, and Philip's handsome best friend Colin.
I liked the idea of this book a lot (and the entire series that follows it has gorgeous covers and compelling titles which tempt me to purchase them every time I see one), but the reality did not live up the packaging. Much of the writing, especially in the first half of the book, felt oddly rushed - scenes were summarized more than they were described and constantly needed to be a page or two longer than they actually were. It wasn't quite info-dumping, just like we only had the middle of scenes and were missing the beginning and the end. Characters would show up for one or two lines of dialogue and then suddenly be gone again. In addition, the mystery was almost offensively easy to figure out, but the characters acted like idiots for two hundred pages, ignoring obvious clues.
Ah, well. A bit of a disappointment, but you know what? I really did not need to start following another 10+ book series right now. I am just as happy to put Lady Emily aside.
What are you currently reading?
Lady of the Imperial City by Laura Kitchell, which is a bog-standard romance novel in terms of writing and characters, but distinguished by being set in Heian-era Japan rather than Regency England and/or Victorian England.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/26473.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Busted Flush by Brad Smith. A comedic novel (supposedly. It's more low-key amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, even if you give it the benefit of the doubt) about Dock Bass, who starts out as a real estate agent married to a woman named Terri, whom he loathes for never-explained reasons. This is clearly supposed to make us sympathetic to a strong, independant man trapped by the rules of society.
Dock and I did not get off on the right foot, as you can probably tell.
Anyway, by page 15 Dock has quit his job (it made act like a hypocrite and Dock is too straight-forward for that, you see) and left Terri (not divorced, although that's his intention, literally "left", as in, "got in his truck and drove to another state without saying goodbye or having a fight". She is almost never mentioned again, so hopefully she filed divorce papers and lived a better life without Dock around to criticize her constantly). With nowhere else to go, Dock decides to answer in person a letter he recently received, informing him that he inherited a house in the town of Gettysburg from a distant relative. Once in Gettysburg, Dock fends off more evil real estate agents, who try to convince him to sell his property for less than it's worth so they can develop the area. Instead he decides to renovate the house on his own.
(Dock spends the rest of the book rebuilding a house from 1841. Literally rebuilds, completely by himself, by hand. Everything from tearing out the roof all the way down to the rafters, making new rafters, installing those, then shingling the new roof. Then he installs new drywall, does the electric wires, the phone lines, the windows, the doors, the flooring - everything. This seems like an implausible amount of skills for one man to have, even if he did used to be a carpenter, especially since it's implied he also knows how to do all of this in accord with 1840s historical restoration. But I barely know how to change a lightbulb, so I could be wrong.)
In the process of taking out the old walls, Dock discovers a long-sealed root cellar, which turns out to contain a huge collection of early photographs, including seven of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, as well as an actual sound recording of the same event. All of this, of course, immediately gets huge news attention, leading to various adventures with elderly Hungarian professors, shady antiquities dealers, millionaire collectors, competing claims to the ownership of the house, and more.
It's hard to decide what was my "favorite" part of the book. It could have been the main villain, Thaddeus St. John, who is a shockingly retrograde gay stereotype. He dresses like he's always at a costume party, wears makeup and perfume, lisps, has a barely-mentioned younger boyfriend who's clearly only there to establish the fact that Thaddeus like 'em young, is thin and weak and afraid of violence. Here's one particularly appalling line: They taped Thaddeus in front of the musket display - his suggestion. Apparently, he was going for as masculine an image as he could muster.
My favorite part also might have been that the book somehow manages not to actually take a stance on the Civil War, one of the easier moral questions out there, but rather drips with obsequious sympathy for both sides. Here's Dock raging at the corruption of modern times compared to the purity of the past at the emotional climax of the book: There’d been something gnawing at Dock ever since he’d opened up the doorway to Willy’s shop. He realized he’d been subconsciously comparing his world to that of Willy’s, and wondering why it was that 1863 kept coming out on top. And finally it came to him. Everything today had to be easy. And if you had to screw over your neighbor or your brother or your friend to make it easy, then get to it. Easy was the way to go in the modern world. Easy was the new God.
Yes, no one in 1863 ever cheated to make things easier, like, oh, say, OWNING SLAVES. What the fuck, Brad Smith. How did anyone let you publish this?
Also, for all of our sakes, I have not copy-and-pasted the scene where Dock tells a black woman she doesn't know enough about the Civil War and needs to have more sympathy for Confederate soldiers. Because they didn't have shoes. Shoes, you guys! Dock sure showed her. Somehow they end the book by hooking up despite this.
This is an unfunny, eyeroll-inducing book without a single sympathetic or enjoyable character to be found. On the other hand, it was a quick read?
....No, no, that's not enough to make up for the rest. Avoid at all costs.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander. Lady Emily is a beautiful, rich young woman in Victorian England who has a contentious relationship with her mother. She would marry anyone just to get out of her family's home. Luckily, she is quickly proposed to by Philip, who is perfectly acceptable if a bit boring. Philip dies on a hunting trip a few months after their wedding, and Emily's main problem after that is to hide the fact she's not grieving and is, instead, rather pleased by her new freedom as an even-richer widow.
However the constant repition by his mournful family and friends of what a great guy Philip was inspires Emily to learn more about him. She starts reading his journals and discovers that he was deeply interested in the Classical Greeks; this leads to her reading the Iliad, frequently visiting the British Museum's Greek wing, and even studying Ancient Greek. Slowly she begins to fall in love with Philip - who, of course, has unfortunately been dead for over a year.
OR HAS HE? Because this is a mystery novel, and so Emily sets off to Paris to investigate a conspiracy that involves several forged antiquities hidden in the British Museum, Philip's possible continued existence and/or the revelation that he did not die accidentally but was murdered, and Philip's handsome best friend Colin.
I liked the idea of this book a lot (and the entire series that follows it has gorgeous covers and compelling titles which tempt me to purchase them every time I see one), but the reality did not live up the packaging. Much of the writing, especially in the first half of the book, felt oddly rushed - scenes were summarized more than they were described and constantly needed to be a page or two longer than they actually were. It wasn't quite info-dumping, just like we only had the middle of scenes and were missing the beginning and the end. Characters would show up for one or two lines of dialogue and then suddenly be gone again. In addition, the mystery was almost offensively easy to figure out, but the characters acted like idiots for two hundred pages, ignoring obvious clues.
Ah, well. A bit of a disappointment, but you know what? I really did not need to start following another 10+ book series right now. I am just as happy to put Lady Emily aside.
What are you currently reading?
Lady of the Imperial City by Laura Kitchell, which is a bog-standard romance novel in terms of writing and characters, but distinguished by being set in Heian-era Japan rather than Regency England and/or Victorian England.
This entry was originally posted at http://brigdh.dreamwidth.org/26473.html. Please comment there using OpenID.