I spend a lot of my time on the internet, but one of my favorite homes is YouTube. I don't recall how long I've been watching Mamrie and I'm sure I could probably find out, but I'm lazy so suffice to say that I've been watching her videos for many years. Mostly she posts videos where she decides what celebrity in the news most deserves a dang drink that week and makes a cocktail tribute to them. I'm not much of a drinker to be honest, but what has always gripped me is her comedic timing and inability to string three sentences together without making a pun. I also don't like puns... Maybe it's something to do with the fact that I have only a soft spot for food or drink related puns. Maybe I'm just bitter that I don't have the brain capacity to make puns so I pretend I hate them while deep down I'm giving a serious and bracing high-five to the punner. This woman is an actor, a YouTuber, a brilliant and sassy comedian and now she's written a book about her insane booze fueled adventures. I've been putting off reading this book though I've had it for maybe a year, which seems to be a pattern of mine and one I'm trying to correct by running a book blog. I picked this one up off the pile because I'd just read a funny book and damn if I felt like I needed another funny one. As with anything Mamrie puts her hand to, this book has a built in drinking game. On her channel, if she makes a terrible pun, you take a drink. In an effort not to give everyone alcohol poisoning however, the book criterion are slightly different but just as delightful to look out for. Drink every time she references an old tv show, talks about a product you could buy at a convenience store or uses a slang term for genitalia. I have the benefit of many years of Mamrie videos which give me the super power of reading this book in her actual voice. Look at this. She made a video with Jamie Oliver. She's like... semi-famous? She's made two movies with her best friends. I quite like her, but I wasn't sure what to expect out of a book from her. So far I'm finding it refreshing and hilarious in that actual laugh out loud kind of way. Who laughs out loud at a book?! Me, apparently. Read it in a raucous and slightly southern accent and you've got yourself a good time. So let's get down to business. I read this sucka in TWO DAYS you guys. Two. It's broken up into chapters that you could definitely read individually - there's no specific plot but rather a theme. At the beginning of each chapter she includes a cocktail recipe, and OH BOY do they relate in a big way to what you're about to experience. Some of these chapter titles/cocktail names include: Framing The Cookie, Key Lime Crime, The Angry Brazilian (which calls for jalapeno-infused cachaca and I want IN MY MOUTH), and Right In The Nuts, which is not as crude as you might first suspect, but is definitely another recipe I want to try, involving cola, homemade grenadine, white rum and peanuts. YES. Not only does she give you amazing cocktail ideas, but an amazing backstory that you'll most likely recall when you make them. This is the book that keeps on giving.
"For the grenadine, all you are going to need is unsweetened pomegranate juice, sugar and half a lemon. We aren't making that radioactive sh*t people put in Shirley Temples - this is the real stuff." - Mamrie Hart I work in a call center, and in between receiving calls I was reading this quietly or... not so quietly, to myself. Cue me stifling giggles all day because I didn't want to have to explain the hilarious and often dirty jokes peppered liberally throughout this entire book. Biographies are not for me as a general rule, but this book was so funny I'd consider adding the genre to my reading rotation. I think the only other biography or at least non-fiction/book-about-me that I've read was Russell Brand's BookyWook. You can probably make plenty of assumptions about the kind of people I find entertaining. This book was a 9 out of 10. So good. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to have a laugh, anyone who likes to drink casually, anyone who likes ridiculous stories... it's comedy gold mixed with real-life aw moments and disbelief. I love it. I went on a Mamrie video spree in order to finish this the other night and ended up weeping with laughter SHE'S TOO MUCH. Oh. Do yourself a favour and get a copy. "Needless to say I couldn't be more thankful to have this absurdly sweet, reincarnated-vaudevillian-entertainer-meets-DIY-driven-hillbilly-sass-factory in my life. And now she's created a book that let's you into hers. THANK GOD. Take it from someone who has watched her scoop room service lasagna off a carpeted hotel-room floor and eat it: None of what you're about to read is exaggerated, fabricated or G-rated. But it is, like her, special." - Grace Helbig
