Tag Archives: book review

August 28, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Like Herding the Wind (A Book Review)

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This is a review I did on Goodreads of a book by an Indie author I met through PDMI Publishing.  It is the first book of hers that I have read, but I couldn’t help but try to promote it.  So here is what I wrote on Goodreads (hoping that I don’t make her beautiful story into an instant worst-seller);

Good science fiction is usually based on an engaging premise that makes you think about it long after the story is finished. Cindy Koepp’s book is like that. The Eshuvani race of aliens crash land their generation ship on the planet Earth in 1612, in the region of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. They encounter the human race with weapons drawn. But a brave and dedicated human cleric defuses the situation and convinces two peoples to learn about each other peacefully. The Eshuvani are converted to Christianity and with their superior technology, choose to try to peacefully share a planet rather than go to war as an alien invader.

But an even more fascinating thing about this book is that it doesn’t choose to be about that first-contact event. It is a hard-boiled police procedural novel set in 1965. Two police forces, one Eshuvani, and the other human, are faced with the problem of alien terrorists attacking the human police for reasons unknown. It leads to a story filled with suspense, murder, kidnapping, and racial tensions blooming into violence between two different races.

So this book is a murder mystery and a story of anti-terrorist police procedure at the same time as it is a form of science fiction known as alternate history. It leads you to want more stories set in the same alternate reality. And it is filled with engaging characters about whom you want to know more.

Amaya, the kiand or captain of the Eshuvani law enforcers, is an instantly likable character whom you can’t help but root for as she struggles with loss of her family and her former partner, the inexplicable difficulties and road-blocks put in her way by her own government, and the need to form a new functioning department out of young and untried Eshuvani officers… all while being hunted and attacked occasionally by the terrorists.

Ed Osborn is her human counterpart, and also her “urushalon”, her inter-species adopted child. He has the difficult task of trying to fight off the Eshuvani terrorists who seem to have his men in the center of the cross-hairs of their weapon-sights, while at the same time trying to teach his men about an alien race and culture that they are trying to work beside and integrate with.

This novel is definitely worth the read for science fiction lovers, and people who like to think deep thoughts about how we would react to an entire race of beings forcing us to share our planet, just as their journey was also interrupted with difficult choices forced upon them.

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June 11, 2016 · 6:38 pm

Mennyms (A Book Review)

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This is the book I have really read, though I intend to acquire the rest.

Sylvia Waugh is a British writer of children’s books who has a lot in common with me.  She spent her career as a teacher of grammar.  In her late fifties she became a published author.  Her book series of the Mennyma is a charming fantasy adventure about dolls so loved by their owner, they actually come to life… and survive her…. and then have to make their way in a world that would be horrified by them and might easily seek to destroy them.

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Hopefully none of my dolls come to life after I croak. After years of collecting, they nearly outnumber humanity.

But rest assured, the dolls in this sweet-natured children’s book series would never prove evil.  The books are more fantasy-comedy than horror story.  In fact, they are impossibly far away from horror.

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The original book.

Joshua Mennym is the head of a family of life-size rag dolls.  He pretends to be a middle-aged man.  He generally keeps his distance from the general public, because, up close, his basic rag-doll-ness would stand revealed.  Rag dolls are not supposed to walk and talk, let alone have families and live in a home of their own.   His wife is Vinetta Mennym, also a rag doll.  Together they are parents to the ten-year old twins, Poopie, the boy, and Wimpey, the girl.

The teenage twins are Pilbeam and Soobie.  Pilbeam is the girl and constant companion of the elder teenage sister, Appleby.  Soobie is the boy and  blue.  Why their former owner, Kate Penshaw, made him with a blue head and blue feet and blue hands is a mystery both to the Mennyyms and to me.   It causes him to be the one most likely to cause exposure of the family secret because even at a distance he does not look like a “real people” person.

Baby Googles is the smallest of the family, constantly cared for by the nanny, Miss Quigley, who is also considered a Mennym because she is also a doll.

Grandpa Magnus Mennym lives in the attic with Grandma and takes care of the household bills.  He writes scholarly works on the English Civil War and publishes them for a modest income which comes through the mail.  Granny Tulip is also relied upon for her wisdom and experience whenever a problem with keeping the family secret comes up.

