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November 27 Germans: Unspontaneous, micromanaging weirdos or gleefully chaotic?
Writing about soccer, the world's most expensive cult. Books Bought:
Books Read:
Related Posts: A Man & His Ball: No Greater Love Pt. 2 A Man and His Ball--No Greater Love Pt. 1 Check out The Festering Book Browser for cover images.
November 26 Romance Pre-Orders for Early 2008Technorati Tags: romance,Amazon.com pre-orders,Lora Leigh,Sherrilyn Kenyon,BDSM,Dream-Hunters,Tempting SEALs series,Feline Breeds series,Ellora's Cave Breathless with anticipation, waiting on 2008
My original premise is to write about books I have at home, BUT, I absolutely CANNOT WAIT for KILLER SECRETS by Lora Leigh! It's a continuation of the Tempting SEALs series -- Ian's story. If you read HIDDEN AGENDAS, Kell's story, you know KS is bound to be thrilling. And, God bless her, she also has a new Breeds book out -- DAWN'S AWAKENING. Back in the day, Dawn was one of the original group of feline breeds, sister to Shera and Callan. She was very much in the background. But through succeeding books in the series, she has grown up -- to a point. Of all the breeds, she seems to fight her destiny the most -- the fact that one day, she'll mate with someone. Her time has come. Wow! This is gonna be good. Sherrilyn Kenyon's B.A.D. series is pretty cool. It's less frantic than the SEALs stories, more romantic where the SEALs books are more "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am". I love the characters. Between the Dark-hunters, the BADs and Leigh's SEALs, it's too much excitement to be contained between paper covers. Phantom in The Night is the new BAD book. The one area where Kenyon's books have it over Leigh is simple revision. Leigh's books, some published by Ellora's Cave and some by Berkeley, have an astonishing amount of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Using adjectives to describe verbs and all that. It's annoying. Yet, sadly, I don't think too many people are noticing and/or caring. If you don't care, you should. But that's another argument for another day.
November 24 Talking about A Man & His Ball: No Greater Love Pt. 2
Quote A Man & His Ball: No Greater Love Pt. 2 November 19 Are walls the new beds?Rhyannon Byrd
Beauty & The Beast -- feminine lady and hulking male
Pride & Prejudice -- hot, popular guy falls for smart shy girl
This book isn't touted as a comedy, but it's pretty damn funny. It sort of follows the Beauty/Beast/Pride/Prejudice combo formula. Hot, hunky alpha male Ryan McCall falls in love with shy outside/adventuress inside librarian Shea Dresden. Librarian? Didn't Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz play out these parts already? In a movie called...THE MUMMY? How tired is that. Still, it's a cute story. For all that I'm blustering about the lack of originality, it's modern and fun and had a surprise or two up it's sheer sleeve. Not the least of which is the couple who enthusiastically emboss Shea's spinal column into the drywall. No, seriously. Like 4 times. It's brilliant.
PLUS-- if you read my post of November 01: Context clues that a series is in the works, you will have noticed some blaring clues that a sequel might be in the works. Shea's friend Hannah and Ryan's friend Derek were thrown together and made a lot of noise about hating each other. I love secondary plots. I don't know why.
The bookstore scene! Blimey!
Another interesting thing about this book is the erotization of certain male-oriented careers. We know that firefighters and cops and spies have the hero/hunk thing going on, but there's others to consider: FBI agents, detectives, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, military pilots. They are to us what stewardesses, nurses, geishas are to men. In this case, we have Ryan and Derek as ATF agents (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms). And it works just fine. Good with guns. Ready for action. {{{fanning self}}}.
This story could kick-start a honeymoon!
A Little Less Conversation is pretty good. Also has a hint of a secondary relationship.
