7 days later...

The Lost One is, at current, wondering if the whole move back to the pacific northwest was a good idea. Yes, on paper it was brilliant. Move back, volunteer, connect with the local legal scene, return victorious. A week later, and the Lost One has no apartment (he has seen every crack house looking for a new tenant in the area), a "day job" that is taking up all of the time during which he should be volunteering, and a family he never sees thanks to...A witchy roommate .

Yet as all seems lost, on the horizon one sees a glimpse of hope...The Roaming One will be traveling to the Lost One's father's (here after "Ulysses") for the summer, but more importantly his car is staying in the area, the Lost One "should" start the volunteering, and well, there has to be a decent apartment... Somewhere. Until then, the Lost One will be waiting with the bated breath of the true fan boy for Harry Turtledove's alt-history masterpiece The Grapple. Even if he is an unrepentant liberal.

Until next time friends...

The Lost in Academia guide to books you shouldn't read, Part II.

The Lost One will now ruminate on the grand disappointment of...One Good Knight, by Mercedes Lackey, recommended to the Lost One by...Well Amazon.com. To be fair, it was the Lost One's choice to pick up the book, no one forced him, either physically, or psychologically to read it. Still, the Lost One failed, so everybody cries. While the Lost One is on this whole, "being fair" kick, he might as well acknowledge that their are different levels on which the book is bad, the first (and most important, as the Lost One is a raving ego maniac) is the failure of the book to live up to the Lost One's personal expectations, as well as the actual disappointment that came with reading a story that could have been done decently, but was not.

So, okay the Lost One had personal expectations that influenced his enjoyment of One Good Knight. The only reason the Lost One picked it up was because (as any longtime reader [of which the Lost One has none] can tell you) the Lost One is a bit of an Anglo-phile. So the opportunity to read a novel about St. George (Britain's patron Saint) and the Dragon was just fine by the Lost One. However , the book is not about St. George, despite the jacket, and cover promising, both Dragon and virtuous dragon slayer, named George. Instead One Good Knight carries on a tradition from Ms. Lackey's other works of having a powerful force of nature in this pretend word, called...Well, The Tradition. In Ms. Lackey's world, precedent is not to be ignored as any event that happens more then once is bound to influence events later down the line, I.E. all the stories say that when the virtuous knight saves the fair maiden, said fair maiden will fall in love with the knight. So by naming the knight "George" Ms. Lackey is nodding at tradition, but not really retelling the story. Which, of course, was terribly annoying. There is a similar nod to Perseus and Andromeda which, again, comes to naught. Annoying.

Still, annoyance aside, the Lost One could have enjoyed the story that was there, but the execution was just too poor. The book plods along at a snails pace, and gets so wrapped up in the life of the heroine that one is praying for something to happen (not that the Lost One wasn't reading the book going, "the Princess is losing her favorite maid, NOOOOO! She likes her new one, YAAAY! Her duties at court are boring!! She finds a way around that!!" but you, know...Something needs to happen...For the kids). And when things finally begin to pick up, the pace goes from something resembling that of a snail, to more like a frog. Jump to a major event, then wait, and wait and wait, and wait, and jump to a major event, etc.

What was even more infuriating was the repetition of the story, and the waiting for characters to figure out what the reader had known for chapters. It put the Lost One in mind of an episode of Friends in which Joey and Chandler are told something dismaying and we watch as Chandler instantly grasped the news, while Joey ponders. Like Chandler, the reader is often left wanting to yell, "Get there faster!" At the same time, events that should have pages and pages of story (like the romance that is central to the story) are briefly discussed and come, seemingly from out of no where. Now the Lost One is not anti-romance, but good great Maker, there exists such a thing as "foreshadowing" and "character development". Annoying.

Finally, we have the fairy tale quality where the virtuous easily triumph, and villainous are quickly vanquished. The Heck!?! That's all you had to do!?!!! Why didn't you do that first and let the Lost One spend the interim time doing something interesting?!!! *Sigh* Well, no one to blame but the Lost One. Until next time.

