Minor Frustrations

Although most of the books I review for Green Man Review come directly from Green Man Review, occasionally publishers will send me ARCs out of the blue. A few weeks ago, I received a copy of The Poisoned Crown by Amanda Hemingway, thought "Hmm, this looks relatively pleasant," and put it underneath Duty and Desire. I picked it up today, after zooming through Duty and Desire (the ending was surprising, and definitely not one I think Jane Austin might have come up with), and discovered that it was the last book in a trilogy. Which means 1) I can't read it right away because I've tried reading later books in series and it drives me absolutely insane unless I've read the books that came before. 2) It means I have to get the first two books at the library, and that means 3) I have to do an omnibus review because there's really no point in contributing a review of the last book of a trilogy if website don't already have reviews of the first two books. Argh!

So, until The Greenstone Grail comes in at the library, I'm going to relax and read My First Official Romance Novel - Bet Me. I've read the blog Smart B---- Who Love Trashy Novels (I can't swear during Lent this year), and I've wanted to try romance ever since, but I never had the time because I usually had a huge stack of fantasy novels to read, than a huge stack of University books to read, and then another huge stack of fantasy novels that were given/bought for me during the school year that I hadn't read yet because of the aforementioned University novels. Well, now I'm going to read it - refresh my palate, I guess, with purely fun books before I start again on the Review Books. Either way, I'm going to try and mark it with my New Marking System, and give you guys an informal review of it when I'm done.

My New Marking System, you say? Whatever could that be? Again, reading the Smart B---- website, I learned one of the writers dog-eared the pages of the novels she reviewed - she dog-eared the tops of pages that had passages she loved, and dog-eared the bottoms of pages that confused her or had stuff in them that she didn't like. I'm kind of obsessive-compulsive about the state of my books (I'm overcome with disappointment if I crease the spine, even), so I'm using tiny post-its instead, but they should do the trick. A post-it on the top of a page means I liked it, and on the side means I hated it. It promises to be an interesting experiment, because oftentimes after I read a book I can be kind of "m'eh" and not know exactly what I thought of it. Comparing the bad parts to the good parts might help.