Each book in the series contains a different adventure revolving around the realistic comedy generated by impossible people trying so hard to be real.  I absolutely love the adventures, even the ones I haven’t read yet.  And I know that the only way you could possibly love these books too is if you share my loony love of the fantastically impossible that turns out to be real.  After reading these books, I fully intend to keep a very close eye on my own doll collection.

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April 15, 2016 · 2:39 pm

Hogfather (a Book Review)

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I finished reading the book Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett,  while sitting in the waiting room as the dentist worked on the wires of my son’s braces in a nearby dentist’s chamber of horrors.  The receptionist and secretary probably thought I was insane for incessantly chortling and making those other rude snorty noises you make when you don’t want to interrupt others with laughing, but can’t help it.  What better way to wait in the cold chambers of dental anxiety than to read a funny, funny book about an assassin named Mr. Teatime who meant to slay the Hogfather, Terry Pratchett’s version of Santa Claus, by stealing children’s teeth from the tooth fairy and using them to control young minds and make them stop believing in the Hogfather, that giver of gifts on the sacred and festive Hogswatch Eve?

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This story has an unusual hero.  Death, that skeletal reaper of souls and talker in ALL CAPITOL LETTERS.  Oh, and not just Death.  His granddaughter Susan is along for the adventure.  So Death puts on the red suit to make people believe in the Hogfather again while Susan tracks down the perpetrators of the tooth fairy plot.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are full of bizarre but highly developed characters who not only make you laugh, but make you think.  The books can be fairly thick and full of complex ideas, and yet, the pages melt away as you read.  And the people who can hear you laughing about the book will think you are absolutely crazy.

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February 14, 2016 · 5:22 pm

Binge-Watching Two

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Having successfully binged on the current first season of the television series Quantico, I was determined to try something different on the second try.  I turned to the HBO series Band of Brothers.  Now, I admit, being a war buff of the worst kind in every way, I have seen the entire thing before when it was broadcast on TBS back in 2003.  The thing is, I did not have all the tools at that time necessary to fully appreciate and understand the dramatic arc of the story.  I found it practically impossible to keep up with all the many characters who come and go so quickly.  Some are introduced for the first time in the same episode in which they are killed.  Some are wounded, leave for an episode or two… or four, and then return as if we are supposed to remember them in their entirety.  So the secret magical spell I employed this time around for better and more intimate understanding is…  I read the damn book.

Yes, the uncritical critic took on Stephen Ambrose’s masterpiece, Band of Brothers.

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Having read the book, I now had all the background information I needed on each of the characters.  I could begin to match names and faces from the cast list of each episode with the real people I read about in the book, and the real people who matched those characters in the movie from the brief interview segments at the start of several episodes.  I began to understand why so much of the film was devoted to the stories of Major Dick Winters, C. Carwood Lipton, and Sergeant Don Malarky… these being men who led Easy Company of the 101st Airborne through the most terrible parts of the war and lived to tell the stories that got made into the book and then the series.  I really began to appreciate the heroics of people like Sergeant “Wild Bill” Guarnere who found out his brother had died in combat in Italy the night before the big D-Day parachute jump, and ended up losing his leg in the Battle of the Bulge, at the defensive stand in Bastogne.  I learned more about the key leadership role of Bull Randleman who was separated from Easy Company in Einhoven and spent a night hiding from the German troops during the failed Operation Market Garden.  I felt the deep hurt felt by people like Eugene “Doc” Roe the combat medic as he tried and repeatedly failed to treat horrible war wounds.  They are not just characters in a war movie any more.  I feel like I know them as people.

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Things about war and good war movies leave me in tears constantly.  They grind up my soul and leave me sick at heart that people could be guilty of such things.  I almost had to look away at times during the concentration camp episode.

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Winters quietly orders his soldiers to open the prison gates

But ultimately it feels like a series like this is good for the soul.  You can’t truly know how good and heroic people can actually be until you see how they live through and conquer these terrible experiences.  And it is good to see an excellent book brought faithfully to life like this.  It helps me lie to myself that writers can have a worthy effect upon life, the universe, and everything.

