Top Ten Picks: Best Villains

Top Ten Picks is hosted by Jillian at Random Ramblings. This week, the topic is "Best Villains". (Yeah, I know I should've done this last Tuesday. I'm late. My bad.)

So, without further ado, here are my Top Ten Picks for Best Villains:

10. Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

This character made me grind my teeth and want to throw the book across the room. I don't know if I've every read about a character that was so infuriating. She's definitely not the most evil character out there, but she elicited so much frustration from me that the author must've done something right.

9. Lysistratus from Yarrow by Charles de Lint

It's been a while since I read this book, so I can't remember exactly what this character did that was so bad. I do remember that he was a deliciously nasty villain, though, so I'm including him on the list.

8. The Huntress from The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

It could probably be argued that the Crooked Man was the real villain of this book, but the events that happened in the huntress's cottage stayed with me (and haunted me) far more. She was the stuff of nightmares, and I'll probably never be able to look at centaurs again without being reminded of that passage. *shudder*

7. Laurel from Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones

There's nothing worse than a villain who does their best to keep two people who love each other apart. From a literary standpoint, though, there's probably nothing better, either. I love complications.

6. The Frenchman from The Dust of 100 Dogs by A. S. King

This guy was just foul. Cruel, heartless, and (evidently) unable to learn from his past mistakes. What a dickhead. It's so delicious when characters like this get what's coming to them.

5. El Patron from The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

Although it could be argued that El Patron was simply acting out of self-preservation, he had a disregard for the value of the lives of others that was indeed chilling.

4. Electronic Metals from The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee

This is a corporation, rather than a person. But who says corporations can't be evil? I can't say much more without giving away the ending... but suffice it to say that, if this company were real, I would be boycotting it.

3. Baba Yaga from Enchantment by Orson Scott Card

When we first meet her, she's extracting the eyeballs of a still-living victim simply because she liked their colour. You can't get much more evil than that.

2. The Nothing from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

This is probably a more abstract villain, but it's still a formidable one... especially to anyone who values stories and dreams.

1. The Other Mother from Coraline by Neil Gaiman

When I heard they were making a movie of this book, I knew they'd need to get this character right for it to work. To my surprise, she was done pretty well. The book version still seems way more creepy to me... but I guess giving little kids nightmares would not be a good way to increase movie ticket sales.

Review - The Girl with Glass Feet

The Girl with Glass Feet
by Ali Shaw

Before I completely tear this book to shreds, I'd like to just mention that I love the cover. Unfortunately, that's about all I liked.

Midas meets a girl named Ida, who is turning into glass.

Honestly, I can't come up with a better synopsis than that. This book just made me feel stupid. I didn't "get it". But, to be quite honest, I'm not entirely sure there was anything to "get".

The premise is intriguing and promises a sort of contemporary fantasy story. Unfortunately, it reads more like literary fiction. Bad literary fiction. There are endless descriptions that border on purple prose. Stop describing rocks and snow and get on with it, already. All the description felt like unnecessary padding... and I say unnecessary because the story was meaty enough to stand on its own, had the author done it right. He didn't, though. Instead, we're introduced to a number of mysteries that seem to have nothing to do with each other and which, in the end, are never explained. I don't think I've been this pissed off at a book's ending since I read Breaking Dawn (and that really pissed me off). As far as I'm concerned, it's lazy writing to introduce a bunch of mysteries and then not bother to explain any of them.

As for the characters, I wasn't impressed. They all read alike, and the author's habit of not using speech attributions made for some confusion in numerous places. Midas was not especially likable. Heck, nobody was especially likable. Everyone seemed emotionally stunted and odd, with the exception of Denver, a seven-year-old girl with the demeanour of a 37-year-old psychologist. (Don't even get me started on how her hair changed colour between pages 81 and 82. Editors, wake up!) I have a feeling that Midas was little more than a (rather blatant) self-insert... but even that didn't help make him anything more than a one-dimensional twit. Since the characters all acted alike, down to their mannerisms (it seems that the only way one can show distress is to put one's face in one's hands), when one of them went and did something a little different, it was jarring and seemed inconsistent. And, ultimately, when the conclusion came, I'd formed so little attachment to any of the characters that I didn't care.

