Reading Today

is Dean Koontz's The Good Guy. It's fairly suspenseful, but also has some rather horrific prose. Below are a few gems from the first one hundred twenty seven pages.

• His preference for simplicity was so strong that he might have been happy as a monk in a particularly spartan monastery, except that monks were not permitted to murder people
• Rooney looked like a black-belt wannabe who, though never having taken a karate lesson, had tried to break a lot of concrete blocks with his face.
• If a spirit could be weighed and measured, Max would have proved to be bigger than his house.

For some reason, the character descriptions strike me as funny. Perhaps this is due to the rather drawn out metaphors.

Speaking of which, I think I'll add a Bulwer-Lytton to the bottom of this, just for a laugh. At the very least, it'll make me laugh.

"The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life." -Artie Kalemeris

Book Sale!

At the library book sale, I bought the following:

Kiss Me, Annabel, by Eloisa James - total bodice ripper, one of those ones where you can open up the first flap of the cover and see semi-clothed kissing people. I'm looking forward to it immensely.

Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding. I read so many references to it, I think I should read it.

Ophelia Speaks, by Sara Shandler. It's something of an extension to Reviving Ophelia, so I thought I'd give it a go. Plus, it was only a dollar.

The Queen of Second Place, by Laura Peyton Roberts. The first line on the back is "You know what four words a girl never wants to hear a guy say? You're a great friend."

The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's was 50 cents, and I read so much fantasy that is derivative of LOTR, I thought I should read it.

The Mozart Season, by Virginia Euwer Wolff. It looked pretty. I like music. Perfect match.

Dreamcatcher, by Stephen King. If this is the one Stephen King book that Otis ruined the ending of (and I don't remember which it is) I swear to god, I will steal all his books and cut out the endings.

A Woman of Substance, by Barbara Taylor Bradford, which my Mom said I should read.

Then I went to Barnes and Noble and bought an SAT prep book. I wanted to get Barron's again, since I had thought that they were good for the SAT-II. So, Mom and I went into the store and asked for SAT books. We were shown a shelf that was literally covered in books about APs, SATs, and SAT-IIs. I found the Barron's one, and they had three books: one for the PSATs, one for the SATs, and one thinner book entitled SAT 2400, Aiming for the Perfect Score. The normal one was bigger but cost the same amount, so I wanted to get that one, but Mom was like, no, you've already had exposure, get the good one, so we did.

It is by far the most pretentious thing I have ever read. It contains such helpful sentences as "A word list a day keeps the average scores away!" and goes on about how by getting higher than a 700 on all three parts, you're in the top 5% of test takers, and this book helps, and on and on and on. I feel like they're trying to capitalize on the intellectual insecurities of readers. I think the authors are figuring that the only people who buy this book are really thinking about all that. It makes me feel rather silly, to be honest. I mean, yes, I would like to do well, but I'd rather be able to study without being constantly reminded of the pressure, thank you very much. And, aside from that, I was under the impression that the '2400 hundred club,' as the book calls it, was made of people who actually got a 2400, not just those over 700 on all three parts. I'll still use the book, though, regardless of how silly it makes me feel.

García's Heart

I just finished a book, and, remarkably, it's only the third one I've read this summer. I feel like such an underachiever. Then again, it's more reading than most high schoolers have probably done in the last two weeks, so I suppose that I'm semioverachieving again.

García's Heart, by Liam Durcan, was pretty good. It was absorbing, and the voice, which walked the line between pretentious and entertaining, leant more towards entertaining. Since the last book I read (The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) was a children's book (albeit an enjoyable one), it was refreshing to see a sentence like "[s]tanding among a group of businessmen in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole and watching them disperse into the Den Haag drizzle, he had already begun to feel conspicuous, almost wishing he could pick up a briefcase and join their ranks for a day of bloodless regulatory triumph" on the first page. However the ending was unsatisfying to an great enough extent that I almost didn't read the last chapter, and when the novel abruptly shifted from dwelling in the past to actual events in the present, the protagonist's realizations felt forced. However, the book did, overall, provide an interesting view into morality and history.

The Dodgeball Vendetta

I feel that the best way to start a post about this as-of-yet-unintroduced character is a four word sentence about him: Berk is a jerk.

Well, Berk isn't always a total jerk, but he sure as hell is annoying. We've been playing dodgeball in gym for the past week, and Berk (run in through a translator of the language that Nyx's mom speaks (I think) to English for his last name) has embarked on an extremely personal and rude quest to destroy any of my already meager dodgeballing abilities.

The first day of dodgeball, he did nothing against me, and I contentedly hung out in the back with Kathrya, Chelsea, and Nia. The second day, however, Berk immediately began attacking me, following shouts of "TEAAAAA" with a poorly aimed dodgeball. The situation was made more ridiculous by the fact that I'm fairly certain that he could have thrown a lot harder, he was just enjoying the theatrical effect of making me squirm. Chelsea says that her favorite part of this day was when Nia was standing in front of me (not that she blocks much, considering our height difference) and Berk yelled "Duck! I'm trying to hit Tea!" The numerous attempts continued the next day, which Berk finished by going in for some strange sort of handshake that is understood only by him, involving some sort of hands to elbows to high fives to a whole lot of confused Tea.

Today, we played the juniors, but he politely announced that, even though we were on the same team, he would find some way to hit me. He accomplished this be grabbing my shoulders and ducking behind me, distracting me enough that I got hit with a dodgeball that wasn't even going that fast. This injury, however, was not as bad as the one sustained when Eli dodged out from in front of me and the high velocity ball going after him slammed into my leg, resulting in a strange bullseye pattern that took hours to fade.

In other news, this video is entirely hilarious

Watch Font Conference on CollegeHumor

Today

Regarding Pertinax: the New Wave of Erectile Dysfunction drugs- I'll develop the science, Vicky can do the marketing (lots of old men in bathtubs) and we'll make millions, I'm sure.

In other news, today was the last day of the softball unit in gym, and I finally scored a run. This was primarily because Peter, who was in front of me, hit a home run, requiring me to jog around the bases. It was quite annoying, because I didn't really want to run that far, but I suppose I'll have to get over it.

We spent our entire U.S. History class discussing the school's future budget cuts. Due to the economic recession, there are apparently going to be some big changes around the school. None of my classes are going, so I'm not overly upset, but once they start pulling from the art department, I'm going to get pissed.

I'm going to leave you with one of my favorites from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is a competition for crafting the greatest badly-written literary sentence.

When he concentrated, his thick black eyebrows furrowed, looking not unlike a pair of Hypercompe scribonia caterpillars on a collision course over the bridge of his nose, but unlike them, his eyebrows would never evolve into giant leopard moths, and would find better places to hover after nightfall than around her 40-watt backporch light.

-Jane Auerbach

SotD

"Are Anne McCaffrey's Pern books fantasy because they have telepathic dragons, or science fiction because the dragons are supposed to be genetically engineered by space travelers?"-Prof. Orzel

this struck me as hilarious, although I'm uncertain as to why.