 

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January 10, 2016 · 5:51 pm

Book Magic, the Empathy Spell

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I have long known that reading good books is the primary path to being a wizard.  There are many, many things you can learn from the magic contained in fiction books, but now there is also research that proves books can improve your empathetic skills.  Here is the article I found to suggest it is so;

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If you don’t feel energetic enough to actually go there and read that, let me summarize a bit.  When you read a good fiction story, you get to live for a while in another person’s skin… see the world through someone else’s eyes… and if it is intelligent, realistic, and complex enough, it rewires a bit of the part of your brain that tries to understand and make sense of perspectives that are new to you, not merely habits that you follow down muddy, well-worn paths on auto-pilot.  You get to practice understanding other people.  And the more you practice this with well-written, insightful material, the more empathetic you will become.  The article notes significantly that children reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series develop skill at compassion.  I can personally testify that as a middle school teacher, I saw that very thing happening as students in my nerd classes not only became more sensitive towards the gifted weirdos in their class because of Harry, but also became more understanding of the special education students, and other often-bullied minorities.  Harry Potter books are literally magic books.

Here are some other notable books and their magical powers;

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is taught in numerous middle schools and high schools across the country because teachers have instinctively realized how much it does to solve problems of racial and cultural tension in the school environment.  It tackles the unfairness of racism, the effects of extreme poverty, the possible side effects of too much religion, and it illustrates everything through the voice of a very intelligent young girl.  Learning hard lessons becomes practically painless.

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is narrated by the angel of death.  It is set in Nazi Germany in the war years.  The central character is the daughter of a man arrested and executed as a communist.  She is forced to live with German foster parents who turn out to be very loving individuals, though they are enduring difficulties of their own.  They not only love and nurture her, they take in a young Jewish man who is fleeing the Gestapo and the work camps.  In the face of the constant threat of death, the main character learns to read both books and people, to care about others, and face the deaths of those she loves without fear.  This book makes beauty out of human ugliness and war, and love out of fear and death.  Very powerful magic, in my humble opinion.

So what am I saying in this Paffoonied post of books and magic?  Only this.  There is magic power to be gained from reading fiction books, especially well-written fiction books.  Try it for yourself.  You may accidentally turn yourself into a frog… or a little girl from Maycomb, Georgia in the 1930’s… but it will turn out to be very good magic.  Go ahead, try it.  I dare you.

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December 8, 2015 · 8:46 pm

Reading Old Books

My personal library is a final destination for a multitude of used and well-worn books.

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Half-Price Books employees used to know me by name.  They don’t now so much any more, because poor health has cut down on available funds, and they hire new people all the time.  But I have bought a number of books just cruising the Dollar-or-Less shelf.  A case in point is a recent purchase of an old book by one of my all-time favorite authors, Terry Pratchett.

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You can see why it was only worth about fifty cents.  It is all scuffed up and dog-eared from previous owners.  Of course, I know how to mistreat a book as well as the next guy, and some of the books I bought bookstore-new long ago look worse than this one does.  But that’s not what’s important.  The good part is on the inside.  You have to put in some effort to get at it.  It is an extremely funny and highly imaginative book.  Johnny is a kid living in Blackbury, England in 1996 (the present day of the story, though it is about time travel and drifts back to the early 1940’s).  He thinks he is just a stupid kid with more stupid-ness about him than he has pockets to keep it in, but he is blessed with an idiot’s ability to think outside of his own head (whatever the heck that means).  There just happens to be an old bag lady named Mrs. Tachyon who just happens to have a Tesco grocery shopping cart that just happens to be a time machine (or so Johnny and his stupid-kid friends just happen to believe).  Johnny and his stupid-kid friends, Bigmac, Wobbler, and Yo-less (don’t ask, okay) along with the girl Kirsty (who is definitely the opposite of a stupid kid), find Mrs. Tachyon lying in a bloody lump in an alley way, and sort of inherit the shopping cart when they get the old lady to a hospital.  And of course, the shopping cart is very unusual with its bags of mysterious wobbly stuff and its resident hyper-vicious cat named Guilty.  It soon accidentally transports the kids back to 1941 when German bombs (like the one in the title) are falling from the sky on Blackbury.  The very day, in fact, when the street they are standing in is supposed to be destroyed by a German bomb, according to history.