The premise was a good one, and had it been done well, it could have worked. It's like this book wanted to be The Time Traveler's Wife. But without the chemistry between the characters, some basic answers about the mysterious affliction, and a decent ending that actually resolves something, The Girl with Glass Feet will only ever be a second-class wannabe.

Plot: 2/5
Characters: 0/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing: 2/5
Originality: 3/5

Overall: 1.8 out of 5

Oh My Blog!

Thanks to Chris and Jess at Park Benches & Bookends for the Oh My Blog! Award. Here's what I, as recipient of this "incredibly prestigious" award, now have to do:

1. Get really excited that you got the coolest award EVER!
2. Choose ONE of the following options of accepting the OMB award:
(a) Get really drunk and blog for 15 minutes straight, or for as long as you can focus.
(b) Write about your most embarrassing moment.
(c) Write a "Soundtrack of your childhood" post.
(d) Make your next blog a 'vlog'/video blog. Basically, you're talking to the camera about whatever.
(e) Take a picture of yourself first thing in the morning, before you do anything else (hair, make up, etc) and post it.
3. Pass the award on to at least three, but preferably more, awesome bloggers. Don't forget to tell them.

Okay. #1... check. As for #2... Well, I don't drink, so option (a) is out. Most of my embarrassing moments are either boring or NSFW, so I won't inflict that option upon you. I don't have a video camera, so I can't vlog. And hell will freeze over before I post a picture of myself (bedheaded or otherwise) on my blog. So I guess that leaves the "soundtrack of my childhood".

So let me take you back twenty-five years to... the '80s. I grew up listening to music on records. Tapes came later. CDs didn't arrive in any large number until I was in my teens. So I have the obsolete skill of knowing how to load and start a record player.

My parents weren't huge audiophiles. The only stuff I can really remember in the record cabinet was an ABBA record (I think it was 1979's Voulez-Vous), In Search of the Lost Chord by The Moody Blues (the sleeve of which I found utterly creepy), and Hooked on Classics (not to be confused with Hooked on Phonics... which was probably more interesting, anyway). My sister and I never owned very many records. Well, not music records. We did have a number of the LP equivalent of audiobooks, though, including one of Bambi where you actually get to hear the gunshots. Lovely.

Much of my childhood soundtrack came from the TV. I can remember religiously watching Saturday morning cartoons (including Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, which featured a lot of music). There was also a music video countdown on Saturday or Sunday nights that we liked to watch... even though my sister and I were just little kids who really couldn't appreciate the music for what it was. Standouts from those years include "You Might Think" by The Cars, David Lee Roth's cover of "California Girls", anything by Glass Tiger and Tears for Fears, and the most memorable of all (and still one of my all-time favourite music videos), "Take on Me" by a-ha.

I also listened to the radio in those days, and developed a fancy for ABBA's "Super Trouper" (although I can't imagine why). And then there were the Minipops. Those high-pitched chipmunk voices provided an acoustic backdrop to many afternoons of playing with my friends. We had a couple of their albums on tape, and they got played a lot. A lot.

So basically, the soundtrack to my childhood was the unique acoustic tapestry of the 1980s. With all of that exposure to music from that particular era, is it any wonder that I love The Wedding Singer?

Hey... what do you know? I kind of did option 2(a) anyway (just without the booze). Heh. I'm going to pass this award on to:

Ryan G at Wordsmithonia
Juju at Tales of Whimsy...
Charlotte at The Book on the Hill

(I know this award is kind of requirement-heavy, so no pressure, guys. Just do it if you feel like it.)

In My Mailbox (14)

My mailbox has been kind of empty as of late. At least as far as books go. I need to read what I've got here!

Anyway, this past week I did get one book:

The Girl with Glass Feet
by Ali Shaw

Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.

Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass?

The Girl with Glass Feet is a dazzlingly imaginative and magical first novel, a love story to treasure.


What was in your "mailbox" this week?



In My Mailbox was started by Kristi of The Story Siren.

Does this mean I'm a Twit?

What exactly do you call a person who Tweets? A Twitterer? A Twit? In any case, I've joined their ranks. Why not? Sometimes I don't have enough to say for a full blog post. So I figured tweeting might be a good way to get my smaller thoughts out there.

I'm not quite sure what I need, though. Should I put a Twitter button on my blog somewhere? Or just leave up the widget that's there at the moment?

Any thoughts? Does anyone even follow other people's tweets, or do they just like to tweet themselves?

