Posts Tagged ‘2 out of 5’

And now for something entirely different, head on over to BookPage and check out my review for the December issue, where I covered the sequel to The Nanny Diaries, Nanny Returns.  No, really, I did!  Can you tell December is slim pickings when it comes to new releases?

Ok, but seriously, even though chick lit is really not a genre that I tend to kick back with if given my druthers, I will admit that I used to dig this stuff and even read the original Nanny Diaries way back when… and I’ve even seen the movie!  So how did the sequel hold up?  I think I nail it on the head when I say that if chick lit is your think and/or you really liked the first, then the sequel really isn’t all that shabby.  Not going to win a Pulitzer any time soon, but not all fiction strives to do that, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Sometimes you just want something fluffy and fun!  And I will say that it was an interesting exercise to read this and then to review it from the perspective of someone who is this book’s target reading audience and put my own biases aside… this book may not be in my wheelhouse, so to speak, but I’m actually quite happy with how the review turned out.  Take a look and let me know what you think!

[P.S. If I were rating this on the site, I'd give it a 2 out of 5, simply because it just really isn't my kind of book, and all things considered, fluff may be fluff, but I'm still taking the writing and the plot into account when I'm evaluating a pleasure read... See above for this not winning the Pulitzer any time soon. Maybe it deserves something higher if I were grading on a "chick lit curve", but honestly I don't read enough of that genre to place this accurately on that curve, so we'll stick with my rating, which I bestow regardless of genre.]

Oh, and since we’re all disclaimer-y these days, I was given the book for free.

I first read a review of this book a few months ago on Write Meg! and left a comment saying it sounded like a fun read, and one I’d consider taking a peek at myself in the future.  Enter, Nicole, publicist extraordinaire who then contacted me asking if I would like a free copy of Only Milo to review on our site.  I said yes (thanks, Nicole!), and here we are!

November has been an abysmal month for me in terms of reading.  We’ve been really busy with traveling and work, and that certainly hasn’t helped me with turning the pages, but moreover I think I’ve just kind of been on reading burn out.  It’s a terrible thing when it happens, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that voracious reader that I am, there are still going to be times when my reading ebbs and I just need to take a break from books.  It’s never a divorce, mind you, just a temporary separation while I recuperate and reenergize before diving back into the endless ocean of books.

So after taking THREE WEEKS to read a single book (Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, if you must know, and no, it didn’t take that long because I wasn’t enjoying it, but rather the aforementioned reading slump is squarely to blame, and yes, I did really like it a good deal, but unfortunately that’s all I can say for now and you’ll have to wait for the Jan issue of BookPage to hear more of my thoughts on the matter, but basically if you are already a longstanding fan of Fforde then it pretty much follows that you will like this one too…), I decided it was time to turn my attention to something that would be a quick and easy read.

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Steph’s Take (That’s right, you get a double-header, folks!  Also, sorry this is a long one; I had a lot of feelings…):

When it comes to publicizing books, you need only say one of two names in order for me to be guaranteed to want to read your book.  The first is Jane Austen.  This is how I came to buy such books as No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym (who has been called the Jane Austen of her day), Beginner’s Greek by James Collins (the book evoked a sense of Jane Austen), The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (self-explanatory… I hope), and Jane and the Upleasantness at Scargrave Manor: Being the First Jane Austen Mystery (also self-explanatory, but perhaps less easy to justify).  The other name?  Harry Potter.  That is how I came to purchase Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (which if it were not for Tony, would still be classified as “unread”), and more recently, to borrow The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

I read the first two chapters of the book, before showing it to Tony.  He said that it seemed like a book he would probably enjoy reading, so he read the first two chapters, and then we decided to read it aloud to one another so that we could experience it together.  It was a fun experience to share Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book together on the way back from our honeymoon, so we thought it might be fun to do it again.

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A few years back, my real-life book club selected Atonement by Ian McEwan for our monthly read. I borrowed the book from the public library (in large print, because all the tiny print versions were checked out with massive queues) and got to reading. And it was agony! Some people love Ian McEwan’s style, but that first part of the novel (which I fondly refer to as “before dinner”) is so arduous and horrifically slow. A friend of mine had already read the book and she said that once I could make it to dinner (and beyond) things would pick up so I really should stick with it. So I did, and true to her word, the book did pick up and many shocking things happened, culminating in the ultimate shock ending. While my initial experience with the book was not so good, I did come to appreciate the book, to the extent that I did eventually buy myself a copy of it. The more I thought about it, the more I came to like it (I especially like Part Two, and I’m not really one for war writing). Based on that experience, I figured it might be worthwhile to check out some of McEwan’s other work, so when I saw a decently priced copy of Amsterdam at McKay’s I bought it.
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This is a stupid movie. I mean, there is a lot of exploding, shooting, robots and shooting robots, which is awesome, but from a strictly science fiction perspective (or real-person perspective) this is a stupid movie. I mean stupid lazy, not just moronic. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect anything more, but the more I thought about this movie afterwards, the more lazy and simplistic it seemed.

