A blight on the ineffable beauty of the “Tube” meme…

The burnished conference table was as soulless and unyielding as the mood of the eight Imperial Senators and officers ranged around it. Imperial troopers stood guard at the entrance to the chamber, which was sparse and coldly lit from lights in the table and walls. One of the youngest of the eight was declaiming. He exhibited the attitude of one who had climbed far and fast by methods best not examined too closely. General Tagge did possess a certain twisted genius, but it was only partly that ability which had lifted him to his present exalted position. Other noisome talents had proven equally efficacious.

I thought of Atlanta Nights several times while reading it.

I don’t really pay much attention when I’m grabbing books off the paperback rack at the library. I mix it up with non-fiction stuff and more erudite reading from the hardcover shelves. Sometimes I win the book lottery, sometimes I lose.

More power to Ms. Lindsey, she’s a bestselling author, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Right now I’m reading Flash House by Aimee Liu, which is a lot more interesting.

I absolutely detested reading it, and 100-odd pages took me an entire freaking week to get through.

1. He was absolutely in love with his own prose and delights in not only using obscure words that often barely make sense in context, but also makes some of the most awful syntax choices I’ve ever run across - and this includes all the High School papers I proofread. Is probably more concerned with getting a 23 on the MS Word readability checker thing than actually, y’know, communicating his points.

2. This is probably not ENTIRELY his fault, but because he jumps across so many topics, he stays on each topic for all of a paragraph before flitting off somewhere else and then coming back to it four chapters later. There is absolutely no methodology to the way things are organized - he doesn’t necessarily do History-development-present, but rather “have an example from history, this is why it’s NOT politics, let’s jump forward 2000 years now only to go back another 1500 years a few pages later!” … And then at one point in time he spent three chapters waxing poetic about the SAME metaphor regarding freedom. So those are the chapters I did my essay on, because I couldn’t… yeah. no.

Ummm. I also really couldn’t get into “Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures” by Vincent Lam, but it obviously won a huge award so it must have some redeeming features. The first few chapters were good, but I don’t think Mr. Lam is necessarily cut out for writing the ’slice-of-life-of-med-student’. The later chapters reminded me a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, which is NEVER good in a novel.

But yeah, other than that it’s been a good run of reading. If I had more time to read maybe I’d have more to complain about.

(Also, never read Tathea. What starts out as a promising adventure novel with assassination, intrigue, and an awesome female protagonist who actually takes care of herself turns into a blatant and unashamed proselytizing novel, complete with “leading to the holy land” and “reclaiming what was promised to us” and AUGH. … I read it five or six years ago and I still get annoyed thinking about it. I hate it when you mislead people. And I mean, I’ve read all of Left Behind at the behest of a religious friend, and Tathea was so much worse in terms of the “CONVERT NAOH YEAH!” themes, and hat’s saying something. Don’t remember who it’s by, don’t really care.)

Sorry for the length. TLDR etc.