Top Ten Picks: Worst Books You've Ever Read

I saw this post by Jillian at Random Ramblings, and I thought it looked sort of fun. Sometimes books just deserve to be on a "bottom 10" list, you know? So here are some of the worst books I've ever had the displeasure of reading (from bad to worst):

10. Past Lives, Future Lives Revealed
by Dr. Bruce Goldberg

I enjoy reading about reincarnation cases, and this was one of the books that I read when I first started getting into all of that. When I read it again years later, though, I realized that it had some genuine WTF moments (that I'm not sure how I missed earlier). I think this excerpt from my review sums it up pretty well:

It's as if the author is one of the blind men in the story about the elephant, and he's only able to describe the animal by feeling its tail. The bare bones about reincarnation are there, but there is way too much other stuff that many would view as nonsense, and that damages the credibility of researchers who are looking into the phenomenon of reincarnation. In Goldberg's world, it seems that anyone with inexplicable behavior, past or present, must be possessed -- either by a poltergeist, a past-life persona, a demon, or an extraterrestrial time traveler. I laughed out loud when I read the following passage concerning reptilian aliens: "These time travelers are most definitely to be avoided, as they eat humans." It is statements like this that make me suspicious of the whole book... that, and the fact that we can supposedly be protected from such malicious influences if we buy Goldberg's tapes.

9. The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway

I had to read this book in high school. It's put me off Hemingway for life, I think. All I can remember is some guy feeling sorry for himself because he didn't have a penis. I think there was some stuff about bullfighting in there, too.

This book exemplifies one of my pet peeves about much of what I had to read in school. It's all from the man's point of view, dealing with men's issues. We girls were forced to read books like this, but god forbid they'd ever make the boys read Sense and Sensibility or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret so they could see things from a woman's point of view. Sure, we did read some books about women, but it's telling that whenever a woman showed up in our reading curriculum, she was raped (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), killed (Of Mice and Men), or portrayed as an adulteress (A Doll's House).

8. Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas: Further, Further Confessions of Georgia Nicolson
by Louise Rennison

Don't get me wrong... I loved Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging when I first read it. It was like a Bridget Jones's Diary for the teen crowd. Georgia's voice was witty and funny, and her descriptions of her family and friends were hilarious.

However, by this third book, the "-osity" thing was getting old and I was tired of reading about a girl who was, let's face it, a bitch. She was cruel to her friends, stupid, completely ignorant for someone her age, and also a bit of a racist. As a social commentary for adults, all that might have been okay. But I thought it was all pretty appalling for a teen read.

I can't believe there are something like ten Georgia books out there now. Do people like reading about mean girls that much?

7. Driven
by W. G. Griffiths

I picked up this book thinking it looked interesting... not realizing that it was Christian fiction (our local library is like a minefield for that sort of thing). I wasn't crazy about the possession elements of the story (I thought it was going in a different direction at first), but what really puts this book on my "bottom 10" list is the fact that it's a very shoddy piece of literature. From my review back in 2002:

Okay, I'll admit that, for a while, this book had me hooked. I managed to look past the distracting rhyming adjectives ("bruised and confused", "wired and tired"). I tried to look past the fact that Reverend Jesse J. Buchanan suddenly became Reverend Samuel J. Buchanan (was there a legal name change we weren't made aware of?). But how on earth did Gavin survive being impaled with "a jagged piece of wooden decking, ugly enough to slay a vampire" without any medical attention? In fact, a few minutes later he's snuggled up with his girlfriend, trying to decide where to go on vacation! Was the editor asleep?

Changing character names and continuity problems? Now I'm wondering if there was an editor at all!

6. The Explosionist
by Jenny Davidson

I think I said it all in my review. This was truly one of the worst books I've ever read. And I'm still pissed off about all the time I spent slogging through it.

5. Blue Moon
by Alyson Noël

I also said pretty much everything about this book in my review. It was little more than a badly written Twilight wannabe, with a ridiculous representation of the Law of Attraction and quantum physics. Boyfriend locked his door? No problem... just "manifest" yourself a new one that you can open! Oh, and don't forget to make a VW Beetle appear out of thin air.

Give me a break.

4. Elsewhere
by Gabrielle Zevin

I do have to give the author credit here. She was one of the forerunners of the squick-worthy teen-girl-gets-jiggy-with-old-man genre that seems to be so popular in YA literature these days. But I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good thing.

