"Dragon Keeper"

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

I tried with this book, I really did. This is another free Kindle e-book, a genre which I have not exactly enjoyed in the past. In this case, I tried to make it 50 pages (this is not easy to measure with the Kindle's "location" system), and after three and a half chapters I just couldn't stand it anymore. Reading this book is like wading through hip-deep mud: It's slow, heavy, turgid, and your mind constantly wanders to something more interesting. The book opens badly, starting with a bunch of dragons cocooning themselves, but they're all weak and dazed and half of them die, and it's so ham-handedly GUYS THIS IS SAD that it becomes silly; I couldn't help but imagine these dragons drunkenly bumbling around to comical music.
Then we switch to focus on a deformed harpy girl and her dad, and nothing happens, and while reading this part I was missing the dragons stumbling around. After a bunch of pages of nothing of interest happening we switch to focus on Alise, our mary sue who LOVES DRAGONS GUYS, and while reading this I was somehow missing the earlier parts about nothing happening to a deformed harpy girl. At this point (I was reading the book in the bathroom) I would have rather just listened to the various gross sounds coming from the next stall than continue reading this book, which I guess is very mean to say, but there you have it.

Grade: F

"Dead Witch Walking"

Dead Witch Walking: The Hollows, Book 1 (Kim Harrison)

Ladies and gentlemen, it's finally happened. Brace yourself - a free Kindle book that didn't make me want to die! Yes! A free e-book that wasn't about God giving court reporters magical psychic powers or Evil Muslim Terrorists meeting at Shoney's to plan throwing grenades into churches or small towns putting up christmas trees right in the road and being surprised when cars hit them! The curse has finally been broken, which is kind of funny since the book is all about an alternate Earth where vampires, werewolves, pixies, witches, etc. live side by side with humans. And it's good! I mean, it's not great literature, but it's clever and brisk and at one point the main charecter turns herself into a mink and the bad guy captures her and puts her into a rat-fighting league to try and bump her off without leaving any evidence behind. I mean, I can pick some nits - the main charecter starts by leaving her job at the supernatural equivilant of the FBI, which reacts by putting out a hit on her, which everyone seems to think is normal and makes sense, but which I myself never understood. But really, I'd be happy with this book even if I'd paid for it, and at the price of free, I'm not gonna complain. Heck, I may even pick up some of the other books in the series, no doubt all part of the author's evil plan in offering the first one for free.

Grade: B+

"By Reason of Insanity"

By Reason of Insanity (Randy Singer)

Boy, this is tough. This is another free Kindle book, and this one I actually finished, although I kind of wish I hadn't.

Let's start with two minor issues: One, our dashing hero is kind of a douchebag (he sees the female lead and wants to help her because she's "an attractive woman at the mercy of the system" - if you're a man or he doesn't find you attractive, well, fuck off). Also, he has dumb facial hair.
Two, there's several boring pages where our author is playing high stakes poker, which is even more boring to read about than I assume it is fun to actually play.

With that out of the way, here's the real big roblem with this book: It's fucking dumb. The writing itself is OK, but the plotline itself is stupid in a I-can't-believe-I-just-read-that kind of moronic. About halfway through the book, a professional, court-expert psychologist is brought in to examine a person under suspicion of being a serial killer who is reporting hearing voices and having visions. This person is suspected of possibly having DID, commonly known as multiple personality disorder. Try and guess what this psychologist does.

1.) Ask for a series of interviews to attempt to diagnose this person.
2.) Guess that these visions are real and supernatural, because Belshazzar had a vision before Babylon was sacked by the Persians in the Old Testament.

