Posts Tagged ‘Book Reviews’

The Plaid Pladd Blog: A New Lease On Life

It’s sad but true: I do not have the adventures I once did. More to the point, I don’t have the time to do semi-strange things and then blow them entirely out of proportion until Josh Langsfeld is saving me from being knifed on a Houston city bus, etc. Since I’m actually working at a public library this summer, I thought I would have plenty of ridiculous stories to tell about crazy people who come in to hide amongst the stacks and loudly shout Star Wars quotes at random intervals (Seminole Community Library, Summer ’06) or the secret soup of library drama boiling in the backroom and behind every desk (Seminole Community Library, AT ALL TIMES). Unfortunately, the library I’m working at appears to be dangerously and unprecedentedly normal. The weirdest story I have is that Wednesday a woman asked me for nail clippers and then seemed sad that the library didn’t have those. Seriously, I can’t compete with The Road Trip with this.

In place of adventures, here is what I do with my time, ordered roughly in how much time I spend on it:

1. Complaining about grad school’s total inadequacy
2. Working at the public library
3. Working on my summer course in management
4. Reading
5. Cooking

Complaining gets top billing because I can pretty much do it while simultaneously doing any of those other things, plus while doing almost anything else (I’m a Tenth Level Whiny Complainer). Working at the public library is awesome, but has the aforementioned Lack of Crazy problems. My summer course’s goal seems to be to mention libraries as little as possible and to have as little to do with my actual life and job goals as it can, thus providing excellent fodder for #1, but not much help in the Cool Things To Blog About arena. That leaves reading (I work at a library) and cooking, two things which I usually don’t blog about because I see them as not of interest to my legions of fans, with a few exceptions. This is going to change.

Twilight 4: A Review That Almost Cost Me My Life

The name of this book is actually Breaking Dawn but you wouldn’t know what I was talking about if I used it. See, I got this book on Monday from the library. I ignored the librarian’s judging, judging eyes because I was too busy thinking “Hurrah! Now I will read it today, write a blog post about it tomorrow, and that will take care of my Tuesday obligations!” Little did I know that this would be a novel so excruciating that I would need to take frequent breaks to soothe my battered psyche into submission and bang my head against a wall. In the end, I only very nearly escaped being strangled by my own good taste by turning on episodes of Black Adder the Third in the background during the last 200 pages.

I had a feeling this one would be different because I was at the library the morning after it came out, when the five teen girl movie volunteers staggered in around noon after staying up all night waiting at the book store. “Well?” I asked them. “How is it?” Since they’d been talking about nothing else for the past two months it wasn’t hard for them to know what I was talking about. I was shocked when they all shouted “HORRIBLE!” at once and one of them added “It’s like Stephanie Meyer didn’t even write it.” After valiantly reading the other three books so that you don’t have to, I started wondering about this condemnation. Could it be that Stephanie Meyer, in the fourth book of her wildly popular and horribly written teen girl series, has FINALLY learned how to write, letting down her vapid fans everywhere?

The answer, I’m sad to tell you, is NO. For the love of all that is at least properly punctuated, NO. So, proceed IF YOU DARE.
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Moving

Today as we were driving to the grocery store (Harris Teeter–I feel like I should be wearing a waistcoat and ordering mint juleps instead of buying apple juice and crispix) my Mom said, “The first thing I did this morning was check your blog. There was nothing…” in this disappointed voice, as if she thought I had somehow managed to update my blog while simultaneously moving furniture and unpacking boxes with her over the past few days. Luckily, our apartment now has the Internet! Unluckily, the wireless router is still MIA so the only place to get it is in the corner of the one room that has no furniture. So, that’s where I am, skillfully avoiding figuring out how to hang up my bike in a closet with the use of a stud finder, which, believe me, is not what it sounds like.

Here are the deets of the past few days. Sorry I don’t have pictures yet:
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Twilight for People Who Don’t Want to Read Twilight

Last summer at the library everyone was ALL ABOUT Twilight. Every teen girl in Seminole would come in every week to ask if Twilight was in yet, since our six copies had a 300 strong waiting list. Naturally, I got a little curious, but had to wait until the craze died down slightly (or until I was in one place for longer than three months–you aren’t even going to hit the 100s on the waiting list in three months) before investigating. Luckily the teen girls are mostly sated, and it’s now mostly third graders and the morbidly curious continuing the obsession. So if you too are morbidly curious, you have four options:

1. Wait six months on the waiting list at the library, enjoy the indignity when it finally comes in and the librarian has to pull Twilight from behind the desk and check it out for you, know that she is SO JUDGING YOU right now
2. Ask a teen girl about it, listen to two hours of “OH MY GOD EDWARD SO HOT!”, commit suicide
3. Actually pay money for it, hate yourself forever
4. Listen to my review, since I have successfully completed #1 on this list with my librarian-fu for the first three books. It is as follows:
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