Here's a funny little link.

Just a quick one, but a funny link to Cash Peter's Internet Dating report. Hilarious.

The Lost in Academia guide to books you shouldn't read, the first one.

Being, incredibly boring, the Lost One feels he needs to add something to excuse the boring stuff he writes about. So as part of his new commitment to community service, the Lost One proudly presents his first installment of, Books you shouldn't read. Now as part of my new self appointed position as the literary canary of the blogo-sphere, I will consider it my personal duty to read every crappy book suggested to me by those brave souls who only wish to share their personal joy with the Lost One. And then of course, to use vicious insults to crush the poor fools, brave enough to put forward a personal recommendation, into a gibbering state of wretchedness. This is going to be fun.

First on the chopping block... Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus recommended by the lovely young lady from EBC (in fairness to the lovely lady, she recommended The Nanny Diaries, which was much better, but the Lost One is holding her responsible for his having picked up the book because he never would have dreamed of touching it, had she not turned him on to the authors [figuratively speaking]). The Sophomore effort from this duo of young authors, virtually assures their young careers as authors die slow, bloody, and needlessly painful deaths. And that was after having read half the book (Citizen Girl enjoys the dubious honor of having been one of only three books the Lost One failed to complete). So what was specifically bad about it? Read on.

First, and foremost of this books many gaffes was a substitution of political ideology for story. The Lost One is not of the opinion that a book must be politically neutral to be a good story (two authors capable of intertwining their political beliefs with good story telling are John Ringo, and Meg Cabot [a fellow chick lit author] representing the political right and left respectively), but where Citizen Girl goes off the reservation is in assuming its own self-righteous position is correct, and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. The story moves with a rhythm that baffles the imagination, because the fun house world of Citizen Girl is not easily recognizable as anything approaching the real world, but instead a series of happenstance, and chance encounters governed by the authors' beliefs in what the world really is like. As a for instance, Girl, the protagonist in this sad little leftist morality play, is hired by My company, the personification of evil for the soul purpose of using her as a token, a nod to the political left. This is seen as the main means by which Girl is oppressed. The Lost One's Main problem with this is the assumption that this is the way right wing corporations want to run their businesses. Tokenism is a creation of left wing attempts to legislate morality (I.E. the belief that by requiring certain hires to meet a lesser standard of competition based on unrelated characteristics, like race, or gender, purely as a for instance), yet Citizen Girl winges on about the unfairness of it all.

Second, and related to the first problem is that Citizen Girl continues the morality play nomenclature from the Nanny Diaries. While this worked in Diaries, where the situation was so real, and generic the reader was almost positive that a trip to Manhattan would reveal a ton of young nannies all struggling under the tyrannical weight of self obsessed employers, the story problems in Girl (see above) left the Lost One wondering if the authors were simply incapable of coming up with a realistic sounding character name (its harder then it looks, incidentally Roger Smith? Sounds made up, too generic. Cornelius Summerson? Too specific. Get it?). In the end, reading the book began to feel like be bludgeoned over the head with "cute" double entendres.

Finally, the book is kind of depressing. Sure this could be because the Lost One wasn't able to finish it and get to the "happy" ending, but even so, it felt like Citizen Girl was aiming for pressured and missed by a good bit. In the end, the Girl just ran from one disaster to the next, with no rest for the reader, and little support from the other characters. In the end, this flaw is probably why the Lost One couldn't finish the book, it sucked any joy from the story, and turned pleasure reading, into a chore.

So there you go, the first in a random, bit of hating on various books. The first, but not the last. Until next time.

Yes, he's back, but for how long?

The Lost one does not kid himself in believing he still has any readers left, still blogging is mostly about self love anyways, so who needs any one else, savvy? Any ways, the Lost One, being a hard core warrior in the culture wars is proud to have found this spoof of the (let's face it, eminently spoof worthy) film V for vendetta. It's 12:00 do you know where your muppets are?