My problem with Elsewhere was that the afterlife just wasn't very interesting or imaginative. The characterization was horrible; the author was writing about teenagers, but she obviously doesn't know any. They all talked like grannies. Add in the talking dogs and the much-older love interest, and this was a recipe for a book that I could never love.

Girls, just because a guy looks young, it doesn't mean it's okay to enter into a romantic relationship with him. Especially if he's already married.

3. Spellbinder
by Helen Stringer

I didn't actually finish this one, but I'm counting it since the reason that I didn't finish was because it was so bad.

I didn't realize it when I wrote my review, but there's actually a word for the thing that bothered me about this book. They're called "said bookisms", and that's basically when the author goes out of their way to avoid the word "said". As a result, the characters laugh, hiss, growl, whisper, scream, and giggle their words. That's not so uncommon. In this book, however, we're treated to "said bookisms" that don't even make any sense because they're silent actions. Characters in Spellbinder grin, shrug, or glance their words.

And, making the whole thing worse, is the fact that this is a middle-grade book. I learned a lot of grammar from the books I read growing up. If Spellbinder is the sort of thing today's kids are reading, we're going to have a lot of kids who don't even know how to write a correct sentence.

2. Breaking Dawn
by Stephenie Meyer

Come on. Do I really need to explain this one?

I wasn't really anti-Twilight until I read this last book in the series. And then... Wow. I just can't get past the implied pedophilia, the rampant sexism, and the fact that there's absolutely no climax. Breaking Dawn is made of fail... and it's too bad, because it didn't have to be that way. But Stephenie made her choices for her characters, and I guess we just have to deal with it.

Doesn't mean I have to agree, though.

1. Joseph Andrews
by Henry Fielding

This was required reading in my first-year university English class. It has stood out in my mind since as one of the worst books I've ever read... or, rather, tried to read. I never got past the first 20 pages (but I still managed to write a passing essay using Coles Notes!).

All I can remember about this one was that it was stilted, old-fashioned, and mind-numbingly, excruciatingly, spectacularly boring. I hated that little paperback, and I would have burned it if I hadn't been living in residence with very sensitive smoke detectors. Forcing poor, unsuspecting English students to read it is just cruel.

Review - The Forest of Hands and Teeth

The Forest of Hands and Teeth (The Forest of Hands and Teeth #1)
by Carrie Ryan
Date: 2009
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Reading level: YA
Book type: prose novel
Pages: 308
Format: paperback
Source: Indigo

Mary lives in an isolated village in the middle of the Forest of Hands and Teeth, surrounded every day by the Unconsecrated, who are kept at bay by the fences. After losing both of her parents to the Unconsecrated, all Mary has left are the stories her mother told her of life beyond the Forest before the Return... and of the ocean in particular. But in the village, there are few options for young women, and Mary finds herself on the cusp of marriage to a man she does not really love... until a breach in the fence changes everything.

This is the first zombie novel I've read. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the genre. This book, especially, was a little too dark for my taste. (I've still got Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sitting in my TBR pile, but I have a feeling that it's got an entirely different flavour!)

I did enjoy most of this book. When I wasn't reading it, I was looking forward to picking it up again so I could find out what happened next. What I didn't really enjoy, though, were all the unanswered questions. Why, for example, was a village run by a bunch of women still so patriarchal in many ways? Where did the Sisterhood come from? How long ago did the Return happen? Where exactly is the Forest of Hands and Teeth? And the ending, for me, was far too abrupt. In fact, after I finished this book, I went to sleep and dreamed that I wanted to start reading another book, but I wouldn't let myself because I hadn't finished this one yet! I still have this nagging feeling that my copy was missing the final chapter or something (but I'm sure it wasn't). I didn't enjoy this book so much that I want to rush out and get the sequel... and that's pretty much what such an abrupt ending forces you to do.

Anyway, the writing was okay and the characters were fairly enjoyable (even if I couldn't really tell the guys apart... they seemed so similar in nature, especially the two brothers). The pace was a little slow in places, but it made up for that in other places where the action raced along. So, all in all, I'd probably recommend this to fans of zombie novels or post-apocalyptic fiction. I just don't think it was my cup of tea.

Plot: 3/5
Characters: 3/5
Pace: 2/5
Writing: 4/5
Originality: 4/5

Overall: 3.2 out of 5