Showing posts with label tedious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tedious. Show all posts

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Lady Midnight by Judith Lewis aka Cassandra Clare


Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another argument against series. This was a humongously long novel, and the reason for that is that the author evidently graduated Summa Cum Loudly from the Stephen King Endless Education in Verbose Yearning (SKEEVY) school, where it painfully obvious that the golden rule is" "Why use one word where fifty will do?" No one gets out of bed in this world unless it takes a paragraph of minutely detailed description to convey the 'action'.

This is truly sad, because I liked the idea of the novel and was waiting for the novel the blurb described, and it never arrived. The reading voice was that of no less than Morena Baccarin, one of my favorite actors, but ever her dulcet tones couldn't rescue this. She also, on occasion, read too fast. Not that I blame her given the size of this tome, but it made some of the text rather difficult to understand.

Emma Carstairs is, we're told, a Shadowhunter who lives for battle against demons, yet in the one half of this novel I could stand to listen to, there was precisely one brief battle and that was it! The rest of the time, she's leading such a tediously un-entertaining and mind-numbing life that makes my own relatively sedate one look like a summer action blockbuster movie. I honestly could not believe that I was listening to such a herd of paragraphs that were better not heard, but still they came, one after another of soul-deadening detail and palaverously prolix prattle! See, anyone can do it!

I was so sick of hearing about the minutiae of Emma's life that I simply gave up and ditched the book back at the library. I cannot recommend even half of this first volume, let alone a whole series of this. Life's far too short to waste it on the mundane even on a Monday!


Thursday, March 3, 2016

The Informationist by Taylor Stevens


Rating: WARTY!

This audio book was about Vanessa 'Michael' Munroe, a young and tomboyish investigator, who is called an informationist because it sounds much more cool even though it's nonsensical. Some reviewers have drawn a parallel between this characters and Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, but Munroe is no Salander, despite the penchant for both to ride a motorbike. Salander would never bring harm on the downtrodden.

To me, Munroe is more like James Bond than ever she is like Salander. She has guys fawning over her as women fawn over Bond. She travels the world as Bond does, and has very convenient contacts wherever she goes. She's always potentially in danger but can fist-fight with the best of them. In contrast to Bond, however, Munroe's story moves at the pace of an arthritic snail (if that wasn't a contradiction in terms), and she isn't an agent of any government. What she does is dig up information on developing countries allowing capitalists to exploit them. While she doesn't do this exploitation herself, it can be argued that she facilitates it, and is therefore not a very nice person since she evidently has no qualms at all about what will happen to the people of those countries once western big money starts pouring in.

But then Munroe is very much a capitalist herself. Recruited by a rich Houston oil baron to find his missing adopted daughter, Munroe is offered two point five million, but demands that it be doubled before she will dirty her hands looking for the lost 18 year old. So she gets five million and a year to search and she keeps the money even if she uncovers nothing which has not already been uncovered by other investigators, official and otherwise. This is not even her field of endeavor, but she doesn't mind raking it in, exploiting a grieving father.

My feeling in beginning was that this story of Emily's disappearance would end up tied to the fact that she's adopted, or it would have to do with so-called white slavery, or perhaps to do with some secret related to her adoptive father's oil business interests in Africa. Taylor Stevens is evidently an escapee from a religious cult, for which I heartily congratulate her (for the escape, not the membership!). She anchors Munroe in Texas because that's where the author lives, so maybe there's some wish fulfilment going on here. Apparently Stevens began writing because her children bored her? I don't know how anyone can find children boring, but that's what I read. Maybe the interviewer misunderstood her? Anyway, Munroe zooms off to Africa to begin her investigation with your usual hottie ex-special forces guy by her side - someone assigned to her against her will be her employer. She has no respect for him and crudely rufies him one day after they arrive in Africa so she can go off on her own and do her job without him tagging along that day. Like I said, she's not a nice person and I neither liked nor admired her.