A Man & His Ball: No Greater Love Pt. 2
Julie & Me, and Michael Owen Makes Three -- by Alan Gibbons, Blue Peter Book Award Winner
The Alan Gibbons books are like FEVER PITCH, JR. A boy. A girl. Liverpool. Manchester Utd. Romeo. Juliet. In track suits. I love these books because of Gibbons application of “Grammar B”, a writing style that flies in the face of traditional grammar. I love how he uses fragments, interjections, punctuation. That especially. He uses punctuation to create an arpeggio of emotional chords. It looks so simple, but any writer worth the title knows he must have worked it out the way Beethoven worked out the final movement of the Ninth Symphony. These books are close to my heart because I lived so many of the moments, both personal and soccer-related. England’s shambolic last minute fumble against Romania in Euro2000. (To this day, my parents still don’t understand why I was yelling at the TV.) Beckham’s tragic spleen venting at World Cup 98. Michael Owen! Phwooooaaaarrrr! Michael Owen. Oooooh, he’s GOR-GEOUS! His sexy smile and big brown eyes on a cover were guaranteed to sell millions of copies of magazines like 442 and Shoot! He’s just so feckin’ hot!
But the dodgy hamstring. The silly crisps commercials. The disastrous year at Real Madrid. Joining Newcastle to work with Alan Shearer (scored pots of goals, but could bore for England) who then retired. Collapsing like a house of cards at World Cup 06. I think he had a vision of what was up the road against Portugal, so his knee did him a favor.
To understand the premise of the novels, you have to understand this tenet of English football culture: one is not allowed to love Liverpool AND ManUtd. At the same time. They are titanic rivals. Cowboys vs. Redskins? Piffle. Lakers vs. everyone? Small potatoes. Mets vs. whoever their rival is? Not a patch. One is not allowed to love Liverpool and Everton at the same time. One is not allowed to love ManUtd (ManYoo) and Manchester City at the same time. That one’s really vicious! City will sic Oasis on you.
Yet -- as an outsider, I strongly believe I can like whichever teams I damn well want to. So here are my teams.
www.arsenal.com www.liverpoolfc.tv www.manutd.com www.realmadrid.com
And if I ever met someone who loved Inter Milan while I love AC Milan? I could live with it. It's called "being an adult". Check it out. I think it might become a trend.
November 18 A Man and His Ball--No Greater Love Pt. 1Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby Julie & Me, and Michael Owen Makes Three Julie & Me: The Treble Year -- by Alan Gibbons, Blue Peter Book Award Winner
FP’s blurb says: In America, it is soccer. But in Great Britain, it is the real football. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious! I’m sure that women wish a man would write about loving her the way Hornby writes about loving soccer. And I’m going to call it soccer – because that’s what it’s EFFING CALLED!
Here’s an insider secret for you: no one feckin’ cares that we call it soccer while the rest of the world calls it football. In the US, we use two words for the simple reason that WE NEED TWO WORDS. That’s it. No drama. No language academy rapping our knuckles. No wanking anglophilic snobbery. So all you language snobs, put your snobbery to good use and get rid of “y’know”, “so, like”, “get your ____ on”, “you go, girl/guy”, and all those other pimply, urban adolescent brain farts.
But, so, like…yeah, Fever Pitch. The blurb on the American paperback edition (ISBN 1573226882) was written by a man – you can tell. The standard male-friendly phrases make up the bulk of the paragraph.
“No pads, no prayers, no prisoners.” Personally, I think it would have been more dramatic if the writer had separated the items with periods instead of commas.
“life-long obsession” “incisive analysis of insanity” Is the writer auditioning for Monday Night Football? “fandom” The writer is a young-ish man. Maybe a Gen-Xer? “coming-of-age” Men place a lot of sentiment on their rites of passage. Must be some Jungian-primal-hunter/gatherer thing. It’s not bad, just not original.
The blurb is basically a string of clichés about sports and sports stories. And, there’s nothing in it for women. You have to go beyond the blurb. There’s an utterly pointless quote from some slag (maybe) at ELLE magazine who calls it “Utterly hilarious”. But it’s not “utterly hilarious”. It’s amusing, sensitive, thoughtful, introspective, interesting, exciting, and clever. It makes you chuckle. It makes you feel smart when you get the in-jokes. What it ain’t, is “utterly hilarious”. If it’s utterly anything, it’s utterly clever.
