Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million Haul

Multi-Store Book Haul

Kinokuniya Haul

Miko's January & February 2020 Favorites

The Weeknd (USA)

This man needs no introduction as The Weeknd has been progressively growing in popularity no matter what genre he undertakes. Some fans have been listening to him since the beginning and others jumped on the bandwagon with the catchy "Can't Feel My Face" or his Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack entry, "Earned It". I came in during the Beauty Behind the Madness era and solidify my devotion with "The Hills", a beautiful dark song. I have yet to go back two album entries, but I'm looking forward to it since there's some fan references to it with his latest song, "After Hours". Of course, during January, this track didn't exist. Fans were surprised with the catchy, somewhat cynical bop called "Heartless". Since Starboy [and a little My Dear Melancholy and Black Panther soundtrack], I've been ready for more and "Heartless" was everything and more for me (and fans)! The following month, The Weeknd dropped another new video to keep us craving more in the form of the 80's synth inspired "Blinding Lights". After seeing both of these videos and repeating both tracks over and over, my body is ready for this album to drop! Since I can't decide which music video to display [as you can tell by the links in the song titles], I'm going to share his amazing performance on The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert as I find the technical aspects (camera shots and set changes) extremely impressive! Honorable mention for the month of January is kpop girl group Everglow as I repeated "Bon Bon Chocolat" and G(I)-dle's "Lion" almost as much as The Weeknd.

Muddy Cult March 2020 Favorites

BlipMasta5's Favorites

Favorite Dance Video

Kick it - NCT 127 (Squad VS Fighter Version)

My first exposure to NCT 127 was this album and this song blew my mind. I was really enamored by the song's structure, but then I came across this video here. I was thrilled by the intro and everything that followed after. Honestly, I dug how the movements fit the theme and how smoothly it went into the groove as soon as the chorus drops. Then, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the routine was choreographed by Brian Puspos, who happens to be one of my favorites. What a wonderful combination of events that made this glorious source of entertainment. Do you agree?

Book Review: World War Z

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks | Published: 2006
I read this back when I was on maternity leave and I loved it and I'm a bit ashamed to say...it's my favorite book. Of all the books in the world, Buonaventura, your favorite is about zombies? You don't even like zombies.

But you guys, this books is just so fucking smart! It's like Brooks went and thought of every conceivable way society would be affected by a rise of the undead. How would it affect a refugee crisis? How would if affect suburbanites? What would happen in communist countries? Capitalist countries? Poor countries? How would an army have to change policies to defeat zombies? It was so thought out!

This book is set up as a collection of interviews done after the zombie apocalypse, describing the rise and fall of the zombies all over the world from forty different people all over the world. What a huge undertaking for a writer and yet he was able to convey forty-one unique characters with first person voices.

This book was so good that it ruined Stephen King for me. When I had finished this, I started Under the Dome and I just couldn't get into it because the writing was so juvenile in comparison.

So, I decided to revisit this when I found out there was a full cast for the audio book. You know how sometimes when you revisit something, it's not nearly as good but you built it up in your head? Not so for this. There were some "hokey" parts that I had forgotten about, like parts of Europe reverting back to the middle ages carrying long swords and living in castle communities. I mean, that's totally plausible, but it still seemed silly.

This book is even better as an audio book as it's used to its full potential as a collection of interviews. The cast is amazing and I'm sure I cried when I read it originally, but I definitely cried at the segment told by Sharon, a young woman with the mind of a child who describes escaping from a mass suicide.

This book is so damn good!

Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Ian Reid | Published: 2016

Just so you know, I will be spoiling this book so beware.

This is a terrible book. Maybe I feel that way because the bar was set high. It’s a Shirley Jackson award nominee with a great cover and interesting blurb. I had to wait for months to get it on Overdrive. I was looking forward to this.

So this book is told from a woman’s perspective and it’s done in a terribly shitty manner. The young woman lacks any sort of personality and just seems super bland and like she’s there to stoke the male character’s ego and be a sounding board to his vapid ideas. Behold their deep conversations that are so profound: “Okay, let me ask you a question. Do you think you’re the smartest human alive?” “That’s not an answer. That’s a question.”

