Aw crap, I missed a day!  Lucky for you, that means you get twice as many snarktastic, bite-sized witticisms from yours truly.  Try to contain yourself!

Anyway, the topic from yesterday was a feeding frenzy of the worst books I’ve ever read.  I have to say, once I stopped reading books submitted for review, the number of times I wanted to throw a book out the window went down dramatically.  I guess it goes to show that reading outside your comfort zone isn’t always a good thing.

But wait, there’s more!  Before this blog returned to its roots as a lark for my own amusement, after I finished books such as these, I actually put words into sentences to describe the pain of having read them!  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

With that said, here are, with linked proof and in no particular order, the worst books I’ve read.  No particular order because let’s face it, there comes a point where rankings simply don’t mean anything any more. Nothing means anything anymore.

Styx’s Storm by Lora Leigh.  Ugh.  It started off bad, got worse, and never redeemed itself.  Admittedly, this is a series to read for entertainment and not for its…academic merits…but this is proof that everything can be overdone.  Oh, and that having an editor is a good thing.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that I paid money for this, and it was an ebook, so I can’t even give the book away to someone and never have to see it again.  First world problems, I guess, but the terrible relationship, bad writing, horrible plot, and everything else made this a disappointment from start to finish. And can I just say, it says something that four years later, when asked to write a list of the worst books ever, this was the first one I thought of? Again, ugh.

Caleb by Sarah McCarty- Boy, nothing like taking high expectations for a fun book and dashing them to tiny pieces by having the characters talk things to absolute death.  And now that I look back at the cover of this book, is it just me or does it look like Photoshop did something painful to this guy’s rib cage?

Desire Untamed by Pamela Palmer- I remember being SO ANGRY about this book when I read it back in my early blogging days.  This was back when J.R. Ward was becoming a thing so the lookalike books were starting out in full force.  This one was a nauseating hot mess.  I remember having to decide if I wanted to take time to review books I really loathed and thinking YES, the world must know what one person on the internet thinks of this book!  I don’t know if it helped or not, but if this review saved one person from reading this mess, it was worth it.

Original Sin by Allison Brennan- This book marked the first appearance of the Shutuposaurus here on the blog, a feat which has never been repeated.  Ugh.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer- My review of this horrorshow appears to have been sucked into the black hole of the Internet, but the deep hurting of this snorefest will live on forever.

Oh, the agony!  Which books make your list of worst ever? 

Time for round 2- today’s topic!  Today is all about tired, saggy old tropes that need to be retired. What elements in books need to just go away.  It’s a Sharknado of bad writing, stupid ideas, lazy plotting, corner cutting, and other things that go bump in the night.

Childhood abuse/sex abuse as a stand in for character development.  Authors everywhere- can we collectively agree that there has to be a better way to get people to empathize with your characters than by subjecting them to childhood abuse or sexual abuse?  Here’s what I mean, so don’t get it twisted- abuse happens, it is real, and it is terrible.  It is also not something that should ever be perceived as “everywhere” or “normal” and that’s what it feels like when seemingly every book and every character has someone with this sort of back story going on that is never addressed outside of a revenge killing for the perpetrator or a magical healing through the power of glittery genitalia for the characters.  Breaking the cycle of abuse in real life is a little more complicated than three hundred pages between emotional wreckage and happily ever after.  Cheapening people’s experiences by having a nebulous idea stand in for back story is just wrong.

Why should I trust you? Because you have to! This is a tricky storyline to work because it can get redundant in a hurry, and often does.  Our characters end up going in circles and the story descends into quicksand and I lose interest, which is sad.

Weird descriptions of body parts, both male and female.

Phonetic spelling of accents.  Please.  We can trust that someone sounds British, or Scottish, or southern, or whatever, without you spelling it for us.

People who are really good at solving mysteries and really bad at everything else.  I’m in a book club where we read exclusively cozy mysteries, and this is an issue we have over and over again.  You get a detective who can look at a jar of jelly that’s out of place and figure out the whole mystery, but she can’t manage to notice that her milkshake brings two different boys to the yard?  Incidentally, I’m not making up the jelly jar thing, because that really happened in one of the books we read.  There’s only room for one dysfunctional mystery solving gang in my heart, people.

Factual inaccuracies.  Especially if the rest of the story has been all about dropping little tidbits to prove just how many Wikipedia pages were used as research for the story.