The wonderful thing about audio books is that you can listen to them while driving and get through a lot of books if you have any sort of commute worth the name. The downside of them is that you have to put up with whatever reader is doing the job. Hillary Hoben was the reader here, and her voice was so mind-numbingly monotonous that I was ready to buy Amway products form her. In short, I really disliked it after an hour or so. There is no inflection in her reading and while she makes passable attempts to modulate her voice to the characters, it's still flat as a pancake. Worse than this, the story stubbornly refused to move. It was less of an action adventure than a no-action misadventure. It went along at a leisurely pace when I was wanting it to get going already. It was at this point that I realized Vanessa and I were destined to part ways. I can't recommend this novel based on the portion (about 30% ) to which I listened, which discounted for skimming, was quite substantial.


Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes


Rating: WARTY!

Read in a mediocre fashion by Adam Grupper, this audio book failed to launch and I DNF'd it in short order. The blurb advises us that "Paul Trilby is having a bad day," but it's nowhere near as bad a day as it is for those who have to read of his tediously pedantic non-adventures. Paul is in a downward spiral. Dismissed from academia for reasons which were unclear from the portion to which I could stand to listen, he eventually winds up in a temp job as a typist. His perky and ambitious news anchor wife has left him, as have three girlfriends, and how he's stuck in the general services division of the Texas Department of General Services, where he's informed that there are things living in the false ceiling. I never did find out what these were, because I lost interest in the endless rambling prologue which is the first half of the novel. I suspect that what lives in the ceiling is the people who have been 'let go' from their jobs during a humongous lay-off at some point prior to Paul's arrival, but I really don't care.

The writing is awful. Every little thing he does isn't magic, but it is detailed monotonously, and there's no humor to leaven it. I certainly have no intention of allowing an author to keep on hitting me over the head with it every other paragraph. If this is supposed to exemplify his life, I got it in the first few sentences which are very reminiscent of the opening scene from Mike Judge's movie Office Space. I'd recommend seeing that instead. I cannot recommend this. It's infinitely boring.


Monday, December 21, 2015

Spiral Bound by Aaron Rainier


Rating: WARTY!

Spiral Bound is one of the most tedious graphic novels I've ever tried to read. I made it about half way through and was bored out of my mind. The characters are all animals who behave exactly like humans, in every imaginable way. There is no difference. Why the animals then? Who knows?

The story went nowhere. It wasn't even a story worth that name. It was simply a drear diary description of an average day full of ordinary events in the lives of these thoroughly uninteresting humanimals. Nothing happened that was worth repeating. It was neither engrossing nor funny. The drawings were all heavy-handed black and white line drawings and they were so busy that it hurt my eyes to look at them, let alone read the text. I cannot recommend this at all.


Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler





Title: The Jane Austen Book Club
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher: Listen and Live
Rating: WARTY!

This was read by Kimberly Schraf and not very well, either, although to be fair, she had a much better delivery than that of a Brick through an electric sheep.

This novel was so bad that I couldn't even get through the first CD. I'm sure there are people who enjoy this kind of thing, but I am not, nor will I ever be one of them. These characters were uninteresting, snotty, bratty, clueless, pointless people, who boast abuse of women and genderism amongst their "virtues", and who had nothing to offer me. Their lives were normal to the point of being tedious, and if I want to listen to people like that, or hear of their lives, I only have to stop work and sit and pay attention to everyone around me, and I can get all I want. I really don't want more of that in a novel which I read for escapism!

There was not a single character I cared about, or was interested in, and I sure-as-hell didn't need to listen to their tiresome, ordinary histories. I could not find anything redeeming at all on that first disk; there was nothing in which to develop even a mild or passing interest, and since I was headed for the library, to turn in other books I'd actually read and enjoyed, I simply ejected this one with them.

I think the cover says it all, and that little yellow star? That indicates it's a pariah even in its own country. I don't know what the hell these people use as a definition for "major motion picture", but it seems to me that the fact that the movie completely, disastrously, and dismally bombed is more than sufficient indication of the level this novel is at, no matter what kind of a "best seller" it was supposed to have been. Time to say the te deum (pronounced t-e-d-i-u-m) and move on.

Note that, out of respect for Jane Austen, and to make up for this sorry volume, I will review Austen's Lady Susan on audio book forthwith, if not third with.