Font is Fixed!!!!

Thank you, Jeff, for your help!

Treasure Trash: A Great BTT

This week's question:

Best Bad Book? March 26, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:36 am


Suggested by Janet:

The opposite of last week’s question: “What’s the best ‘worst’ book you’ve ever read — the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?”

I have a lot of best 'worst' books, both in my personal library and on my list of favorites. Probably the ultimate one is The Dirt by Motley Crue. I've written about this one several times as being the ulitmate sex, drugs, and rock n' roll memoir. I think it's because the people who generally write books on these topics are repentant to some degree. The memoirs of Tatum O'Neill and Danny Bonaduce cover how they got into drugs and alcohol and how it messed up their lives. But they don't cover the fun parts, at least not to the gory detail that the Crue does. I should probably be ashamed of liking this book. But I can't help it. I love it.

The works of V.C Andrews were a force in the young lives of many women my age. I remember when that travesty of a film came out, and how scary it looked (I rented it in high school and laughed at it). I felt really brave and mature reading the Flowers in the Attic series, although they weren't so much horror as "gothic" in a way. Flowers in the Attic is still my favorite series, although I read all the Heaven and Dawn books too. I got tired of the repetition, and the ones that weren't actually written by her look to be even worse, so I believe I stopped there. But the Flowers in the Attic books are definitely captivating reads. The one about Cathy's son flags a little, and the final book is almost all denouement. But the title book in the series, the book chronicling their attempts to fit back into society and put their past behind them, and the prequel book explaining why the grandmother was such an evil bitch are full of suspense and tension.

They're also not terribly well-written, I know that. Most of the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is bad, and many of the scenarios strain credulity. If I read them now for the first time, I'd probably hate them. But as it is, I think they provide hours of entertainment!

Incidentally, does anyone out there know how to change font size in html code? This is way too small throughout, I think.

Under Construction

Upon reflection, I decided that my most recent look was, in fact, too pink. It wasn't a bad template. If there was any way at all to tone down the Pepto Pink on the sides, I would have done it and hung on to it for a while. I liked the pink/grey scheme I had going, but it was just way too much.

I started hunting for a new template before I went on vacation. I looked at a bunch, but my search was really over the minute I found this "Colibri" template. It was at eblogtemplates.com, the very first thing that will come up if you just google "blog templates," like I did. It's still a work in progress, but I hope you all like it as much as I do.

Unfortunately, I didn't quite realize that this change was going to completely wipe out all of my sidebar stuff. All my links, my TBR vanquished list, everything, gone. But maybe it's for the best. There was quite a bit of dead wood on the TBR, I know, and perhaps the links could have used some pruning and updating as well. So if you used to be linked here and now you're not, I'll get it back up shortly. If you notice it's been a week or so, though, a reminder wouldn't go amiss.

Back from Vacation, with an E-pisotlary delight of a novel

It turned out that my choices for vacation books were pretty decent! The first one, which I finished on the plane ride down, is Matt Beaumont's E. I checked it out because I'm interested in the internet in literature. It's hard to believe the book is almost ten years old, as it still feels current. The book is set in an ad agency in London and has our protagonists staggering to work nursing hangovers on the first day of the new millenium. Things at the agency are generally in a state of general chaos threatening total disaster, and the beginning of the new millenium is no exception. One of their accounts hangs in the balance as two creative teams duke out a strategy. Another is all aflutter with activity as they prepare for a commercial shoot on location in Mauritius. But everyone's primary preoccupation is winning the mother of all accounts: Coca-Cola.

The entire story is told through emails, and the devices have only become more familiar as time wears on: the passive-aggressive emoticons ("Hope you don't mind staying through until 9 tonight to work off that long lunch :)"), the pretentious signature lines, the outbursts of playfulness in the subject line, and the "bcc" feature for all your backstabbing needs.

Beaumont draws vivid, if familiar, characters through mere emails. There's the tempermental CEO; the anal-retentive secretary, the ditzy secretary, and the slutty secretary; the horny young men who can most often be found hiding out at a nearby bar, if not in an elevator between floors with the Slutty Secretary; the Closeted Married Creative guy; the nerd; the hippie; the naive, starry-eyed recent grad, etc. I'd recommend this book as an excellent vacation read, especially since the terse emails provide an average of three logical stopping places per page. It's very enjoyable and funny, but also a decent picture of what corporate e-life is like.

Too Pink? LD's new look

In search of books to bring on my vacation, I took a trip around the blogosphere. And it made me feel like a small-town schoolteacher at New York Fashion Week. I have to admit, I don't really think much about the look of this blog. I think about what I'm going to write on it a great deal, but I don't give a whole lot of thought to how it all looks.

