Robbie's Reads

As you possibly already know, my new blog, Robustious, is up-and-running. It is a combination of my book blog and my formerly languishing “personal” blog, so while there will still be much book related content (including my reviews, in the same professional format), there will also be posts about, among other things:

• my gratuitous use of run-on sentences
• college life
• things that annoy me

I’ll be having www.boywithbooks.com redirect to my new site sometime before the year is out, but please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

Bree Despain, author of The Dark Divine (which I loved) is having an awesome contest for her new book trailer. Check it out, and enter. If you don’t want to enter, do it anyway and gimme the stuff if you win. The trailer is also below.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

Personal Demons

by Lisa Desrochers

Publisher: Tor Teen

Release: September 2010

ISBN: 978-0765328083

NOTE: This is not the final cover.

There’s no star rating this time, because I didn’t finish the book, and I didn’t read enough of it to feel like I could adequately judge; I will try to elaborate on my feelings, though.

Personal Demons follows Frannie, and average teenage girl, and the two men who are vying for her. The difference in this case is that those two men are Luc, a demon; and Gabriel, an angel.

As I said, I didn’t finish the book, and I can tell you that it was not because of the concept or plot, but the characters. I was immediately turned off by them. Frannie, who is supposedly a girl with a head on her shoulders, melts into butter the moment Luc steps into the room, and spent what seems like a lot of time describing what she was wearing. Luc, on the other hand, felt very omniscient to the point of being boring; while the idea of him “smelling” emotions was cool, it got annoying quickly.

While I can’t really give opinions on the plot, as I only got about 35 pages in, I did think the concept was interesting, and I know several people who might like this quite a bit.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

If you would check out my new blog that’d be awesome. It’s over at rob.ustio.us. BoywithBooks will still be active, but all personal and/or non-book posts will be over at robustious. This is going to allow me to retain a more professional book review site, expand my viewership, and also free me from some language and content restrictions on BwB.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

Fat Vampire

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• Reading level: Young Adult
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Balzer + Bray
• Release Date: July 27, 2010
• ISBN-13: 978-0061920905

In this farcical romp from Adam Rex, the vampire universe is turned on its head and inverted over and over again with hilarious results. Fifteen-year-old Doug is horrified when he is accidentally turned into a vampire–now he’ll never lost his baby fat. What’s more, now he has to struggle to find a goth chick with a vampire fetish that’s into chunky guys. Add in that the show Vampire Hunters may be looking to hunt him down and expose vampires to the world, and Doug’s got his work cut out for him.

In the current YA market, it’s refreshing to see a paranormal story without the romantic aspect that makes up the bulk of the genre. Indeed, Fat Vampire reads more like contemporary fiction than paranormal. While the plot is non-traditionally structured and felt uncontrolled, it’s certainly a roller coaster ride of hilarity. Pop culture references infuse the novel with a great sense of reality, and there are jokes in the text for everyone.

The characters felt a little flat for me. Perhaps because of the unfocused plot, it felt like the characters weren’t given proper development as the spotlight shifted around frequently. Worse, I felt the protagonist, Doug, became more and more unlikeable as the novel progressed. The antagonist, on the other hand, was not highlighted properly and while I was certainly surprised at the revelation of who was behind the plot, it wasn’t a good kind of surprised. It was more like “…really?”

Still, Fat Vampire certainly achieves was it set out to accomplish, lampooning the current mega fad in an intelligent way. And really, giant pandas, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Nosferatu all in the same novel? It’s a shoe-in.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

I have a love/hate relationship with this show, but I do watch consistently, and one of the reasons is the music. But…sometimes they miss. Horribly. Here are my personal picks for the ten best and ten worst songs featured in this season of Glee. Links take you to youtube, where you can hear the songs without paying the $1.29 iTunes wants to gouge you for.