“And by the way, this isn’t a very original thought or anything. You know I’m not trying to be brilliant right now, right? We’re just talking.” “We’re communicating,” I say. “We’re thinking.”

sigh

This book is full of contradictions. The couple is driving for the first third of this book. The girl calls it a road trip but they are actually just driving to the boy’s family farm for a dinner. Not to stay the night. That’s not a road trip. He actually has work the next morning. Why would they drive hours each way just to spend 45 minutes for a dinner? And then they go to Dairy Queen?!

They end up at a high school in the middle of nowhere. A school for “about two thousand students.” Where are they bussing these kids in from? I went to a rural school when I was a kid and it was k-12 and there were 800 students and my school was pretty close to a large town.

I really don’t think the author did any sort of homework on how a farm works. Like any. At all. I don’t think he even thought about basic things. Like why people raise livestock. They talk about two pigs that died from old age. Pigs don’t die from old age on farms. There’s only one reason for a pig farm to exist and it’s not to make pig milk, ya donks.

I realize that I’m getting bogged down by dumb details but this book is saturated with dumb little details and they really muddled the story, dammit

So anyway it turns out that I was right about the woman having a bland non-personality — she was a figment of some self-involved whiney man’s imagination of what could have been all along. He was depressed and suicidal and wished that he had talked to that girl more and that it would have turned into something. So it wasn’t an unrealistic lady voice being written by an inept author. It’s the character writing a lady’s voice ineptly. It’s blandladyception. This revelation has no redeeming effect for the story and actually made me hate it worse.

This whole book was written like a pity party for an incompetent narcissist who offed himself. It was trying to be profound in its vagueness but it came off as boring with a whiff of freshman philosophy.

PS: I didn’t even get to the two unnamed characters that were talking about the dead guy or his parents but those parts were awful, too.

Book Review: Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box

Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box by Brad Meltzer | Published: 2013
This is not the type of book I was expecting it to be. With a cover like that, my eyes ignored the “mystery writers” and just assumed “horror writers” and my brain was confused when there wasn’t a lot of scary bits at first.

You get my confusion, right? I know that Mystery is written in a huge white super-prominent font but c’mon. The rest looks like a blood soaked coffin full of terror.

There were some stellar stories in here and some that were indeed creepy (like Heirloom by Joseph Finder). Mad Blood by S.W. Hubbard stayed with me for a while after I read it. My favorite was The Very Private Detectress. There was such a lovely twist at the end and I would read a whole series about these characters (Pretty please, Catherine Mambretti!?!?!?!)

The last story is the longest one, or it felt like it with all the annotations. It gets sillier and more and more over the top and was a good ending to the collection.

I listened to this while I played my candy games at night before bed and the variety of voice actors was nice. The only one that didn’t work so well was the last story because of the excessive use of annotations, but it made for an even wilder story as a whole.

Ophelia's Favorite Witches and Wizards: Part 1

In the spirit of my favorite time of year, I decided to put together a few supernaturally themed lists and reviews for our faithful readers. Anyone who knows me personally has more than passing knowledge that October goes well beyond just the usual pumpkins and fall festivities. My love of all things spooky, vampy and witchy is endless. Gather your familiar and prepare to be spelled by my top 10 witches and wizards.

Book Review: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King | Published: 2015

As I was reading this collection, I kept thinking to myself I thought I liked Stephen King’s shorts. Is that because I read them when I was young and impressionable and didn’t realize there were such things as badly written books? It’s true I hadn’t read King in a while. Ever since I tried to read Under the Dome right after World War Z (which turned out to be my favorite book, oddly enough), any illusions I had that King’s novels were good were shattered. I did like his short stories, however. Nice little tasty bits of horror. Long enough for a good plot, but short enough to not get too invested in doomed characters. I’ve read so many of his short story collections growing up and I remember them fondly.

It was my plan to read this on my breaks at work and the first chance I got, I nestled into a comfy chair, lit up my kindle and…

Why aren’t these good? Don’t I love his short stories?

We start off with a story about a boy, but it’s really about an alien car that eats people. It goes from the boy to the car in a very meandering way. Once we get to the car, it becomes a very redundant death march. Good Samaritan pulls over to help car. Good Samaritan is eaten by car. Second Good Samaritan sees two cars (which, I mean, I would assume the situation is being taken care of at that point and not stop, but whatevs) and decides they should help too and promptly are eaten. Third Good Samaritan…(good gravy! Is this story just going to end with a long line of empty cars and an alien car full of Good Samaritans?!?) It doesn’t but the end is not very satisfying.