I quite like GQ’s quote: “read-bits-out-loud-to-strangers funny” “highly perceptive and honest” http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/Daily_News
Under the covers, I like the way the story is organized by Arsenal games. Each chapter has to do with an Arsenal game and what was going on in the life of Rob. There’s hardly any dialogue. It’s almost all rumination. How self-absorbed is that! There’s tons of name-dropping of famous soccer players – the giants and jesters of the sport. Yep, you’re going to feel really smart about English soccer when you’re done with this book.
November 12 IN A NUTSHELL: Sept. 30 to Nov. 11Thanks to Maki of www.doshdosh.com for writing about the benefits of roundup posts. Here's a compendium of my most recent titles.
My inaugural post! A huge leap. I’ve been uneasy at how I don’t read as often as I used to. Not that I need a reason, but this is a very satisfying way to get back in touch with my collection.
These were my first batch of posts. Stylistically varietal as I was still finding my feet. I’m looking forward to doing more shopping spree posts in future.
With these most recent posts, I'm starting to exercise more design consistency. I spend a lot of time setting up links. It’s a hassle, but it’s worth it if easy links lead to people going after these books.
One of the best things about my new hobby so far is that I wrote a poem – my first in about 2 or 3 years. I composed it as a book review: DATE 12 October TITLE Different Hours/Same Minutes CATEGORY Books in The Bedroom
O the utter mundane! O the utterer of mundane! Name-dropping, and school-boy writing lessons. Weltschmertz and bagels. Oi!
Anamorphic anaesthesia Like fog, drifting, coating Cuddling dullness and stunted wonder.
Sinatra sings "It was a very good year." --for red-blooded boys, martinis in hand Snapping to the band, pretending life is grand.
What. Ever.
Artfully big words artfully dropped Like chocolate morsels; make sure you Pick up each one. Don't let them go to waste. A paragraph at the least for each.
I'm not saying a monkey could do it. That would be absurd. They know better than to labor pointlessly. Who learns from who, then?
I’d love to know what you think so far.
' Leave a comment. (Click the phrase under individual post.) ' Old-fashioned e-mail: swetergrl86@hotmail.com
November 10 Pen & Paper in Perfect AccordI keep a smallish libaray in my classroom. As an English teacher, I teach writing straight from the source -- literature. I haven't used a textbook in 2 years and I haven't missed them at all; my students either. Most of the books I buy from Scholastic. Visit my MINI-MALL for other sellers.
We use the books to analyze and practice writing styles. By the end of the school year, students have a sigfinicant repertoire of sentence and organizational styles at their disposal. This is just a short list from the top of my head.
November 09 Triple Distilled Creative Energy in Powerful Surges of ProseCoyote v. Acme. Aaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaha…snort…hahahahaha! Heeheeheeheeheeheehee ooooohoohoohoohoohoo aaaawww …cough…ffffffffffffff hih hih hih hih hih hih hih.
Ian Frazier. Bwaaaaahahahahaha. Eeeeeeeeeeeee HAR!
Whew! My stomach hurts now. Take THAT fancy-schmancy spell checker. *Dr. Evil laugh. *
Damn, I wish I could remember what led me to buy this book. I remember it wasn’t anything particularly special. I have a vague memory of probably reading either a review of it – or an excerpt. Yeah, hard to get much more vague than that. I flatter myself that I have discovered a gem. It’s simple and beautiful in its execution. Like Hornby’s POLYSYLLABIC SPREE and HOUSEKEEPING VS. THE DIRT (September 2007 entry), it’s a compilation of writing pieces previously published in other, uh, publications. (“Please allow myself to introduce myself…) There are so many reasons to love this slim tome. Chief amongst them being – it’s short. It’s slim. It takes up very little room in a purse, a glove compartment, a briefcase, a backpack.
Most chapters are only a page or 2. You can take in whole paragraphs at a glance, so they are perfect for reading at red lights or when you’re stuck in traffic.
The cover is instantly recognizable and fills people with that happy, sappy sentimentality that fills you when you think of your favorite cartoons. Everyone loves Warner Bros. Cartoons. And if you don’t – you should, you uncouth, classless philistine. Hell, even the title font is from the cartoon! It’s completely and utterly brill.