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You know that feeling when you pick up a book and in the first few pages you can tell it's going to be a real good one? I get that feeling when I open the crisp, somber pages of a Neil Gaiman book or the tattered, well loved pages of a Terry Pratchett novel. Anything Discworld has always been one hell of an adventure in silliness, expanding my world view and managing to be so hilarious that at some point I will be crying with laughter, guaranteed. That incredible man had a way of weaving the most hectic of storylines into something truly incomprehensible and utterly beloved. Neil Gaiman is a new favorite of mine but definitely a firm one. The few novels I have read of his so far have been wonderfully inventive - he dwells in the darker places of fiction and even if you'd not call him straight up inventive, he does have a certain knack for tying together established mythology, religious iconography, and bizarre character builds in a way that entertains and informs in just the right mix. The first thing I notice about the book is Terry's style of peppering the pages with asterisks and corresponding notes for perusal. This is something I had to get used to the first time I picked up The Colour Of Magic. I'll be honest, I was not a fan at first, but he has a talent for choosing just the right point in the narrative to pause and fill you in on some relevant detail or anecdote that enriches the story before you can plunge right back in. So far the book feels as though Pratchett is writing dialogue in a framework extensively mapped out and furnished by Gaiman and I can only approve. Together they've take a fantastically bizarre idea and set two incredibly well suited writing styles to the task of telling a story together. Brilliant. What we're looking at here is basically a comedy based around the birth of the son of Satan and The End Times, or, basically... The Apocalypse. Oh. It's honestly a real treat. I know I have a fondness for religious icons being blown out of proportion, satirized, given motivations no one has thought of before... I watch Supernatural for goodness sake. Crowley, at one point the King of Hell, has to be one of my favorite characters, and in Good Omens he is present as one of the main characters. His roots lie in the serpent from the Garden of Eden who tempts Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. He explains his name as having been based off his original name, Crawley, which he ultimately decides isn't really working for him. Silly little details like this make the story immediately seem well thought out and fun, at page one, I'm so ready for this journey.
I don't want to give too much away about the story line in case you're one of the few people in the reading community who haven't read this, as always I try to keep my posts relatively spoiler free as much as I possibly can. There's certainly a knack to writing about a biblical subject without it being horrendously boring and dry, or without making it so hilariously cliche` that you're unable to see past the entirely comedic nature. Here lies the ingenuity of a Pratchett/Gaiman crossover. While Pratchett is a master of bizarrely colourful comedy, Gaiman offsets quirky characters with just the right amount of seriousness. Take the subject of the apocalypse and the arrival of the Anti-Christ - in our story we have representations of the four horsemen who are weirdly glossed over in a way that doesn't directly point them out to be what they truly are and allows readers to fill in the gaps with their own presumptions. In terms of War, Famine, Pestilence (aka the Anti-Christ) and Death, on the opposite side of the story these characters are juxtaposed with child-like versions down to a wonderfully feminine embodiment of War, though these characters ride bicycles instead of the traditional apocalyptic steed. By telling part of the story through the eyes of the children, although the subject matter and overall tone of the story is bordering on creepy, a knifes edge balance is maintained until you switch back to the perspective of a descendant of Agnes Nutter and everything becomes a little ridiculous again. I love the way Pratchett stories flow, feeling in the beginning as though you're quite keeping up with what's happening, to realise that weird stuff is flying all over the place and you're able to keep up with plot twists and barely relevant notes to the point that he makes you wonder if you're mad or just a very capable reader. I always end up feeling like a capable reader. "...there was an ancient woodcut of a man pushing his head through the back of the world, past the sky, and seeing the cogs and the wheels and the engines that drove the universe machine. That's what people do in Terry Pratchett books, even if the people doing it are sometimes rats and sometimes small girls... They open their heads." - Neil Gaiman. Final Verdict 8 out of 10 Brilliant comedic timing, a blend of two incredible story tellers collaborating on an often dry subject and creating something amazing. I recommend the hell out of this book. If you find that stories crawl and you end up putting them down because you find you're not engaged, try this book. In loving memory of Sir Terry Pratchett (April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015) who enriched my tiny world with the Discworld, and because no one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. ![]() Book four of 2017 is complete! Title: Ruin and Rising Author: Leigh Bardugo Published: 2014 Genre: YA, Fantasy Pages: 370 Finish Date: 02.02.2017 Read If You Enjoy: Books by Sarah J Maas or Tamora Pierce, Harry Potter, magic, Game of Thrones without someone dying on every second page. A significant factor in my reading choices is my love for fairy tales. I collect fairy tales, folklore, fables, stories that have been told across the world for hundreds of years. There's something about fairy tales that form us as young people. They are filled with wonder, heroism, triumph over the dark... that is what this series is about. Defeating the darkness. I don't want to give much away about the story line itself, as this is the third book, so my focus with this will mostly be broader topics, Bardugo's writing and story-craft, the feelings and opinions evoked by the story. The other thing that really grasps me about the world this series is set in is the motivating cultures behind the writing. We are very familiar with English magic, with tales set somewhere in a vaguely UK based country. Lord Of The Rings, Magician, Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones. The cultures that make up this universe are based on Russia, Scandinavia and China. Magic here is called the Small Science and the people who practice it are the Grisha. Magic is believed to be a natural extension of the world around them but this is not widely acknowledged by folk who have no ability, which does seem to vary upon location. As you can imagine, this creates a lot of tension, fear, hostility and even persecution. Depends on where you are in the world as to whether you are welcomed, valued and needed, or dissected - there are safe places to be born with ability and there are places where it is a death sentence. You can safely assume that this makes up the basis of the problems faced by the main characters. By the time we reach book three our characters have been brought from low to high to low again and we are sure of their ability to endure but bewildered as to how they will face ongoing difficulty. They must find a way to overcome a smooth-tongued tyrant who has been lying to the world for decades and is really very, very good at it. He has a particular fondness of the main character Alina, but in a possessive way. He wants to own her so he can own her power, which is the only thing that threatens to bring down his grand chaotic plans. Her only hope lies in the folklore of her world - buried in fables are the secret to unlocking a greater power within herself in order to defeat the Darkling. This trilogy? Twist after twist, after twist. Leigh Bardugo manages to build up the world and bring it crashing down time after time without burning you to the point that you want to stop reading. Periods of sweetness and hope set against a background of great anguish. Camaraderie sprinkled with torture, mutilation and rescues. Some rescues are just in time. Some are not. The twist at the end of this book... I was reading at work just before I was about to start my shift and I nearly burst into tears. There was a single tear that slipped down my face as Bardugo ripped my heart out and crushed it in her hand. The worst part is, she foreshadowed this moment so thoroughly that I didn't ever believe it was really the only way to defeat The Darkling. I honestly thought they'd find another way and I couldn't have been more naive, but that's the way I like it. I don't find much enjoyment in dissecting a story and certainly not before I've finished the whole thing - guessing at how it's going to end is so boring, why would anyone do it!? Figure out the mystery, who-dunnit, detective novels and pat yourself on the back, but don't make me unravel a fantasy story. We all know the world is going to be better off by the time the story is finished, I just don't want to know how. So I'll leave the plot points unsaid and let you read if you will. I really enjoyed this series, and I enjoyed the other series Leigh Bardugo sets in the Grishaverse - Six of Crows, which occurs in one of the cities barely visited in the other books and is centered mostly around a magically unremarkable underbelly. It's filthy, gritty, enhanced by a sprinkling of Grisha intrigue, full of mobsters, swindlers, pleasure houses and brawling. I wish there was an actual genre based around this kind of fantasy because I WOULD READ EVERY BOOK THERE IS. Upcoming this year will be a review on my favorite book series, The Gentlemen Bastards which is based on a similar but way cooler premise, and involves no magic, just incredible cunning.
Verdict - 7 out of 10 It's decent YA, it's simple to get into and to understand, easy to read. Give it a go if you find real world fiction boring as hell but want to read more often. |
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