Teaser Tuesdays: That's What She Said!

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!

No blahdy-blah-blah this week, just my teaser which I feel speaks for itself:

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession

by David Grann

(New York: Doubleday, 2010)

Hardcover, 338 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9780385517928, US$26.95

MY TEASER: “Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. ‘It was bigger than a human leg,’ Ragot later told me. ‘It was a tentacle’” (154).

A New Venture...

Ever since I saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose in the theater one fall day, I have wanted to blog about horror movies. Today, that dream has taken one more step toward fulfillment. If you feel so inclined, join me over at Schlock Watch: The Horror Movie Blog and we’ll step into the dark recesses of the theater to talk about horror films.

Booking Through Thursday: The Reports of Books' Deaths are Greatly Exaggerated

Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: With the advent (and growing popularity) of eBooks, I’m seeing more and more articles about how much “better” they can be, because they have the option to be interactive … videos, music, glossaries … all sorts of little extra goodies to help “enhance” your reading experience, rather like listening to the Director’s commentary on a DVD of your favorite movie. How do you feel about that possibility? Does it excite you in a cutting-edge kind of way? Or does it chill you to the bone because that’s not what reading is ABOUT?

I honestly think that the hysteria surrounding the supposed “death” of print literature is greatly exaggerated. Sure, I have engaged in lamenting the passing of print, but as the months have passed, I have come to realize that lamenting the “death” of printed literature amounts to nothing more than the fetishization of printed books. It’s not the books that are important, the pages, the covers, the inks, the papers … it’s the ideas that they carry and eReaders carry those ideas just as well as print books. The interactive aspect of eReaders like the Kindle and Nook and iPad are nothing more than bells and whistles that do not, in my opinion, affect reading anymore than the internet or TV does to print books.

I have a Kindle, and if anything it has made reading easier. It certainly made my life as a grad student much easier since I could store and read PDFs and Word documents on it as well as eBooks. But I’ve strayed from the question at hand. I don’t think that the interactivity really excites me about my Kindle (though the instant dictionary is helpful) its more the convenience of the device that excites me. The fact that I can carry around 200+ books, the fact that I can have all of the research I need for a paper in one place (without having to carry around multiple printed PDF articles), the fact that I can read samples of books before deciding if I want to continue … it makes it really convenient.

Sure, I have decried the electronic revolution, but I’ve come to realize that eReaders are not the end of print books … as I’ve said, reading is about ideas and stories and characters and eReaders convey those just as easily as print books, flashy interactivity or not.

Get the F**k to YouTube...

Apparently, some enterprising soul has posted the entire audiobook of Go the F**k to Sleep on YouTube complete with pictures. Enjoy it while you can before it is taken down:

Go the F**k to Sleep (Audio)

by Adam Manbach
read Samuel L. Jackson
(Newark: Audible, Inc., 2011)
MP3 Audiobook, 3.3 MB, 6½ Minutes, Satire
ISBN: N/A, US$0.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as the voice of a father struggling to get his child to sleep. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s profane, affectionate, and radically honest verses perfectly capture the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, he opens up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations and laugh at their absurdity. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the F**k to Sleep is a book for parents new, old, and expectant. Due to its explicit language, you probably should not play it for your children. Go the F**k to Sleep is available free for a limited time. Feel free to share the link to this page with tired parents and other people who could use a good swear and a laugh.

My Review: So, what does it say about my reading habits immediately out of two years of grad school for a Masters in English that the first two books that I review are the amazingly so-bad-its-good Moon People: The Age of Aquarius and now Go the F**k to Sleep? This book has been circulating among my group of friends on Facebook for some time now (and yes, we are all parents) and we’ve all been discussing who we would like to read the audiobook. My votes were for either Denis Leary or Lewis Black, but that was before I found out that Samuel L. Jackson would be reading the audio edition, and I can honestly say that there is no one better suited for this book than Mr. Jackson.

Any parent who has tried to get a young child to sleep will love this book (provided your sense of humor is of the variety that doesn’t mind the occasional profanity). The book was released today and for a limited time you can download it for free on Audible.com. My wife and I listened to it and we could not stop laughing. Mansbach perfectly captures a parent’s frustration at trying to get a child to go to sleep, and there have certainly been moments in my fatherly career when I have just wanted to say “GO THE F**K TO SLEEP” but you just can’t do that … can you?

Anyway, I cannot recommend this book enough, especially as read by Samuel L. Jackson. Run, don’t walk over to Audible.com and download for free right now. You will not be disappointed.

Teaser Tuesdays: Now That's What I Call a Threat!

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!

This week, my teaser comes from Charles Portis’ True Grit. I want to save what I have to say about it for my review, so I’ll just leave you with my Teaser:

True Grit

by Charles Portis

(New York: Overlook Press, 2007)

Kindle eBook, 240 Pages, Western

ASBN: B004I8V0Q8, US$14.95

MY TEASER: “‘You have no case.’
“‘Lawyer J. Noble Daggett of Dardanelle, Arkansas, may think otherwise. Also a jury.’” (34).

Moon People: The Age of Aquarius (Kindle)

by Dale M. Courtney
-Moon People Trilogy, Book 1-
(Bloomington: Xlibris Corp., 2008)
Kindle eBook, 80 Pages, 280 KB Science Fiction
ASBN: B003NX70B8, US$9.99

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE*

From the Cover: This Book is based on the turning point for Earth into a new era of space travel and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. The story focuses on one Man by the Name of David Braymer and his adventures from High school teacher to 1st Science Officer on board the Lunar Base 1 Mobile Base Station and his encounters with Alien Life forms through out our universe and the space Battle of all battles David experiences. I hope you enjoy the many adventures of David Braymer and his conquest in space and our journey into the Age of Aquarius.