10

Best: Leaving on a Jet Plane

Worst: Thong Song

These are both sung by the supremely talented Matthew Morrison, and it shows how this show can either get it right or get it horribly, horribly wrong. Leaving on a Jet Plane is a beautiful rendition, it’s not overprocessed like so many tracks from the series, and it’s the most poignant moment in the banal otherwise-uninspiring pilot episode. Oh, what’s that? You say it was cut and is only in the Director’s Cut? Huh, go figure. On a different note, why do they keep making Matthew Morrison sing rap songs when he is clearly white like Boo Radley must be after all those years indoors without the sun? I mean, seriously, the guy cannot rap. And to give him this…”song”…I don’t even…

9

Best: Smile (Lily Allen)

Worst: I Could Have Danced All Night

On an average day, I’m about 100% more likely to listen to I Could Have Danced All Night than a song by someone I’ve never heard of. I love showtunes, so it makes sense. So aside from the fact that Jayma Mays tries valiantly to mask the fact that she cannot sing (I forgive it, because she is an amazing actress, and you can’t win ‘em all), why did the producers decide it would be OK to use a cheap karaoke track for that song? Smile, on the other hand, has no relation to the plot in the episode it is featured, but it’s a pop song I had never heard of, and I went out and purchased the entire album by Lily Allen, because I liked the song. So, see? You learn something every day.

8

Best: Push It

Worst: No Air

As I said, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and Push It is one of the cases where it works. I had never heard of the song before, and I don’t like the original version having heard it now, but the amazing hilarity that results from its performance makes this song memorable. Particularly amazing was Sue Lynch’s delivery of the line “that was the most disturbing thing I have ever seen, and that includes a kindergarten production of Hair.” The amount of auto-tuning in No Air lands it on this list. It sounds so mechanical and just plain awful…I don’t even want to think about it.

7

Best: Bohemian Rhapsody

Worst: Highway to Hell

I was absolutely not surprised when Vocal Adrenaline won regionals, because their performance of Bohemian Rhapsody was amazing, and has better singing and dancing than the New Directions show. It was utterly amazing, and a great feature for Jonathan Groff. On the other side of the coin, Jonathan Groff sang Highway to Hell, a great song, but my throat hurts just thinking about it. So much screaming.

6

Best: Jump

Worst: Endless Love

Jump is full of 80’s goodness and makes me wish I had been alive then. Endless Love reminds me that, actually, no, I don’t. It’s boring and just squicky. I feel dirty after watching it or listening to it, and I need to go wash my hands now. Whoever thought up that pedo storyline needs to go die in a fire.

Aaaaaaand that’s one-half of the list, but a total of ten songs! So you’ll have to wait for a bit to see the rest of the list! Comments welcome!

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

Sharon (Loves Books and Cats) posted a great list of her Top Ten Tips for Verbally Bashing Another Blogger. They’re really quite funny. However, I wonder if she realizes that she’s being a ridiculous hypocrite by not linking to and/or naming the person/people it was aimed at…Eh, I dunno. Don’t really care. Just thought the post was amusing and y’all might like it, so spreading the link love.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

We semi-PuGged some ICC25 last night. Half guildies and half…other people who would not shut up on vent about GearScores and Recount. Anywho, I bring you two delicious screenshots. The first is one of said PuGs apologizing for pulling extra mobs because he was not paying attention.

Not paying attention in ICC 25 is not a valid excuse. This person should be shot.

Next, after a wipe, I commented in guild chat, and an amusing conversation ensued.

Let it henceforth be known that to calm my shadowy wrath, a Gnome sacrifice shall be required.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

I will be in Chicago the weekend of June 25, 26, and 27, attending to important family business. If there are any bloggers or authors who would like to get together for coffee or lunch, I’d be down with that.

I think I am going to the Cubs/White Sox game that Saturday at Wrigley Field, so a late brunch on that Sunday would be perfect.

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.

Someone, and I am not going to name names, posted on their blog last week, with ARCs for sale for a nominal fee (in the five dollar or less range). Now, this person and I got into a disagreement, with them stating that they lost money on the sending of the ARCs, and also that they were purchased at a used bookstore. (By the way, at least one of those ARCs was sent to the blogger by the author, not purchased.)

This week, that same blogger has made a post about awful people on eBay selling ARCs. (Admittedly, these people are bad, bad, bad people selling multiple ARCs for 25 or more USD, while this blogger is merely someone who is unaware or disrespectful of the fact that ARCs are not to be bought or sold.) Is it just me, or is this…ridiculously hypocritical?

Mirrored from BoyWithBooks.com.