Of course, I can’t help but love any book by Terry Pratchett.  But this one is quirky-wonderful and full of surprises.  I really can’t even tell you more about it without spoiling something magical.  I won’t, however, recommend that you read this book.  After all, I had a lovely time reading it, and you certainly don’t need to share in that.  I can keep it all for myself.  No, don’t even think about trying to find a copy and read it!  I think it is out of print anyway.  Don’t you dare go to Half-Price Books!

I will continue to read and fall in love with old books.  I have a few in my library that haven’t actually gotten around to reading yet.  And I have a large number of books I want to read again.  Old books are the best books, and I will continue to say that… at least until I have a new book of my own coming out.

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September 13, 2015 · 2:29 pm

More Books to Make You Crazy

I have now written several goofy book reviews in which I explain some of the goofy books I have read that I blame for my current state of crazily unbalanced intellectualism.  If you decide you would like to be as goofy and crazy as me, for some totally inexplicable reason, you can read some of these oddball choices.

34504Michael Beyer‘s review

Sep 13, 15  
5 of 5 stars
Read in September, 2015

 

Terry Pratchett wrote books of magical power and satirical alchemical wit, but not a single one of them tops Wyrd Sisters. I believe this is the best book he ever wrote from a collection of several of the best books ever written. The three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick call up visions of the witches in MacBeth. But no Shakespearian special effect ever captured the searing ridicule of kings and kingly aspirations as this book about king-making, or king un-making, or witchly interference with the best laid plans of mice and would-be kings. Granny Weatherwax is a witch you never want to meet in real life, but this book portrays the practical-minded old witch so talented at headology with such clarity, that you realize that you have indeed met her in real life… probably more than once. And the book has as unlikely a plot as ever underwent loop-the-loops and barrel rolls in its flight through a book. I have now smeared loopy gushings of hyperbole and weird wordy praises all over this book, and hopefully you will take time out from feeling nauseous long enough to give it a look.
I am also guilty of having a great love for non-fiction books and learning.  So here is a singularly weird choice to obsess about.

Michael Beyer‘s review

Sep 13, 15  
461434by Dennis Craig Smith
4 of 5 stars
Read in September, 2015

 

Back in the 1980’s, I had a girlfriend whose sister lived in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. Visiting there was an exercise in absolute embarrassment and near apoplexy. But it made me curious as well. There were children as well as adults there. Family-oriented nudity? I needed to know more. So, on advice from friends I located a naturist society based in Florida and corresponded with them. I bought a copy of this book from them. It contains a fascinating study, told mostly through collections of anecdotal data, of the effects, and possible effects of living parts of your life completely naked. And the effects it could have on kids. Having grown up with considerable burdens of shame and trepidation about being seen naked, this book helped me to understand that being naked is not necessarily the bad thing I thought it was. I confess to becoming a closet nudist… er, if never letting anyone else see you naked qualifies as being a nudist. And I have met, over time, wonderful people who are totally nutty about being nude. I will never become one of them. But this book helped me to at least understand them better.
I basically got the notion that books make you insane from the next author, a favorite of mine for reasons I can’t begin to explain.

Michael Beyer‘s review

Sep 13, 15
5 of 5 stars
Read in September, 2015

 

H.P. Lovecraft gives me real nightmares because he is such a master of the arcane arts of creating unease and worry. I have never read another author’s work where the atmosphere of the story leaks toxic chemicals of fear and loathing into your brain quite the way this story does. As you experience the rotting, festering, tainted town of Innsmouth through the eyes of the narrator, your entire being is slowly sauteed in a stew of creepy details, unsettling characters, and an architecture of decay. It is decay of both the actual seaport town, and the mouldering culture of a humanity that long ago yielded to the temptation of ultimate corruption. Frog people from the ocean’s depths could easily be humorous or simply bizarre. But Lovecraft’s slow, relentless reveal makes the unwinding plot absolutely horrifying. If you like a good scare, this book may be too much for you. If you love a bad scare that makes your very skeleton shiver, then this is the perfect book.
All of this book-review nonsense can be found on Goodreads, a critical website for readers and writers, and I have peppered this post with enough links to it that you probably can’t avoid accidentally ending up there.

