First tag by Dante_Greywolf
Scenario 1: You are in a bookstore, and all of a sudden, dun... dun... dun... ZOMBIES ATTACK! Children are crying, women are screaming, and men are scrambling. A low voice appears out of nowhere: Pick a book you hate and throw it at the zombies. This is the only way to save humankind.
Hmmmmmm *rubs hands together in the juiciness of this*
A Murder for Her Majesty by Beth Hilgartner. This is one of the few books I was assigned in school that I actually hate. While the setting, Elizabethan England, contains reasonable accuracy, the characters flop it as far as culture, mindset, and speech goes. We had just finished another book with VERY authentic Elizabethan-style characters, not so as to be difficult to read, but it actually transported you into another time. This one did NOT.
Furthermore, the book starts out too hard trying to make you pity its main character. I do not want to pity a character yet when I know nothing about who she is and why she got here, and especially not when you're mashing the general idea of "pity her, pity her" in my face. The girl is stupid, and annoying, and stupidly annoying, with her big puppy eyes and the way she wins everybody over, and my land, her temper is vicious!
She has to disguise to be a boy to get into the choir, which is a good way to work in the "oppressed female" stereotype that Alice Tuckfield embraces with a vengeance. As if she weren't cliché enough already.
The villains are so hopelessly stereotyped and character-less, and swear every other sentence. My mother was reading it aloud to us, and she would keep pausing and substituting, "Piggy... piggy... piggy..." and finally voiced her disgust that Sonlight (our program) was even assigning the book.
There is so much else wrong with that book, but to list all its plot holes would take too long and spoil important parts... not that it's worth letting you read anyway.
Scenario 2: You finally did what I've been postponing for weeks. You got a haircut. You barely left the hair salon when oh-no, it starts to rain. You have to commit an unforgiving sin and use a book to save your hair. And it must be a sequel.
*touches hair protectively* I can almost sit on my hair now. Actually, I can if I lean back just a wee bit as I sit, which I try not to do now XD XD
Hate me, everybody, but I'm going to use The Brotherband Chronicles: Scorpion Mountain. John Flanagan's writing is not suited to that series in my opinion. The first three were tolerable, but what he writes well is action-y humourous stuff, and even the action in that is reaaaallly dry. I almost get the impression of the old writers who got paid by the word, because that's what it feels like to read: he's overwriting. Plus, the characters are differentiable, but they all have this basic "Skandian" rough-and-tough vibe that I get tired of. He tries too hard to make them all Skandian and not hard enough to make them human.
Scenario 3: Your classic literature teacher is lecturing the class on how to save babies, and puppies, and kittens (and foxes too -- obviously) But today you can't stand him anymore and throw one of his beloved classics at his head. Which one is it?
Does The Great Gatsby count? I never understood why there was such an adoring fuss kicked up over this book. Why it is held up as a paradigm of American literature. I read it when I was fifteen for school and it left me blank. Blank, bored, disgusted, untouched. I mean, what is the whole point of the book? It's something like Romeo and Juliet with a lot more lax morals added into the mix. Not to mention I never found a single character pleasant or interesting, least of all the narrator, and the writing, while I withhold judgment because of the time elapsed, failed completely to draw me in. (And I read LotR when I was 11 and loved it, adored Pride and Prejudice at 13...)
Scenario 4: Global Warming caused a new Ice Age. Very suddenly. Basically, everybody froze to death except you and a few other people who hid in the library. To keep warm, you have to burn a book that will give everlasting heat.
Does this mean it needs to have fire in it? Or that it needs to be an enormous book? If the former, I'll say Eragon, at least the last three books. Huh, that would fit the second category too. XD Although I almost hate to chuck them for sentimental reasons, since they've inspired so many literary rants from me...
Right. Tagging
And any other interested parties. Personally, I thought this was a very interesting tag.
And.... I was also snared for a thirteen facts tag, twice, by nightwraith17 and tarsrife. Here goes.
1) I just got my hair trimmed so it's no longer quite as long as stated above in the previous tag.
2) I have a tea-cup, a toy nutcracker, a notebook containing plot info and excerpts for The Claw, a hairband, scissors, my brush, my Sunday School material, my sister's Bible, and two books on the desk at which I'm writing.
3) That's probably too many items.
4) I just cleared some of them off and also unearthed a microfiber cloth for cleaning glasses.
5) I used to have a book of poetry on here which I unpublished.
6) I've lived in four states.
7) When I was little I used to carry my friend piggy-back around, basically to show off because she was three years older than me. We were both skinny though. We still are. Well, slender is a nicer way of putting it. XD
8) I'm graduating in spring and I'm actually starting to get excited because my mom is talking about a graduation party. (For about four years I lived under the assumption that I was not going to have a graduation party because of some chance remark my father made)
9) My father is the pastor of an Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We've served in it for almost eleven years now. Funny story: One time I was with our little choir at a nursing home, and after singing there we talked with the folks and one lady asked about our church. Then she was like, "Oh yeah, you're those renegade Presbyterians."
Me, mutters in aside to my friend: "Orthodox."
10) My mother paints and sells her art online. As if mothering eight kids weren't enough. XD
11) I'm planning to go to a writers' conference sometime this year. Any suggestions?
12) I wish I were writing right now.
13) I'm done with the tag!
Not tagging anybody for this one because these get old really fast.
*runs away to write*
YOU ARE READING
Verity's Book
RandomRandom book. You know those random books people have? Tags. Art. Announcements. Blog-ish sort of things. Random facts about their characters. Tags. Tags. More tags. Yeah... that's pretty much what this is. I know, I know, you want to read it. They a...
