Press Boners by Earle Tempel
Press Boners is a short, small book that contains various typos, miss-sayings, poorly written sentences, and out right sarcastic headlines and article quotes from newspapers all across the country. It was a book foisted off on me by my father-in-law when he was going through his books and decided to get rid of several in a move.
The positives of the book is that it was at times laugh out loud funny, the sly jabs at men, women, and various situations were amusing to read as well as the intentional and unintentional humor found in them. It was also amusing to find the Lancaster New Era quoted a handful of times, my old hometown newspaper.
The cons far outweighed them though. This book is not organized in any way - not by subject, type of mistake, or region. This led to 174 pages of headlines and quotes with absolutely no break. It made it good bathroom reading at first but eventually even that got boring. Especially when I came across yet another sexist remark hidden in bad english, or yet another jab at someone's husband for some reason whether accidental or intentional.
This book was also published in the 1960's, hence the reason that the title is so obviously dated (it wouldn't have passed the smell test with a bunch of pre-teen boys nowadays, they would have giggled themselves silly). Also the sexist and sometimes racist remarks got to be a bit much after a while. I'm willing to take a jab or two at my sex, as some women out there live up to the misogynist's stereotype and I can even find that funny, but over and over for pages and pages of unsorted, sometimes not all that funny, headlines? Bleh.
Speaking of not all that funny, I would say that probably only one or two headlines per page should have gone to print. The rest, while mildly amusing, normally didn't even have me cracking a smile.
Now a days this kind of content would be better suited to a website. People could submit them, rate them, tag them, comment on them, sort them to view by subject, location, etc and it could lead to an enjoyable 10 minutes of someone's life. But, as a book it just didn't really work out at all. Perfect for the 1960's where there would be no other way for this information to get out, but for modern day there are better ways to present this information.
My second one star, but my first book that I actually no longer want in my collection. Perhaps I'll BookCross it, it might make good train reading for someone someday for the 10-20 minutes during which the book is actually interesting enough to bear reading.
Rated
by Bitsy at 08:07 AM
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Absolutely Amazing Five-Minute Mysteries by Ken Weber
The byline of this novel is "40 New Cases of Murder and Mayhem for You to Solve", which is precisely what this novel contains. My husband and I decided we wanted MOAR mystery after reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes so we decided to read Absolutely Amazing Five-Minute Mysteries together, a book that we had picked up at a brown bag book sale at a local elementary school a long time ago.
The mysteries turned out to be tough. You read the beginning of the mystery and then had to guess the end yourself. To check to see if you were right you had to flip to the back of the book to read the solution, a la the Clue books of my childhood. We got to be pretty good towards the middle and end of the novel at really reading the short stories and trying to pick up on all of the clues. There were a few things working against us though.
The first was that the book was written in 2002, so there were a few things that have changed in those years that made a mystery's clues obsolete. This was particularly true of the ones that involved computers. Also, as far as the computer based ones went, we ended up thinking WAY TOO HARD about the clues and it was always something obvious and safe that someone totally computer illiterate would have been able to get. Which was probably the safest way to go back then. Though, again, technology has changed and advanced since then and in some ways, even for 2002, there were things that just weren't taken into consideration because the technology wasn't main stream enough for the audience (though it would have been perfect for the crooks involved).
There was an excellent cross section of mysteries involved, some dating from the Victorian period on up to our techy modern day, some involving detectives, some insurance officers, some police, some the military. There is something for everyone in this short novel, but it's definitely a brain stretcher that should be done with friends. It is particularly fun to read one and figure it out in advance and then sit back and be smug while you watch someone else go through the same leaps (and missteps) in logic that you did to solve it.
Rated three stars because it's not as much fun to read and figure it out on your own, and because of the dated references that the writer couldn't help but that did make one or two of the mysteries impossible to solve.
Rated
by Bitsy at 06:08 PM
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Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. is a book that contains several of MLK's key sermons printed and bound all in one place. It was a free gift that I received at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of 2002. Yes, I am only now getting around to reading it. This is one book that I should not have put off reading.
I am not normally a very religious person. There is a lot about religion that I find disgusting, hypocritical and at times down right hateful towards various people based on things as flimsy as gender, color, sexual orientation and lifestyle choice. I say flimsy because at the same time religion (any religion) tends to say that we are all equal before God and that it is our soul that He values above everything else. This book gave me new faith.
Most of the sermons - such as A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart, On Being a Good Neighbor, Love in Action, and Loving Your Enemies - talk about that exact problem with religion and with humanity. MLK's urgings to love everyone regardless of personal differences and to stand up for what you believe in regardless of what other people think about it were very inspiring and moving. These sermons gave me hope, realizing that people (religious people) once thought like this and believed in it very strongly. They also helped strike home how very little of this type of rhetoric is heard anymore in the religious community.