Good book for people with A.D.D. Adult Doughnut Deficiency. No, really, so…hey, I was driving by Krispy Kreme and I thought hot choccy and 3 glazed doughnuts would be so good, but then my cell phone rings – wait – it wasn’t my cell phone, it was my watch. Did you know Patek Phillipe watches – an everyday model retails for …
Oh, right. Coyote. Speaking in tongues. Evil laughter. Demonic possession. Life insurance. Reminiscing about golf. You can’t make this stuff up! Or can you… Even – does he dare? He does; he does! Classic literature rendered illiterate! Or do I mean subliterate? Indeed, what gall! What chutzpa. It’s enough to give you shpilkes in your geneckteckessoink." But in a good way, y’know?
So go get a copy and stick it – wherever the hell you want to. It’s THAT good.
Click on the book's link at The Festering Book Browser. November 03 Grapes in a glass and shameless name-droppingWINE FOR DUMMIES -- and for the rest of us, too! Wine, good wine, is one of those creations that makes life worth living. There's so many; so much to know. So I got a copy of WINE FOR DUMMIES from You-Know-Where.com. I've never been fond of the "for Dummies" title because I'm not a dummy. But, the book does what it advertises. It tells me everything I WANT to know, plenty of stuff I SHOULD know, and lots of things I'm EXCITED to know. For example, there's a section on corkscrews. The one I have does a good job if I get the screw in just the right spot. (A wine cork's sweet spot is the center of the cork. Be careful that the screw doesn't skew sideways!) The worst type is the plain corkscrew -- no leverage. Better ones are the screwpull (combo corkscrew with prongs) and the "Butler's Friend" (prongs only). Then, on page 101 (2003/3rd ed.), there's a bit titled "The most professional corkscrew of them all". OMG! That's the one I have! It's called "The Waiter's Corkscrew". It's a bit like a girly swiss army knife. It has the standard curly screw, a knife to cut foil around the mouth, and a piece that looks like a bottle opener -- which is what gives you the leverage to pull out the cork. You still have to get the curly screw in just right, brace the bottle opener bit against the lip and pull. Good leverage, not that much muscle to pull out the cork. However, you have to be careful not to bend the curly screw. Another great thing about this book is that you can read it in pieces. It's not meant to be a novel. You can pretty much cover your eyes, and drop a finger into the table of contents. Yet, organizing so much information and minutiae does have its challenges. Some of the pages contain so much graphic design, your eyes are not sure where to look first. There's lists, bullet lists, charts, grey boxes, marginalia, tables, titles, titles almost indistinguishable from subtitles. Phew! The grey box on p.212 should have been placed closer to the beginning of the book. It's one of the most interesting blocks of information in the entire book, and it really helped me understand the philosophy of winemaking. Other useful bits are the tearaway cheat sheet at the beginning and plenty of blank pages to jot down notes. Also, the margins are quite wide, which is great for writing notes to self. In keeping with the earthy humor (humor de terroir) -- sorry -- the section pages feature wine-related comics from THE 5TH WAVE. The appendices could make a book all their own. Pronounciation chart (btw, you don't have to come all the way to the back for that. Whenever an important foreign word is introduced, a pronounciation guide is right next to it! Sweet! A well-filled glossary, vintage chart, and painstaking index. If you're like me, you don't bother with tables of contents. I go straight to the index. Tables of Contents are like topic sentences. They don't help you find specific information, they just hand you a road map and send you on your way. I'm ok with being a wine dilletante. The difference between me and the experts has been reduced to the fact that they've had more practice. Wine snobs are done and dusted. Their time is over. It's time to open up your minds like you open up your noses. Click on the link for this book at The Festering Book Browser. November 01 Context clues that a series is in the worksHere's a list of clues that let you know a series is a strong possibility -- or a least a sequel.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Dark Hunters) Lora Leigh (Feline Breeds, Wolf Breeds, Coyote Breeds, Tempting SEALs), and Lori Foster (Visitation, Buckhorn Brothers, Winston Brothers) are the current queens of this mode d'emploi.
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