Sunday, May 07, 2006

*poof!* goes the rant engine.

So, I write the odd review. I'm pretty harsh, in that I try to give an honest opinion on what worked and did not work for me. Any review written is going to be subjective, one way or another, and I don't see the point pretending to be an impartial, god-like being that can judge whether *you* are going to like a book or not - I just know whether *I* liked it or not.

Now, a couple of things have come up that have troubled me, and I'm not going to say which book, and I'm not going to comment on the writing on the book itself.

First off: male characters that restore life to dying women by bringing them to orgasm.

Get real! I'm lying there, blood spewing from my guts, or shivering my way to a frozen end, and you think I'm going to be grateful for you roughing me up 'down there'? No way! Get your hands off me! Show me some damned respect and call the paramedics down here now! I don't care what kind of supernatural amazing sex-god you are, I'm frigging lying here DYING goddamnit and all you can think about is SEX?!? What's that? The only way your paranormal magic works is through 'bonding'? You can't work your magic unless I'm moaning your name? What kind of perverted freak are you? Get off! Go away! Let me just die, damnit!

*cough*

Next off, and on a slightly connected theme: Opening chapters that bear no relation to the story itself. Now I *have* commented on this on one book, because the story was so good I felt genuinely mislead by the opening (if you find the review I mean, do buy the book it's great), but that's by the by. The point is; there are lot of 'teasers' that seem to think it's a good idea to promote some raunchy sex scene, no matter whether the story itself is actually all about sex or not. Sex sells, I guess, but I'm fed up with it: there are some great stories out there of which romance and sex is a *part* of the tale, but frankly there are only so many nipples and 'tenderest skins' I can really appreciate and I'm not going to be able to tell your book apart from the next if that's all that's being sold to me.

*cough*

Next off: "Could care less". What do you mean, you "could care less" - you mean, you do care now? The phrase is "could NOT care less" - in other words, you are at the lowest point on the caring scale, your care has left the building, your care has jumped the light fantastic, it is pushing up the daisies and it does NOT care any more. COULD NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT CARE LESS.

*cough*

Next off: PDF formating. I like ebooks. They're cheap, they take up no shelf space and if I want it I can buy it now and read it... *now*. UNLESS it's one of these double spaced, letter-sized PDFs in a serif font, that I have to spend half an hour working out the idea zoom factor to be able to read the font properly, only to discover that in doing so I have made the lines of text too wide to read easily and the page-scroll size is about 1/3rd of the page. It's an EBOOK, I want to be able to read it on my SCREEN, not printed out! I want sans-serif fonts! I want readable column widths! I want a font-size-to-page ratio that isn't going to drive me insane!
And I want everyone to be consistent! Thank god, most of the smaller e-pubs offer an html or mobipocket version that I can reformat to something useable.

*cough*

*cough*

Actually, I'm feeling much better now. Thank you for reading LOL