Spoiler alert: It's number two. I think you can guess what the problem with this book is now. As it turns out, the female lead is psychic and is having visions from God. Really. Everything else in the book is totally straight and scientific - except that at the age of 25, this reporter suddenly develops psychic powers that give her visions. This opens a whole can of worms (Why does this just happen now? Is Jesus giving her these visions? If so, why? If he can give her these visions, why doesn't he just stop what he's sending her the vision about?) that the author never examines, because, ummmm, (indistinct mumbling). It's bad. No, not even bad; It's fucking terrible. It's kind of sad, too, the author really isn't a bad writer, it's just the plot with these beyond moronic super powers is a waste of time for everyone involved; You might as well as have it all be a dream for how plausible any of it is. The author is, as I found out after reading this, apparently considered "The Christian John Grisham", but a more accurate title might be "The Shitty John Grisham Who Writes Bad Books".
Also, the icing on the cake - the female lead, who's in jail for 70% of the book, has one of those "Hi, nice to meet you, now we're in love" romances with her lawyer, the dumb-bearded douchebag up above. Blech.

Grade: F-

"Cell 2455, Death Row"

Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man's Own Story (Caryl Chessman & Joseph Longstreth)

Here's another acclaimed book (almost no negative Amazon reviews) I didn't like. In fact, I hated this book. The very beginning, where the author is actually talking about Death Row, is interesting if a bit overwrought, but then we switch away from this and into the author's life story. Here the book commits the cardinal sin of wasting the reader's time. A common problem I have with biographies is that I don't care what so and so was doing as a kid; It's what she did as an adult, that she's, you know, famous for that I'm interested in, not reading about her growing up in Bumfuck Nebraska or whatever. This book covers the boring part of the author's life not only in incredibly boring and pointless detail, but also with flat out bad writing. Here's a sample:

And why? He didn't, he couldn't fool himself any longer. He didn't try. He knew why. [The author is rhymin' crazy! - Ed] But not rationally. Emotionally. Arbitrarily. Thatwas how he knew. And knowing required no proof.
It was then that Hate and Rebellion took off their masks and introduced themselves. They had been hiding within Whit for a long time, playing a waiting game - for sickness, frustration, resentment, hostility, fear, confusion to build into an intolerable tension - for anxiety to generate a pressure that could not be withstood. Waiting for the inevitable physical implosion. And then it came, and it was soundless, and did its devastating work.
Hate had showered sparks and the sparks had kindled a fire in the midst of the devastation; Whit vowed he would fan and feed that fire until it became a roaring infero.
I'll get even! (It didn't matter against whom or what.)

Frankly, either the author giving us page after page of his going through junior high or the terrible writing alone would be enough, but taken together I just put this book down after slogging through as much of it as I could stand. Maybe it gets more interesting once the author actually begins his life of crime, but I won't be sticking around to find out.

Grade: D-

"The Christmas Lamp"

The Christmas Lamp: A Novella (Lori Copeland)

You're probably already familiar with the idea, if not the formal definition, of the idiot plot - the plot that would be solved in five minutes if everyone wasn't a dumbass. I admit that I have real problems with these. You can ask K. Ham - I'll often end up yelling angry advice and orders at the TV ("Just shoot him!!!"). Unfortuenatly, The Christmas Lamp has one of the worst idiot plots I've seen in a while. As the book opens, the town of Nativity has set up a town christmas tree in an intersection. A car intersection, that you drive through, with your car, is where the town christmas tree is. Now wait, I hear you asking, don't people hit the christmas tree in the middle of an intersection with their cars? Yes they do. In fact, that's how the book starts. The male lead, who may as well be named Grinchy Lesson Learner, shows up and, surprise, hits the town christmas tree, which is in the intersection, with his car. Later, he proposes that, if the tree gets hit by another car, they not bother putting it back up. This is supposted to show us how much he hates Christmas, and Jesus, and mom and apple pie. He then gets into a fight with the moronically named "Roni", the book's female lead, about wether or not they should put the tree back up if it gets hit by another car.

At this point I had an idea. How about you move the tree? Maybe - I don't know - cars wouldn't hit the tree if it wasn't in a fucking intersection? However, this never occurs to our happy little band of morons. No, instead there's geninue tears and hurt feelings over not keeping up a tree, in a intersection, where it's hit by cars several times each year.

At this point I have to confess I put the book down. I could already tell what was going to happen - the male lead, who at this point is Evil(TM), and is described as such ("He detested Christmas and all its phony sentiments"), is going to learn that Christmas means putting up a tree on the fucking street where it gets hit by cars all the time, and he'll marry "Roni", even though she's at the age of 29, which makes her an old bag who needs to get married and start popping out kids right this second.

