Book of the Month: Infernal (June 2017)

June 2017

Infernal (Mark De Jager)

(I’m not sure if it is part of a series)

The good part about finding that first Book of the Month was that I also found the second Book of the Month at the same time. I was scrolling through my wife’s Borrowbox app and noticed where a reviewer had described this book as more John Wick than John Wick. I’m not even sure what that means but as it turns out, understanding isn’t a prerequisite for excitement! Best of all I got the impression that if there was fucking then it was incidental to the story and after the first book, that was a relief.

We meet to grade June’s Book of the Month on its level of John Wickness at the German Club in late June.

As an aside, my wife has joined a rival Book Club and attended their first meeting recently. Firstly, it was fishy this one started in the same month as mine and secondly, how can you have a Book Club meeting somewhere that doesn’t serve alcohol? It makes no sense.

I assume they were all stoned.

Find all prior Book of the Month links and Reviews here!

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BotM Review: Romulus

Book Review:

Romulus (Marilyn Campbell)

The Innerworld Affairs Series, Book 1

A cautionary tale.

As promised, I did start the May 2017 book of the month but I never finished it. I just couldn’t get into the thing. The writing wasn’t bad, there was action and flow wasn’t as interrupted with constant fucking as I original thought it would be. Of course the fucking was indeed constant but it remained relatively contextual. The main problem was that the book tried to make me feel stuff, stuff that wasn’t relevant to the storyline. It was almost as if to relate to the heroine I needed to have had a troubled upbringing to even understand half the thoughts passing through her head.

I did discuss this book with my wife as well, although our conversation entailed me asking her to read a page and when she was finished I asked if she was up for what they described. She was game, obviously, but we found that their description was sadly lacking in detail or the characters were contortionists of some kind. So in a rather accurate way, reading this book directly caused me to hurt my back.

Additionally, the writer used the word ‘impale’ as a sex-verb during a vigorous session. I’m not up on the romantic fiction meta-game but I sort of remember a television interview with Fabio around 20 years ago (my memory works weird). He said that word wasn’t viewed favourably by the female demographic. If this reference was true then the book may have been aimed at a rather specific male demographic. A male demographic who was into science fiction and who want their scenes sprinkled with mental trauma, angst and lots and lots of wordy sentences about ever changing emotional states. Call me old fashioned but I prefer my space opera simple: someone pointing a laser gun at someone and then quipping, “Enjoy the light show”, before firing.

And if there needs to be fucking then by all means get busy, but I’m not sure anyone needs to be impaled.

(Refresh me on this whole Book Club thing)

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Book of the Month: Romulus (May 2017)

May 2017 - Refresh me on this whole Book Club thing

Romulus (Marilyn Campbell)

The Innerworld Affairs Series, Book 1

I’m not sure what I find more unsettling, the fact that Borrowbox on my wife’s tablet collectively groups romantic fiction under the SciFi & Fantasy genre or that the cover art on this selection may demonstrate a subconscious yearning on my part for chiselled men who may or may not be aliens. It wasn’t clear. In any case, I had been scrolling through the list for some time and ran out of patience, so this is the Book of the Month for May.

This isn’t going to be representative of future books but does illustrate the randomness of these type of decisions. You may hate it or you may love it, but to refresh on the point of all this: that is point of all this. Next meeting will be Sunday 28 May, so curl up, get in some ‘me time’ and start reading.

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