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September 4, 2015 · 1:49 pm

H.P. Lovecraft, The Master of Madness

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When I was but a young teacher, unmarried, and using what free time I had to play role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller with students and former students and fatherless boys, I came across a game that really creeped me out.  And it was quite popular with the kids who relied on me to fill their Saturday afternoons with adventure.  It led me on a journey through the darkness to find a fascination with the gruesome, the macabre, and the monstrous.  The Call of Cthulhu game brought me to the doorsteps of Miskatonic University and the perilous portals of the infected fishing village of Innsmouth.  It introduced me to the nightmare world of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

“H. P. Lovecraft, June 1934” by Lucius B. Truesdell

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Old H.P. is as fascinating a character as any of the people who inhabit his deeply disturbing horror tales.  He was a loner and a “nightbird” but with little social contact in the real world.  He lived a reclusive life that included a rather unsuccessful “contract” marriage to an older woman and supporting himself mostly by burning through his modest inheritance.  As a writer, he got his start by so irritating pulp fiction publishers with his letters-page rants that he was challenged to write something for a contest article, and won a job as a regular contributor to “Weird Tales” pulp magazine.  He was so good that he was offered the editorship of the magazine, but true to form, he turned it down.  He resembled most the dreamer characters who accessed the Dreamlands in various ways, but let their mortal lives wither as they explored unknown continents in the Dreamlands and the Mountains of the Moon.  He created a detailed mythos in his stories about Cthulhu and Deep Ones and the Elder Gods.  He died a pauper, well before his stories received the acclaim they have today.

I have to say that I was so enamored of his stories that I had to read them as fast as I could acquire them from bookstores and libraries all over Texas.  My favorites include, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness.  But reading these stories lost me hour upon hour of sleep, and developed in me a habit of sleeping with the lights on.  In Lovecraft’s fiction, sins of your ancestors hang like thunderheads over your life, and we are punished for original sin.  A man’s fate can be determined before he is born, and events hurl him along towards his appointed doom.  H.P. makes you feel guilty about being alive, and he shakes you to the core with unease about the greater universe we live in, a cold, unfeeling universe that has no love for mankind, and offers no shelter from the horrors of what really goes on beyond the knowing of mortal men.

Loving the stories of H.P. Lovecraft is about deeper things than just loving a good scare.  If you are looking for that in a book, read something by Stephen King.  H.P. will twist the corners of your soul, and make you think deep thoughts to keep your head above water in deep pools of insanity.  I know some of his books belong in yesterday’s post, but we are not talking about happy craziness today.  This is the insanity of catharsis and redemption.

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September 3, 2015 · 1:48 pm

Books You Should Read If You Desire To Go Happily Insane

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Yesterday I wrote a post about religion that revealed my lack of connection to organized religion (I am still in recovery from fifteen years of trying to be a good Jehovah’s Witness) and my deep connections to God and the Universe and That Which Is Essential.  I feel that it is good evidence for the theory that being too smart, too genius-level know-it-all goofy, is only a step away from sitting in the corner of the asylum with a smile and communicating constantly with Unknown Kadath in his lair in the Mountains of Madness  (a literary allusion to H.P. Lovecraft’s world).  And today I saw a list on Facebook pompously called “100 Books You Should Read If You’re Smart”.  I disagree wholeheartedly with many of the books on that list, and I have actually read about 80 per cent of them.  So it started me thinking… (never a good thing)… about what books I read that led to my current state of being happily mentally ill and beyond the reach of sanity.

2657To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is the first book on my list.  The Facebook list had no reasons why to argue with, so here are my reasons why.  This book is written from the innocent and intelligent perspective of a little girl, Scout Finch.  It stars her hero father, Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer who has to defend a black man from false charges of rape of a white woman.  This book makes clear what is good in people, like faith and hope and practicality… love of flowers, love of secrets, and the search for meaning in life.  It reveals the secrets of a secretive person like Boo Radley. It also makes clear what is bad in people, like racism, lying, mean-spirited manipulations, lust, and vengeance.  And it shows how the bad can win the day, yet still lose the war.  No intelligent reader who cares about what it means to be human can go without reading this book.

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Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell is the second book on my list.  This is really not one book.  It is a complex puzzle-box of very different stories nested one inside the next and twisted together with common themes and intensely heroic and fallible characters.  Reading this book tears at the hinges between the self and others.  It reveals how our existence ripples and resonates through time and other lives.  It will do serious damage to your conviction that you know what’s what and how the world works.  It liberates you from the time you live in at the moment.

