Brief book review: Good times, bad boys by Melanie Murray

Still catching up on the book review backlog. Have I mentioned that I've been having insomnia problems and turned to books? Expect at least two more reviews this week.

I decided that liked Miss Bubbles enough that I ordered another of Melanie Murray's novels:


Good Times, Bad Boys by Melanie Murray

Twitter-sized review: A "why not to date a musican" story seemingly patterned after this list. Funny and adorable

Longer Notes: I actually liked this better than Miss Bubbles Steals the Show, perhaps because I found it much easier to identify with the music journalist protagonist and musicans than I could with the actress protagonist. Echo is a little more driven and in some ways little less hapless, while still feeling very fallibly human in a romance-protagonist sort of way. But the real sell of this book is how incredibly funny it is. Seriously, it's like the author took this list about writers (or some similar one about musicians) and brought it all to life in living colour. (I could see this as a movie, easily!) It's incredibly adorable and hilarious and I most definitely recommend this one if you're looking for a bit of fun.

"one book a week, one a month, one a year...?"

books
by brody4.

Before I started high school, I had to have some sort of interview with the vice principals of my proposed school. To this day, I don't know exactly what the purpose of this interview was, although I suspect it was more for my parents than for me in that it gave them a chance to check out the school I was planning to attend.

The most memorable part of the actual interview was when they decided to ask me how much I read. "So, one book a week, one a month, one a year...?" I was absolutely horrified of the idea of reading only one book a year. I read three a week, easily.

I figured that with the responsibilities of an adult living on her own, I'd never be able to average three novels a week ever again. So imagine my surprise when I looked at the books I've reviewed for January. In 31 days, I have read six full novels and five graphic novels, half of the next novel in the queue, listened to most of an audiobook, and about a quarter of a non-fiction book that I'm taking slowly for my research discussion group.

That's getting awfully close to three books a week right there.

I'd feel guilty about it, but my scientific writing process requires me to get completely away from the document so that I can see it with fresh eyes when I revise, so those books are providing me with a great way to work more efficiently. That might sound like a justification, but when I don't read, I do other things: play games, make crafts, do exercises, do chores. I think of all these things as necessary distraction tasks, like the shape rotation ones they use in psych studies -- if I don't have them, the process just doesn't work.

So I guess I'm just going to channel my inner teenager and be proud of all that reading.