My Review: Have you ever fallen in love with a movie that no one else can stand? One that was so bad it was good? Something that maybe turned up on Mystery Science Theater 3000? A film like Eegah!, The Lost Continent, The Day the Earth Froze or The Wild Wild World of Batwoman? Well, that’s what Moon People: The Age of Aquarius is like. I first came across Courtney’s book while I wasting time on the internet (I was probably supposed to be reading something for a class, but there you go.) Anyway, someone had posted the first page or so of the book, and I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. So, I tracked it down on Amazon and read the first chapter for free. I fell instantly in love. A couple of months later when my wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas, Moon People was one of the first books I downloaded.

I can’t even begin to describe what it is like to read this book. I suggest you head to Amazon and read the first chapter, and you’ll get some idea. Yet, that doesn’t capture the full experience of reading Dale M. Courtney’s prose. I mean, what do you do with passages like the following?

This Story Begins on a beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida with a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old single man that works at the local high school as a science teacher. He also teaches astronomy in the 12-grade level. Now he has been here about 5 years and has become somewhat partial to a young lady by the name of Cheral Baskel a local restaurant owner in Daytona Beach Florida. At the moment, Cheral is preparing her restaurant for another shuttle launch at the cape. Everyone always gathers at her place because you can see the launch real good there. It is on the water and its real close to the Cape. She always decks the place out right before a launch too. Now David always goes to Cheral’s place before work every morning for breakfast because it is on his way to his school. He has never missed a shuttle launch at Cheral’s place since he’s been at his school. David was not always a teacher. Before he was a teacher, he use to work for the government for U.F.O. research about five years ago. He didn’t like the job that much because he was always bored.

He really wanted to teach anyway. Today is also Oct. 27 in the year 2048. The next shuttle launch at the Cape is on Halloween. There has been some unusual events the last 2 shuttle launches though. They would get right up to the launch sequence and stop the launch for some kind of weird problem.

Well, you get the idea. The book is self-published (Xlibris is one of those pay-and-get-published vanity presses) and has obviously not gone through the editorial process, because the book is riddled with spelling errors (there for their, your for you’re and, my personal favorite gauche for gotcha), fragmented sentences, truly random capitalization, shifts from first to second to third person and back again—sometime all in the same paragraph, and odd punctuation (my favorite happens shortly after the passage I quoted above which reads: “They have also been trying to get David to join the crew on the U.S.S. Lunar Base 1 for about 2 years. Which is one of the base stations that is almost completed?”). Yet, there is a certain charm and jouissance that comes from reading Moon People: The Age of Aquarius.

This is not to say that the book is perfect, far from it, but then, neither is Robot Monster or Pod People. You don’t read a book like Moon People and expect the literary version of Canard à la presse. This is not Moby-Dick or Hamlet. Dale M. Courtney’s book is the literary equivalent of a bologna sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise. It’s not nutritious but it is filling, and dammit every once in a while you just want to eat something crappy. I will say that Moon People is not a book for everyone … hence the asterisk after the ACQUIRE rating … you buy this book with the understanding that it is like owning Plan 9 from Outer Space, it is a book to have for the camp value not for the deep lessons or scientific accuracy. (It might also make you feel better about that novel you have languishing in a box in the back of your closet.)

Better yet … there are two more!

Musing Mondays: Into the Wee Small Hours...

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by Should Be Reading) is as follows: What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

So, I’m easing back into this whole blogging about books thing with a Musing Mondays, and of course it has to be a tough question because, honestly, the last book I remember staying up and reading into the wee small hours of the morning was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park when it came out in paperback. We were in Southern California for a family reunion … this must have been in August of 1991 and one of my Dad’s cousins was talking about a movie he was working on. He was a Hollywood carpenter and helped construct sets for Always, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Hook (which thinking about it now he must have been a carpenter at Amblin).

Anyway, he was talking about a new set he had been building in Hawaii—a large King Kong-style gate—for the new Spielberg film about dinosaurs. It was a film based on a book by a fellow named Michael Crichton and was supposed to be real good. Well, that evening, when we stopped by the store for some goodies, I wandered into the book section and found the book that my Dad’s cousin had been talking about. It looked cool, what with its white cover and black Tyrannosaur skeleton on the cover, and so I picked it up and started reading in the car on the way back to my grandparents, where we were staying. I proceeded to spend the next couple of hours reading and was up until two or three in the morning finishing the book. The next day, it was all I could talk about, and had to pass it off to my Mom, Dad and brother, and they all read it really quickly too. That might be because of the fact that Crichton’s prose is not too terribly challenging, but I’d like to think it is because it had an amazing story.

Anyway, I’m sure that there are other books that I have read into the wee hours of the morning, but Jurassic Park is the one that stands out to me, even twenty years later. And, I still own that exact copy of the book, it is dog-eared, yellowing and a little worse for the wear, but it opens comfortably to all the good spots.

And We're Back...

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez: “I’m back Baby!” I think now that my schooling is over for the foreseeable future, and I no longer have to read and produce writing on a tight schedule I am going to get back into reading for pleasure, reviewing the books that I read, and then blogging those reviews, and so after a nine month hiatus, I am coming back to Bryan’s Book Blog, dusting off the shelves, shooing the spiders back outside, rinsing the servers, and sweeping the corners and jumping back into the online world of book reviews.

I know that I am probably writing to about three people, including myself and my wife, but it’ll give me something to do as I decide just what I can do with a Masters degree in English Studies. So, I’ll be swinging things back in to gear here over the next weeks, and there will be some changes, and we’ll see where and how far this takes us.

I just hope that after two years of graduate studies I still know how to read for pleasure…!