I saw TS while I was in San Diego with the VP of my company. We were drinking a beer at the Yard House, which had good beer (but makes the claim that they have the word’s largest selection of on-tap beer, erroneously, as I’m quite sure the Flying Saucer in Nashville has a good deal more), when we decided to go see the movie. Naturally, this is a movie that our significant others did not want to see, and we both agreed that this was also a movie that required at least a modest buzz to be enjoyable.

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Almost at the halfway point through the year, when I look back at my reading log for 2009 thus far, I can see that I’ve definitely been delving more into the mystery genre than I have in years past.  Sometimes I worry that my reading is becoming too firmly ensconced in the detective fiction realm, but then again, I think we all have our own little reading jags that we go on, and sometimes you just need to binge for a while to get it out of your system.  Another side effect of said binging is that you start to get a tad more discerning, with certain writers rising to the top and others not so much.  It’s kind of like when I first started to drink wine – to my unrefined palate, all wines tasted alike (namely, like “wine”), but after 7 years of drinking the stuff (in moderation, mind you!  Most of the time…), I finally have some definite preferences.  Similarly, every book I read helps me hone my concept of who I am as a reader, and each mystery novel I read also gives me a more specific knowledge regarding that genre.

On the surface, Publish & Perish is a mystery novel I should have liked.  Dr. Ben Reese is on sabbatical at Oxford when he is awoken by a call at 2 in the morning from his good friend and colleague Richard West.  He says he has uncovered an injustice that has long been hidden, and only the two of them can bring the culprit to justice.  However, before Richard can go into further detail, the call is cut short and when Ben next hears from Richard, it is actually in the form of a telegram telling him that Richard died of a heart attack that night.  Ben flies home to attend the funeral, and whilst there begins to poke around… although there’s no direct evidence that a crime was committed, something doesn’t sit right with Ben and he soon finds himself investigating the murder of his friend.
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The hardest books (or novellas, as the case may be) to write about are the ones that I feel completely apathetic towards.  There’s nothing ostensibly wrong about them that I can nitpick to high heaven, but there’s also nothing glimmering and wonderful to get me all worked up about, so I wind up simply feeling like all I want to write about them is one word: Meh.  That’s how I feel about The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.  Unfortunately, “meh” doesn’t really make for an interesting entry, so I will try my darndest to say something about this wholly unremarkable slip of a book.

The story revolves around a mute Jewish boy who flees to England to escape persecution in Germany.  His only companion is an African parrot named Bruno, who trills out a mysterious stream of numbers every so often.  Many people are pretty interested in Bruno and what these enigmatic numbers might be the key to, so to make a short story even shorter, one day a guest staying with the family harboring the mute Jewish boy is found clubbed to death and Bruno is nowhere to be found.  Although the murder holds little enticement for him, an aged detective with a penchant for tweed and beekeeping decides he will take up the case of locating Bruno and returning him to his young master.
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What happened to us? I know that the prince and I have had our ups and downs over the years, but I still believed. He wasn’t good about returning calls and was always late for everything and what do yellow roses mean, anyway? But this, blatantly phoned-in, latest effort has me thinking that not even counseling can save us.

Ahem. I recently finished playing the latest installment of the Prince of Persia franchise, and since this game was released more than three months ago I’ll dispense with any pretense about this being a timely review or anything like that. Instead, I’ll create some talking points and assume that anyone who is interested in this game has already played it. I’ll also show my cards early in the game: I think that Prince of Persia 2: Warrior Within is one of the best games ever made. Ever. This latest installment continued what I consider a downward spiral of what could have been an excellent, potentially unmatched, franchise.

First, the good. Then the bad. Then the why.

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It should come as no surprise that Tony & I are huge dog people (in that we love dogs, not that we are part dog.  See this Demetri Martin clip for clarification.).  Because of this love, we tend to watch a lot of movies that feature dogs, and coo along adoringly when those adorable little canine scamps turn up onscreen.  Through this movie-watching exercise, I’ve come to believe that movie makers exploit our love of dogs, namely by making some truly horrendous films that ostensibly revolve around dogs or the love of same.  I mean, for every My Dog Skip, you have a Must Love Dogs, or a Beverley Hills Chihuahua, or even a, you guessed it, Year of the Dog.  [For the record, Tony & I have not seen Beverley Hills Chihuahua, nor do we have any plans to do so]  These are some bad movies, people, so be forewarned and avoid them if you either: a) love dogs; b) love movies; or c) love yourself.

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Ah Netflix, allower of guilt-free movie watching. I know in my heart that there is no way I would ever have seen this movie if it wasn’t for “free.” As it is, this little gem showed up in our mailbox the other night and both Steph and  I knew it was going to be delightful.

The premise is this: unlikeable guy who has no direction in life and a bitchy girlfriend who has made a cuckold of him with his best friend gets caught up in a ploy run by an association of professional assassins formerly known as “The Weavers” (lame) but who now go by the much more kick-ass “The Fraternity” even though a woman is one of their top guns. So anyway, he has some sort of poorly conceived adrenaline-related time slowing ability and they need him to kill some people. Enough said.

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