The Manic Attack

Books I've read - the good, the bad and the ugly

Week 26, prompt 6 - "Welcome To My Reality Forum"  - "Tell us about the books you've read this year. Do you change genres very often? How long does it take you to read a book? Is reading a chore or a last resort against boredom, or is it a much loved and anticipated part of your day?"

The books I’ve read this year so far range from non-fiction to trashy fiction, I’m sorry to say. I read a couple of handbooks on classroom management for high school teachers, which took me two days, and they were loaded with tons of helpful tips for new teachers and how to manage the classroom and the students when just starting out. That’ll definitely come in handy when I go for my student teaching internship, because I don’t want to go in there cold turkey with no experience or any knowledge on what I’m doing there. I do have classroom and teaching experience, though. I was an after-school program tutor/teacher for elementary school students, with the grades ranging from K-6. Kindergarteners were the worst, and I hated teaching them. I liked the older students much better. They were more focused and disciplined and knew what they were doing and confident with it. I have all the patience in the world when it comes to students, but the younger ones were definitely difficult, more so than the others. I also did an internship at a high school in a French class (that’s my major, and I intend on teaching high school French) but the master teacher at that high school didn’t let me interact with the students much. It was more of an observation type situation, which was boring as hell.

Another book I read and I’m ashamed to admit it is Fifty Shades of Grey, which took me a couple of weeks, and I'll tell you why. I originally read it because I’ve heard a lot of hype about it and wanted to see what the big deal was. Well, the big deal was really that there was a cheesy sex scene every other page, I kid you not. I was getting so tired of reading poorly-written erotica that when I finally finished the novel, it was a relief. The story continues into a second and finally third book, and although I started the second one in hopes of finding something better there, I was disappointed in the plot line and simply gave up. I like erotica, don’t get me wrong, but raunchy erotica that’s written by somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing is not my cup of tea. Reading any book by a poor writer is just painful. I’m ashamed to admit this as well, but a few years ago I read the entire Twilight saga, all 4 books. I originally watched the first movie first, and when I found out there were books, I had to read them. Little did I know that it would be so ridiculous, reading 400 pages of complete fluff and fillers. I kept waiting for that “moment” to happen in each novel but it never came, which was a huge letdown. I can’t stand published authors who take 300-400 pages to tell a frickin story. Be concise, for the love of God. Be a wordsmith and get to the point sooner rather than later. The only novel I’ve read over 300 pages that I didn’t think was fluff was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. That book was amazing, and gripped me from beginning to end. 50 Shades and Twilight, however, leave much to be desired. Tsk tsk.