I was reading this book at the same time that I was reading M*A*S*H, so I was reading two books that talked about events in the 1950's. The time trip was very interesting, and to hear their takes on communism, women's rights, minority rights, etc was intriguing and was like looking through a window back in time.
The eerie part of this book would have to be the sermons where MLK talks about his own death. Both the possibility of it's occurrence and his fears about it and how that all related to his faith and trust in God. In the end he trusted to God and if God decided it was his time to go that he was ready to accept it. Very brave and strong words considering the world he lived in, and they definitely shed a new light on his assassination. His strength to love in spite of the odds he faced and his ultimate fate was probably the most profoundly powerful aspect of the book.
A must-read for Christians everywhere.
Rated
by Bitsy at 04:59 PM
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Anthem by Ayn Rand
I tried my best, but there was so much of this book that I had problems with, and it was such a short book with so little plot it was very hard not to spoil it, so... spoiler ahoy in this review!
Anthem is a novel about a man named Equality 7-2521. Much in the style of other horrific Utopian novels he is one of many is a futuristic society, where everything is utterly controlled from education, to vocation, to sex, to death and (like Brave New World, 1984 and The Giver) the main character is seeking to throw off this yoke and go back to how things were before, though he hasn't realized it yet.
For the first ten chapters he speaks in the style of Gollum, of Lord of the Rings. When he speaks of himself he says "we" and "us" for the collective is what is important, while individualism in any form breaks divine law. Everything is done for the betterment of all, for the will of many is greater than the will of the individual. The many's needs are greater as well and therefore the individual must sacrifice himself for the many.
Equality 7-2521 is given a position as street sweeper and in his work finds two things that are his undoing: a beautiful woman, and an old underground sewer left over from the times before. He sneaks off there and writes his own private thoughts and does his own private research. But, the scientific discoveries he make are nothing next to the truth that he uncovers there.
Anthem is supposed to be a novel exemplifying Ayn Rand's philosophy about individualism and collectivism and the pros and cons thereof. I have to say some of what she believes I don't really agree with and actually reading the foreword (a fault of mine) kinda prejudiced me against her before I even got to the story.
In the foreword she says that anyone that does not acknowledge (as she does) the future that we are inevitably headed down are neither blind nor ignorant but rather weak and are maliciously choosing for us to face and experience such a future as she outlines in the book. If that is the case why write this book at all? Isn't this book meant to educate people on the matter? If they are already set in their ways and are already weak and spiteful how is a story further educating them on a manner that you say they are already fully aware of going to change anything at all? Furthermore, how can anyone support individualism and yet at the same time say, "but you have to agree with me and what I say, or else the betterment of mankind will suffer"? Isn't that exactly the premise of the book that you have written against collectivism? How can you use the ideals of collectivism to fight against it?
And, we haven't even gotten to the book itself yet. Normally I enjoy a well written Utopian novel about the evils of controlling thoughts and ideas and so forth for the betterment of all. I can see the evil in that. And, that includes the guilt tripping in your foreword, Miss Rand. But, this book just seemed a bit too much. Equality, as I'll call him for short, was throughout an incredibly self centered and proud character. I guess that goes along with the individualism theme but he seems to go over the top with it. There were several scenes where his pride, arrogance and blind self-centeredness got him into a great deal of trouble that a bit of logic and thinking things through might have kept him out of. Then again he was pretty naive about the world, and had to undergo a huge paradigm shift throughout the novel. This only made his pompousness at times all the more aggravating. And, the final line of the novel was just too much. At a moment when I should be in awe of philosophical wonder I found myself laughing at all the hyperbole and sheer arrogance of it.
Also, for a novel celebrating the individuality of man kind and how man must do things for himself and it be his choice alone, I thought it was very annoying when he treated "his woman" (Liberty 5-3000) as a being that had no choice. He chose where they would go and where they would stay, he chose her name and he chose what they were to do with the rest of their time on earth. She just kind of sat back and looked pretty, like so much window dressing.
Finally, the blurb in the first pages contained a huge spoiler in my edition of the book. Luckily I didn't read it until I was half way through and had already suspected what was spoiled, but still. Also, I was very surprised that the beginning of this novel was so like 1984. Especially since 1984 came out eleven years after this novel did. Yikes.
Anyway, I didn't enjoy this book at all just because it was all so unbelievable. Yes, I agree that socialism et al is bad (though perhaps not for the reasons outlined in the book, at least not entirely). I agree that people should have the freedom to choose whether to help their fellow man or not. But, using this novel as an argument for either of those two beliefs is laughable. My first one star.
Rated
by Bitsy at 08:17 AM
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M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker
I loved watching M*A*S*H reruns growing up, so when I found this book at a brown bag book sale I just had to pick it up. M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker is the book that the TV series was based off of. When my husband read the book he thought it was hilarious and highly recommended it. I dove in with high expectations that unfortunately ended up being too high.