Regrettably, The Christmas Lamp is another in the depressingly quickly growing collection of free Kindle books that are so bad I still feel ripped off.

Grade: F

"The Epcot Explorer's Encyclopedia"

The Epcot Explorer's Encyclopedia: A guide to the flora, fauna, and fun of the world's greatest theme park! (R. A. Pederson)

Not really an encyclopedia - The author, I assume, avowedly avoided appliciable advice to always abstain from alliteration - this is really a history and rundown of Epcot, from the pavilions to the rides. Most of the book - about 80% - is about the front half of Epcot, Futureland (understandable, since the back half, the World Showcase, is mostly un-changing shops). The star attraction is the detailed rundowns of the rides, and as far as I've seen, this is the best place to get information about what the rides used to be like - the written information in this book is much more comprehensive and understandable than shaky YouTube footage, and the behind the scenes information sprinkled in is a nice touch. (It seems like this is a great resource if your husband never went on, say, Horizens, or the original Journey Into Imagination, and you're going crazy attempting to explain it to him.) About the only bad things I can say is that, being what looks like a self-published labor of love, there are a few goofy grammar and spelling errors, and that obviously if you don't give a fuck about Disney you'll be bored out of your skull. You grinch you.

Grade: B

"My Billion Year Contract" ( & new genre introduction)

One genre of books I enjoy is that of people who have escaped the Church of Scientology, a cult designed to drain money and free labor from its victims via a gradual process of brainwashing and cutting off all ties to non-Scientologists. There's a peril to reading these, which is that Scientology uses a huge amount of jargon, to the point where even people who have escaped from the Church and have been living outside for years will pepper a sentence with enough mysterious words and phrases to make it unintelligible. For that reason, this - and future - reviews of such books will contain a Scientology Jargon-O-Meter, a simple way to gauge how readable the book is without keeping a pocket dictionary of what the hell getting RPF'd for sec checking a SP squirrel means. The book will be graded on a 1 to 10 scale, 1 containing no or always well explained jargon, and 10 being a Palin-esque word salad of puzzling acronyms and phrases.
And now our feature presesntation...

My Billion Year Contract: Memoir of a Former Scientologist (Nancy Many)

Nancy Many's story is not dissimilar to may Scientology survivors: As a curious young college student she was sucked in with the organization's sales pitch, not realizing what was happening as she was fleeced of her money and freedom until she found herself working feverishly for pennies hard-selling the organization's products. One of the lowest points actually comes very early on in the book as she is assigned the dreaded RPF, or Rehabilitation Task Force, a kind of hard-labor prison program where she has to sleep in a hastily constructed shed in a parking garage and is only allowed to eat leftovers. This occurs while she is five months pregnant.
Not surprisingly, she decides to get out, or "blow", and escapes not only the RPF but Scientology completely. Imagine my surprise to note that all of this occurs about a third of the way through the book. So what's the rest, you ask? Kind of a confused mess, I hate to say. Nancy escapes actually having to live in the Scientology centers, but she stays affiliated with Scientology, even doing undercover spy work for the OSA (Office of Special Affairs, basically the dirty tricks division). The first third of the book is tightly written and easy to understand, but the last two thirds is kind of a mess; I went from thinking she'd just escaped Scientology entirely to her working as a sales rep and spying for the OSA. Eventually during a "Security check", what sounds like basically going into a small room and having someone yell at you for hours on end, she has a complete mental break. This is harrowingly written and genuinely scary. After this she kind of just rambles for a while until the book ends.
This isn't a bad book, but I feel like the author got more from writing it than you may from reading it, if you get my drift. I don't know if it was really that disjoined and muddled or if it seemed that way because I was reading it on my ipod. Either way, I don't feel like reading the book was a waste of time, but unless you're really interested in the genre you may want to take a pass on this one.

Grade: C
Scientology Jargon-O-Meter reading: 2 (occasional phrases without explanation; Vast majority of terms explained when they first appear)