Some people have really beautiful pages. I would love to know how people did the scanned-in lacy sidepanels and richly textured backgrounds. I don't think mine will ever be that nice to look at. But I at least dug out a new template. Why does blogger only give you like seven options?

I want to work harder at making it look nicer. That's one of my goals for when I get back from vacation. If anyone has any advice for me, I'd love to hear it.

Need Help!!!!!

I'm going away for a week next week and have a very big problem: I don't know what books to bring.

I mentioned that I visited the library a couple of weeks ago and checked out an array of random, interesting-looking books. Well, I got them home and found out that none of them really appealed to me that much. So today, I brought them all back with the intention of starting over. And nothing!

I didn't go home empty-handed. In addition to experiencing the worst BO ever -- twice -- from my fellow patrons, I got four books. One was David Copperfield. One was by Ana Castillo, who wrote a great book that I read in college and was featured in their staff picks. The other two? I picked them out less than an hour ago and I'll be damned if I can remember. Doesn't bode well for my actually reading and enjoying them.

I thought that looking at my TBR list would help. It didn't. In fact, all it did was convince me to reassess the list. There are several books on there that only made the list because I wound up with them somehow. I'm not sure how much I actually want to read them.

So, I'm looking for recommendations from anyone reading this blog. My criteria are as follows:

1. It can't be a brand new book. Those are 7 days and will be overdue by the time I get back, even if I wait until the very last minute to check them out.

2. It should be a decent vacation book. Not too heavy in either subject matter or in..errr...actual matter.

3. But it has to be decent. Something a little bit different. I don't want to read another book about a girl with a shitty job who wants Laboutin shoes and a boyfriend. And I'm not yet at the phase in my life where a book about a woman with a decent job who wants a new living room set and a baby would interest me either.

4. It can also be a good biography or autobiography. By "good," of course, I mean "bad." Any celebrities who've led interesting or colorful lives that you can recommend, I'll check out. Unfortunately, someone broke the only copy of Slash's autobiography. That would've been just the thing, but it showed as "under repair" in the library's database.

Any other thoughts or ideas? I'm open-minded at this point.

At the Movies With Books: This Week's BTT

Movie Potential March 12, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 7:10 am



Tami inspired this week’s question:

What book do you think should be made into a movie? And do you have any suggestions for the producers?

Or, What book do you think should NEVER be made into a movie?

Unlike a lot of the BTT's, I knew what I was going to write about immediately when I read this.

I've mentioned my beloved Prydain chronicles many times on this blog. The storyline is rooted in Welsh mythology and in general mythological tradition. I always thought it would film well. As an adult, it seems a bit more "kiddish" than a lot of young adult novels, but I still believe that a decent treatment of the books would be worth watching. One of Disney's worst animated films was a hatchet job of the second book, but thankfully, it's rarely viewed anymore. As a kid, The Black Cauldron was my favorite of the series, with its colorful characters, its dark undertones, and its thought-provoking (to an 11-year-old) theme of the nature of heroism. As an adult, though, I prefer the quieter Taran Wanderer, in which the protagonist sets off first in search of his true parentage but ultimately in search of himself. This book would probably make the worst movie out of the five, but I'd love to see someone take another crack at filming this series.

The Stephanie Plum books also strike me as ripe for the plucking, full of action, humor, romance and crazy characters. There's no way anyone would make allfifteen (or whatever we're up to now) of them. In fact, maybe the books should be inspiration for a movie rather than the basis of the script: a brand-new Stephanie Plum adventure, with her loyal but reluctant sidekicks Lula and Connie and the two sexy men in her life. I'd go.

As for movies that should never be made? For years, the idea of a movie based on Donna Tartt's The Secret History has been kicked around. At one point, Gwyneth Paltrow was rumored to have been cast (presumably in the Camilla role, although she's the wrong age and type entirely). I always thought it was a terrible idea. There's something unfilmable about that book. Several of the main characters, including the narrator, are very difficult to get a sense of, and it adds to the book and the suspense rather than detracts. Just the act of putting them in flesh and blood would change the story irrevocably. Perhaps the people attached to the project agreed with me, for it no longer appears on IMDB.

My sister disagrees with me, but I also don't think the Thursday Next books would translate well to the screen. Part of their humor comes from the printed format. How would you express the Footnoterphone and the mispeling vyrus on screen? How would you deal with The Generics from the second book, who are still going through character training and don't even have genders when you meet them? Nah, they should keep the Thursday Next books in their original format. They'd need a truly exceptional filmmaker to make them any good.