The characters come across as far more serious in the novel. Their attempts at banter and fun and games came across as what they really were, mere attempts at sanity in the insanely harsh conditions they faced serving in Korea. As a whole, the novel seemed to have a much different tenor then the light hearted TV series does.
The other thing that was different (or perhaps my memories of the TV show were rose tinted) is there seemed to be a great deal more and much harsher misogyny. I remember the fighting with "Hot Lips" Houlihan, I did not recall anything concerning whore houses, brothels or the taking advantage thereof by married enlisted men and officers.
For the time it was written in the novel was fairly progressive concerning race. Though, I was amused to note that the author, in his rush to make his characters seem cool with the African American in their group by having him complain about people that went out of their way to seem cool with him, succeeded in doing quite the opposite and the meeting came across as very forced. I also was very uncomfortable with the Duke constantly referring to him as "the nigra" at the beginning of that chapter.
The TV show is probably one of the only medical series I can stomach because I have no tolerance for blood, gore or long drawn out surgeries with pictures of what is actually going on. I appreciate the fact that Hawk Eye and Trapper John were surgeons and that everything they did seemed to be done to a sheet and that was all I wanted to know. It was very hard for me to read the scenes in the novel that went in depth with what was going on behind those sheets. To the novel's credit my husband, who is a big fan of series like ER and Grey's Anatomy, had no such problems and, when I brought it up with him, he hadn't even remembered that such scenes were in the book at all.
My final complaint is, the book was just really hard to get into. I had to force myself to read each chapter throughout and only just finished it after five days. Which is ridiculous for me and a mere 200 some page novel. It did give me a chance to catch up on my other reviews though. All in all, because of all my complaints (in a nutshell, my squeamishness on various subjects) I have to give this novel a low two stars. If you can get past all of those things and still enjoy a novel about the beloved characters of M*A*S*H then by all means read it. If not, give this one a pass and go and rent the DVDs of the TV show off of Netflix instead.
Rated
by Bitsy at 06:35 AM
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A. C. Doyle
The first time I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes would have been in the summer between fifth and sixth grade. My parents had gotten me a boxed set of classics and this particular one was my favorite. I had always loved mysteries whether in the form of Clue or The Boxcar Children and these seemed so much more polished, not to mention were much harder to guess out how it was going to end to my eleven year old mind. I read them again in the seventh grade when I had to take a bus to school for the first time and the novel acted like the proverbial security blanket as I sat and read it every morning in the increasing cold temperatures in the strange environment.
Some time before I moved out I gave away 90% of my book collection (some 100+ books) so that when I left home it was only with a mere handful of ten or twelve. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was one of the books to go. I have since thunked my head on my desk many times wishing to have many of those books back. My parents repurchased The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for me in far more adult binding then the lovingly tattered paperback I had before and I sat and re-read these beloved stories to my husband. He tended to fall asleep during them, but I quite enjoyed the trip down memory lane.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a series of short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle to be published in serial format in a magazine called The Strand. They are each complete unto themself, so if you missed one you could still go out and get the next one without much of a bother. The character Sherlock Holmes became much beloved in England over this and people even wrote into the magazine asking if he was a real man (to which the editor gave a suitably vague response). Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries through logic and observation, and oftentimes just had to hear about a case to piece together what happened, he is famous for his large magnifying glass, his tall lanky figure, and of course his pipe. His is still the figure people think of when they think of a detective even today.
The plots are sometimes weak, but often intricate and they leave you guessing until the final plot twist at the end as to who did what and how. Occasionally you can guess early just what is going on but you still want to read on because you find you care about what happens to Holmes and Watson and whatever other innocents become involved in the case and you need to see what happens next! If you love mysteries you need to give this classic an honest try. It's highly readable, and well worth a go. You won't be disappointed.
Rated by Bitsy at 11:27 AM
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When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
Another hilarious collection of essays by David Sedaris. This was another book that I read aloud to my husband. Again, a lot of this book had to be read in private though, and not around relatives. It's definitely adult reading and adult language!
The portraits he paints of every day people doing things that are absolutely crazy in a way that makes them seem mundane is his calling card and he does this to excellent effect in this new novel. Whether it's the woman that lives alone in an apartment building that acts like she runs the place (and really does), the crazy people he hitchhikes with in the early 70's, his parent's take on art, or the people he meets in his attempt to quit smoking in japan, it's all written with a humorous edge and a sarcastic wit that makes even the most outcast and odd palatable.
There were several parts where he seemed to go over the edge beyond funny into really being almost sad, pathetic, or even hateful. But, the rest of the book is so well written and his humor continues to be so endearing that you can't help forgiving it as you continue on.
When You Are Engulfed In Flames is an excellent, strange, but very well written series of comedic looks into David Sedaris' life and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to read some fun short true stories about NPR's funniest voice in comedy.
Rated by Bitsy at 12:12 PM
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