Bad editing- spelling errors, grammar mistakes, etc.  Or oh lord, when a whole page is missing! I’m not saying I’m perfect and that my grammar and spelling always shine like the perfect angels that they are, but I’m also not charging you actual money to read what I have to say.  F7 is your friend.

I’m sure there are more, but you know what they say…

So the lovely Rachel at Parajunkee knew I was coming, apparently, and baked a cake, because it’s Snark Week!  It’s time to cut loose and get snarky, with a different post each day on a different topic.  The snark usually flows pretty freely around here, because that’s how I roll, but now it’s like a convention! Hooray!

With that said, it’s time for the gloves to come off.

5. That moment when you realize that all your blogging gripes that immediately come to mind are things that happened in 2013.  

So what about you? What really grinds your gears?

Hello friends! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Yes, yes it has. I wanted to share this excellent project with you, as summer approaches and fun, engaging reads are the name of the game:

I’ve been going back and forth about what I want to write about this series since I finished installment three last Monday.  I hadn’t even planned on reading this when it first came out back in December but ended up giving it a shot when a significant chunk of it was free from the author as a teaser.  I originally wasn’t a fan of the serial release but the fact that holiday hysteria occurred in between the various release dates meant that the wait wasn’t that much of an issue.  I was reasonably confident that I would at least enjoy the writing in this story, because I love both the IAD series and the author’s previous historical releases, so I figured all would be well.

All was well, for the most part.  The classic Kresley Cole snark was present in force and it was fun to read it coming from someone who wasn’t a thousand year old immortal.  The story was decent- the focus is definitely on the evolution of the relationship between the two leads with a little bit of Russian mafia whatnot thrown in to break up the sex scenes.  The sex scenes comprise most of the word count and are not for the faint of heart or fans of blush romances.  I’ve not read Fifty Shades or anything by Sylvia Day (hard to believe, I know) but fans of those series would find a lot to like here, I think.  Overall each installment brought a pleasant read and the price tag for each one ($1.99) was easy to handle.  Most of my famous authors have first release in hardback at this point so an inexpensive Kindle book is a fun event indeed.

And yet…there was something about this story that left me with a funny taste in my mouth at the end.  Not disappointment, per se, more…a feeling that the dust hadn’t quite settled.  I was surprised- normally I finish a Kresley Cole book and I’m ready to stand up and shout hooray and go back and read everything I own from her backlist in one sitting without blinking.  I was puzzled, and it took a couple of days for me to put my finger on what the issue was for me.

Spoilers ahead.  Ye be warned.

The first person narrative in these installments was challenging for me- I admit I got a little tired of Natalie’s me, me, me after awhile.  We didn’t get the point of view of any other characters for comparison so I felt like a lot of other story elements were there to account for the fact that the sex between Natalie and Sevastyan wasn’t completely 24/7.  There were a lot of other avenues I would have enjoyed exploring, and the descriptions of the settings were so lush and vivid that I wanted to know more about that stuff instead of dealing with Natalie’s relationship problems.

I had issues with the addressing of Sevastyan’s past history as well.  Here’s where it’s about to get really spoilery so you have absolutely no excuse if you keep reading.  It turns out that Sevastyan’s childhood was even more horrific than we had imagined previously- physical/verbal/sexual abuse, homelessness, and eventually the event that saved him was being assumed into organized crime, where he’s been ever since.  He has strong opinions about the implications of his sexual proclivities and we know from part 2 that he was reluctant to indulge in those proclivities with Natalie, even though she was raring to try them all out and it would have been completely consensual.  We knew he had issues- we didn’t truly grasp how serious those issues were.  The climax of the story is a scene between Natalie and Sevastyan where he finally discloses all of these things to Natalie in an effort at full disclosure to save their relationship.  I wasn’t cool with the fact that he disclosed these things under duress, from Natalie.  If the gender roles were reversed and he had pushed and pushed for Natalie to either disclose every detail about her past or face the fact that the relationship was over, I would have said he was an abusive misogynist and thrown the book across the room. I was pretty close to doing that here too.

The resolution of these issues is, for me, where the author’s skill as a writer really shines through.  Right when I was about to get upset and disconnect from the story, Natalie realizes the position that she has put Sevastyan in.  It hits her like a bolt of lightning- what she’s asking from him is huge, and forcing him into a corner isn’t something that would make the basis of a good relationship. Even though the topic is something they would eventually have to explore, forcing someone to tell you about their past under duress isn’t cool.  It’s not enough that she’s offered to let him know every detail of her past, because her past isn’t all that scandalous. His is.  She also has to confront the reality that although she may have a lot of vicarious sexual experience and he has a lot of actual sexual experience, neither one of them knows jack squat about having actual, successful adult relationships.