And that’s how we start off this book. However, a month after reading this, my brain has sorted out the Meh stories and remembers the Better stories with a rosy hue. I did like the story about the women driving with their kids, but I think I only like it because the idea was interesting, not because King executed the story well. I also liked the one about the Kindle but again, because the idea of having a Kindle with access to parallel universes is a cool idea, not exactly because the story was good.

But then there was a story about baseball. A long story about baseball. A long, uninteresting, not scary, play-by-play-of-the-game story about baseball. Unforgivable. I can’t believe King tricked me into reading a boring story about baseball with my own face eyes.

I almost gave this book three stars because it ends on a high note. I like me some end-of-the-world stories and I was digging it, but then I realized it was just On the Beach but set in New England with a dog instead of a baby (so not nearly as tragic). Also, I just can’t get over the fact that I read a novella about baseball. This gets two stars from me.

Review: Fragments of Horror

Fragments of Horror by Junji Ito | Published: 2015

When I was a kid living in Japan, I learned that scary stories were for summer. It made so much more sense to me. Of course you want something, anything, to give you goosebumps when the temperature is hitting triple digits outside. Why would you want to give yourself chills during the dark frosty months?

Japanese horror is also great in that it doesn't follow the rules of western horror (why would it?). When imbibing myself with some American horror, I know what lines won't be crossed which puts me in a sort of comfort zone I don't have with J-horror. Junji Ito takes me out of my comfort zone.

The first of Ito’s works that I read was The Enigma of Amigara Fault. I came across it in the Something Awful Forums and they had a link and everything. 20 minutes later I had forgotten that it was July in Texas and I was in a house without central air. My arms and legs were covered in goosebumps and I immediately looked up this Ito person to see what else he had. I was hooked and within a week I had read Uzumaki, Gyo, and Tomie. The artwork is intricate and distressing. The plots are vague and surreal. When I saw a friend on Goodreads was currently reading his most recent anthology, I knew I had to partake as well so I got a copy from the library.

Fragments of Horror contains several short stories with a variety of themes. My favorites were Gentle Goodbye and Whispering Woman. The former hit a bit close to home and had me reaching for the tissues. Others had more zany plots, like the woman with a sexual interest in houses and a transvestite writer looking for a new tic. Overall, I loved it and it was great to revisit Ito. I only wish it had been longer but that’s just me being a glutton.

I highly recommend pretty much all of his works, especially with the peak of summer upon us. Stay cool out there!

Darkness V-log: Dumb Media Trends, JRockers "Expressing" Themselves, & M...

Quick Book Review

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa | Rating: 4.5/5

A seemingly normal story that turns into something more intimate and disturbing. We follow 17 year old Mari through her routine of working at Hotel Iris with her controlling mother and prying, troublesome housekeeper and immediately meet the catalyst of this story. Hotel Iris is a definite page turner, but the pace is slow and steady until a major turning point between Mari and the catalyst. The book was extremely enjoyable and felt like the perfect movie, which pushed my ambitions personally to acheive my dreams.



The Devil's Whisper by Miyuki Miyabe | Rating: 3.5/5

Despite the chapters being a bit discouraging personally, it was worth the build up and frustration. It is also a bit slow paced and uninteresting in places, but if you're a committed reader, you will not be disappointed. This a bit of a murder/suicide mystery that'll keep you asking questions. These questions will probably fuel your curiousity and determination to keep reading. Aside from the chapter length, I did get a few of the characters mixed up, but I liked that they were listed in the front in play format. I was also a little unhappy with the ending, but I can't think of any other at the moment.



Villian by Shuichi Yoshida | Rating: 4/5

Another murder mystery that isn't that simple. It made my exploration for Japanese literature more enjoyable (and a little more appreciation for my job). Shuichi Yoshida makes reader/character relationship a high priority as you form definite opinions about each and every charcter, no matter how big their part is. This book allows you to get in touch with your emotions as the mystery progresses. Who is the real "villian" in all this? Especially in the end when everything is revealed. Once again, I had to adjust to to the lengthy-ness of the chapters, but a lot of my predictions for this story were wrong and that factor made it more enjoyable and encouraging to continue.