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The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini is the third book on the list.  This will give you an idea of how fragile people truly are, and how devastating a single moment of selfishness can be in a life among the horrors of political change and human lust and greed.  No amount of penance will ever be enough for the main character of this book to make up for what he did to his best and only friend… at least until he realizes that penance is not all there is… and that it is never too late to love.

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The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak is number four.  This book is about an orphan girl, the daughter of an executed communist, living in Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s.  It is a tear-jerker and an extremely hard book to read without learning to love to cry out loud.  Leisel Meminger is haunted by Death in the story.  In fact, Death loves her enough to be the narrator of the story.  It is a book about loving foster parents, finding the perfect boy, and losing him, discovering what it means to face evil and survive… until you no longer can survive… and then what you do after you don’t survive.  It is about how accordion music, being Jewish, and living among monsters can lead to a triumph of the spirit.

Of course, being as blissfully crazy as I am, I have more books on this list.  But being a bit lazy and already well past 500 words… I have to save the rest for another day.

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August 30, 2015 · 3:12 pm

The Uncritical Critic Likes to Read Books Too!

I told you before that I make a lousy movie critic because I watch anything and everything and like most of it.  You don’t believe me?  You can look it up through this link; The Uncritical Critic

I hate to tell you this, but it is almost exactly the same for books too.

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The Paffooney is an illustration for a proposed collaboration on a children’s book.  My friend and fellow author Stuart R. West (Stuart’s Blogspot about Aliens) had a story about three kids taking a balloon ride when they accidentally gave the goldfish bubble gum to chew ignoring their mother’s warning that dire consequences would follow.  He decided the project was too ridiculous to follow through on, or at least my Paffooney power wasn’t up to making sense of his brilliant literature, and the book did not happen.  And I am sorry about that because I couldn’t wait to find out how it turns out.  I love weird and wild stories of all kinds.  And, unfortunately, I love them uncritically.

So, what kind of books would a goofy uncritical critic actually recommend? Let me lay some bookishness on ya then.

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Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads on Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

I have always felt, since the day I first picked up a copy of Mort by Terry Pratchett, that he was an absolute genius at humor-and-satire style fantasy fiction. In fact, he is a genius compared to any author in any genre. He has a mind that belongs up there with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner… or down there as the case may well be. This book is one of his best, though that is a list that includes most of his Discworld novels.
Amazing Maurice is a magically enhanced cat with multiple magically enhanced mice for minions. And the cat has stumbled on a sure fire money-making scheme that completely encompasses the myth of Pied Piper of Hamlin. In fact, it puts the myth in a blender, turns it on high, and even forgets to secure the lid. It is funny, heartwarming, and changes the way you look at mice and evil cats.
This is a book to be read more than once and laughed at for the rest of your life.

You see what I mean?  I uncritically praise books that make me laugh and think deeply about things at the same time.  It is as if I don’t have any standards at all if something is brilliantly written and makes a deep and influential impression on me.

1953

Here’s another book that I love so much I can’t be properly critical when I reread it.  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  I cannot help but be taken in by the unrequited love the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton had for the beautiful refugee from the French Revolution, Lucy Manette.  Tragic love stories melt my old heart.  And I can’t help but root for Charles Darnay as well, even though I know what’s going to happen in Paris at the Bastille because I have read this book three times and seen the Ronald Coleman movie five times.  I also love the comical side characters like Jerry Cruncher the grave-robber and hired man as well as Miss Pross, the undefeatable champion of Miss Lucy and key opposer to mad Madam Defarge.

I simply cannot be talked out of praising the books I read… and especially the books I love.  I am totally uncritical as a reader, foolishly only looking for things I like about a book.  Real critics are supposed to read a book and make faces that remind you of look on my little brother’s face when I had to help him use an outhouse for the first time.  (Oh, what a lovely smell that was!)  (And I mean that sarcastically!)  Real critics are supposed to tell you what they hated about the book and what was done in such a juvenile and unprofessional way that it spoiled all other books forever.  That’s right isn’t it?  Real critics are supposed to do that?  Maybe I am glad I’m not a real critic.

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