Also, and it might have been explained in the story, I didn’t get a clear picture of how long these two knew each other- I can understand attraction being immediate, but I wasn’t sure if they had known each other all that long, and if maybe these big revelations would have come more naturally with a little more time or a little less stress, like fewer people getting murdered and all that.

Anyway, the big revelation for me as a reader was the realization that the author had done a really great job of portraying Natalie exactly as she was billed- 24 years old, not a lot of life experience, stepping into several totally new worlds all at once and realizing abruptly that none of those worlds is as it seems on the surface.  Natalie was very multifaceted and it was okay that there were facets that I didn’t care for.  Real people are hard to classify as totally likable or totally unlikable.  It’s easy to portray someone as a hero or a villain but harder to put them somewhere in the middle.

The door is definitely open for more books in this series so it will be interesting to see what develops from here.  I’d be open to possibilities, and the adventure of trying something new from an author I really love cemented for me the fact that I really love her writing.  Now, I can more clearly identify what it is I love about it.  What’s not to like?

Have you read this series? What did you think of it? 

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to those who partake, and to those who don’t, welcome back! It’s been awhile (again) and a lot has happened since my last apology for abandoning my blog to the internet wolves, so to speak, but the joys of the holidays means there’s actually time to sit down and do things for fun. Hooray!

Anyway, as 2013 draws to a close, it’s time to do the annual round of looking back and seeing how things went. For the first time in a long time, I will have read less than 50 books this year. That’s a big change- for a long time I was averaging around 200 per year. I certainly miss having more free time!

Just like I did last year, I went back to see if I had written any goals for myself, since offhand I’m not able to remember what they might have been. I found my first post of 2013 and read my own words, saying I was going to focus on reading for fun and writing here when the mood struck me. Frankly, the mood didn’t strike a lot this year.

I think that’s because, for a long time, I was devoting a significant amount of time and energy to blogging and the blogging world, and recently I’ve found my interest to be shifting to other things. Running (I’m training for my second half marathon- eek!), crafting, and working on certification to become a BCBA have all claimed significant portions of my time, and I’m happy for that. It’s good to have diverse interests.

Being able to leave WBiT? alone for so long and then come back to it has proven an important point for me. Reading has been something I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, and it’s one of the best hobbies out there because there’s nothing to practice and no skill to maintain, once you’re proficient. I could walk away from books and stories and come back and it’s like I never left. That’s what happened this past year- every book I’ve read has been 100% for pleasure. For my record keeping, I only track new-to-me books for the purposes of my yearly total, but I’ve reread so many books, some multiple times. It was so awesome to go back and visit my favorite stories without any pressure to do otherwise.

The books I’ve read have followed two trends this year- they’ve either been dark horses, books I grabbed at the library because the cover was interesting or the blurb was intriguing, or they’ve been books by my go-to authors. It’s safe to say I have definite favorite authors now, whereas before I think I would have waffled on that a little bit.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting the reviews of my favorite books I’ve read this year, the ones that stand out in my memory even if they were read months ago. I’m looking forward to doing more of the same in 2014. The point of this endeavor was and is to talk about books. I’m game to get back at it. 

No, not that one.

Anyway! I’m back! It’s been a busy summer, filled with work, studying, and travel to interesting places.  Places like Wall, South Dakota, where they have a giant statue of a jackalope.  No, really.

Doing stuff and making things and generally being out and about means that I haven’t been checking in here. I know right? Cue the dramatic noises! Time was I would have been really worried about this. Even though I haven’t written anything myself I still check in with my feed reader on a daily basis and it seems like I’m not alone in this.  Will people stop reading if I stop writing?  Are they even reading anyway?

I digress.

The point is, I have been reading some excellent books lately, and I’ll be doing another roundup of reviews.  I kind of like that format actually- checking in every five books or so and then you, dear readers, get a bunch of quick reviews all at once!  Plus with the impending start of the school year it’s probably not a bad deal to have some kind of a plan for when I want to write about books but just don’t have the time.  Plans are good, right?

Anyway, I didn’t forget about you guys, and I’ll have more to say in future posts.  Stay tuned!