Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories

Fiction

I was very intrigued when I saw this book, because I love Roald Dahl’s stories, James and the Giant Peach and Matilda most of all. I had never read a ghost story composed by him, and I was slightly disappointed in reading the introduction to find out that the stories within were not ones he had written. The collection is the result of research, consisting of the reading of hundreds of short stories, and these few he deemed scary enough to be made into episodes for a potential television show. The show never happened, but Dahl wanted the stories to reach others. 

I’m sure in another time, like, when the book was first published, these stories would have been a little bit scary. But they are from another time even more distant than that. None of the stories in this collection scared me. I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this when it was first published in 1983 would have been frightened by any of the tales. I think it more likely that the stories in this book would have scared someone reading it when I imagine a lot of them were originally written, which I am guessing is around the end of the 19th century. 

So all I can say about this collection of scary stories is that it is a great example of how the bar moves with time. What was once guaranteed to frighten people over a hundred years ago would probably not even make a person gasp in the slightest now. This could just be me, I think I do have a very liberal opinion of what constitutes being scary, but how could I not when I was literally brought up watching Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Poltergeist. The only way to judge for yourself would be to read this Book of Ghost Stories. 

Bite of Justice by R.L. Caulder

Fiction

In the final book of the Blood Oath series we get the intense, filthy, spicy scene between all four main characters that we have been waiting for, definitely a four out of five on my spicy scale. Alina and her three fated mates start to figure out how the dynamic is going to work with four of them being connected by the means of a bond that can only be broken both physically and emotionally, but seemingly not spiritually, through death. Everything else that has been going on, between Alina and the slayers, the plot to overthrow Dracula, is resolved, with the exception of one thing.

There is one big unanswered plot point that I was really bothered by once I realized that it was not going to be discussed further. The author never explains what was going on with the violent deaths that were occuring at the school, the very deaths that forced the administration to send all the students home. I think this may have been done purposefully as a way for the author to get you to read her other books. On the authors website, as well as at the end of this book, you are directed to where you can purchase additional novels that follow Alexandra, Alina’s demon friend, as well as Alora and her family, who happen to rule Hell. 

Another disappointment, though it was not as all encompassing as I found it in Book 3, were the grammatical and punctuation errors. This is just something I cannot let go of in a book that has been, or at least I assume has been, professionally edited, reviewed, and published. Books like this that exist pretty much purely for the purpose of being an exciting, fantasy, controversial romance, novels that don’t have much else going for them, should at least be well edited. I’m not completely ragging on this genre, I mean look at me, I read plenty of these types of books. They serve a purpose, and we all know what that purpose is. I would just appreciate it if there was a bit more care put into the final edits. I do apologize for the rant, but I feel like it is long overdue and this series just put me over the edge a bit. 

I hope to have a book review for you next week that will be full of praise and nothing but kind words. I have been working on a very long history book for several weeks that I have been enjoying very much. Hopefully between now and next week I will have found myself with enough free time to finish it.

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Fiction

After seeing this book mentioned frequently amongst readers of a particular genre I decided that I had to read it. I then went into this book knowing only what was summarized on the back cover. I was pleasantly surprised with the story, which goes back and forth between the present day and the not so distant past. We follow Lowen as she struggles to get her life back in order while also trying to get the extensive notes of an unfinished book series in order. Then there is Verity, the talented writer who no longer has the ability to finish her series, the very same series that Lowen is trying to make outlines for as she goes through the piles of papers that Verity has strewn about her large office. The themes comprised a mixture of loss, mystery, thriller, romance, desire, and macabre, which worked extremely well together and I loved it. 

I could see this becoming a film one day, something which has a racy and perplexing feel comparable to that of Gone Girl, which also happens to be an incredible book. It was a delight to finally read a well written book that was also a little bit sexy, but not overly so, one that didn’t try too hard and was not the main draw of the story. I definitely need more books like this in my life and I am probably going to do some research towards finding ones that have a similar feel. If you couldn’t tell, I am encouraging you to read this book, it is worth it.

A long overdue update

Update

The last time I wrote about what the actual content of my blog was going to be during my first post, my introduction, was when I first set it up over two years ago. Since then, the blog has been nothing but reviews of everything I have read. I feel it has been far too long for me to not have spoken about what my goals are and what I hope to gain from writing.

When I first started blogging, I just wanted to pursue a hobby that I knew I would stick with because I was putting money into it. Investing monetarily into this hobby, not just by paying for the site itself but in purchasing all the books I would be reading anyway, was the way I was going to keep myself accountable and commited. In that, I have stuck to my goal. I have definitely been reading more because I want to consistently make posts, I have kept up with my hobby.

Now, I have realized it is an amazing way for me to keep track of everything I have read through summarization. The majority of my posts are not very long, I am not a professional writer by any means, so they usually only take a few minutes to read through. In a few minutes, a person can most likely make a decision as to whether or not a book they have been thinking about picking up is one that they might potentially want to read. As for myself, being able to go back and read my summaries is a great way for me to see if the book I have in mind is a book I would like to read again.

On top of writing reviews, I also started to keep a spreadsheet with all the books which I have organized by genre. I now have a categorized list of everything I have read and reviewed on this site, as well as an ever growing list of books I want to read. The spreadsheet is honestly one of the greatest things I have ever done, it is better than keeping an extensive list on my phone, a list on an old fashioned pad of paper that I could potentially lose, or just trying to remember the names of every novel I want to read.

As for why I chose to make an update now, I decided that I just wanted to change the day of the week in which I post. I have been adding a new post almost every Tuesday, and sometimes dropping a bonus post on Fridays. For the foreseable future, I will be posting on Thursdays instead. I realized that I am very busy at the beginning of the work week, and I am often scrambling to get my posts done by Monday night. I simply just need to write later in the week after I get all my domestic errands and chores done. I hope that with this change I can improve my writing skills and my reviews by being less rushed. So with that being said, after taking a break last week due to being on vacation, I will have a new post up this Thursday. To my very few followers, I hope you keep reading, and I don’t mean just my posts.

Bite of Vengeance by R.L. Caulder

Fiction

This book is absolutely riddled with grammatical, spacing, and punctuation errors, it comes out on top with the greatest number of mistakes I have ever found in a published work. It was incredibly frustrating to have to stop reading with such frequency as I had to pause and reach for a post it to mark a flaw, of which I already said, there were many. Every time I found a mistake I hoped it would be the last one and I tried to let it go, but at some point I just gave up on being able to think well of the author and the persons responsible for publishing this mess. You can see my picture of shame along with this post, the dark pink being all the errors I found and the light pink being the spicy scenes. It is kind of embarrassing that there are more errors than there are exciting plot moments, especially when you consider that people usually buy these types of books specifically for the dark romance and not living out a fantasy of being a book editor. 

I just really wanted to get that out of the way before I review the actual story. Again, it is very fast paced, events taking place over hours and days rather than weeks. I like that for the majority of this book they are out of the school and in the real world. Honestly, all the plot focused around the school is quite boring, we never get much of an insight into the subjects they study, which I would have found very interesting. The real world, the world in which vampires live alongside slayers and other magical beings is so much better since we get to see them in their day to day life. 

I have one more book in this series left to go. I do want to see how the story ends, but I am more interested in seeing if the pages have been edited better than its predecessor. I don’t know what went wrong here, I didn’t find any errors in the first book, and I only found three in the second one. I’ll let you know how things turned out next week.