What's on Chuckle TV #14

Welcome to Chuckle TV! 
Every week I will be talking about what I have been watching in the world of TV, be it sport, documentaries, TV series, films, soaps or interesting news items. I'll be talking about favourites from the past and all the great sounding stuff that I haven't watched yet. Believe me, there are a lot of popular series that I haven't had the chance to see! Let the Count and I be your guide in the world of entertainment! Comments are welcome on what I'm currently watching but no spoilers please or your comments will not be published!

So it has been a while since I wrote a TV update, mainly because I've been watching a couple of long series and doing a ton of reading. 

Masterchef Australia season 5 was where the producers selected the top group based on personality and not cooking skill. Despite a few good cooks like Rishi, a lot of the cooking was poor and Clarissa the opera singer was the most obnoxious contestant I've ever seen on the show. Not good!

If season 5 was a bit poorer in quality, season 6 had it in spades! The challenges were tougher, the standard of cooking superb and there were a lot of people in it that I liked. This was Masterchef Australia back on form and I can't wait to see season 7 this year!

Book Review: A Job from Hell by Jayde Scott

The moment Amber starts her summer job in Scotland and sets eyes upon Aidan, her fate is sealed. Summoned by an ancient bond, she can never love another. Lost in the woods one night Amber enters Aidan's deadly world when she unknowingly participates in a paranormal race and promptly wins the first prize...a prize worth killing for.

In a world of forbidden love, ancient enemies, legends and rituals, nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted. Life will never be the same again, unless she enters the Otherworld. But to do so, Amber must die..

My Review:
This book is one of the worst that I attempted to read last year. In fact there are so many things that I hated about it that I barely know where to start.

Oh yes I do. As usual, the author decides to set a book in Scotland and do her best to make the country and its people look bad. A rural setting of course means that the place is a brooding hellhole in the middle of nowhere that sucks the life out of our wonderful heroine. It is of course filled with moronic locals that she is superior to in every way. Yes of COURSE we have the taxi driver who won't take you all the way to your destination, dumps you at the side of the road in the Scottish gloom and demands a higher payment than agreed. Of COURSE this first Scot that you meet is a mean con man! Of COURSE limited cell phone coverage because of the mountains means you are in a third world country! That seriously pisses me off. And before someone comments, I'm overusing 'of course' for emphasis.

The way the Scottish characters are written bugs me and the superior attitude that the snooty MC has towards them made me want to kill the dumb cow myself. Amber is a waste of cells. She is incapable of doing anything for herself including having a thought in her brain, never mind being hired to cook and look after a household. How in the hell would anyone hire this lazy bitch? What references did she have other than stupid and useless? Between her and her crooked asshat brother Dallas, there must have been some serious family inbreeding. Amber spends her first night there moaning, whining and refusing to follow simple instructions and as soon as Dallas says he's found valuable things in the woods, both are planning to sneak off to steal it! What the hell kind of characters are these idiots meant to be? I don't know what the hell the author is thinking having such muppets as the so called heroes of the book coz I just want to see them both die. Now.

And speaking of death, there was nothing of interest in the plot to liven things up. It is a dire Twilight wannabe with dreadful characters, a pathetic attempt at a love interest with the charm and personality of a mop and the badly written soul mate rubbish that was thrown together from the plot of almost every YA book I've read in the last two years. Add in the stupid inane dialogue that never seems to stop and a terrible writing style which had me rolling my eyes constantly. I hate to savage books but this one really was a dreadful waste of my time and I will never go near anything written by this author again, even if you paid me. It really was that bad and I have nothing positive to say about it.

Hated it. 

Book Review: The Rain pt1 by Joseph A Turkot

There are a lot of stories about how the rain started. The thing that always comes to mind first isn’t the how though, it’s the how much. Russell still does the math too: 15, 5,400, and 8,550. 15 inches a day, 5,400 a year, and 8,550 feet since the start. We have no idea if it’s accurate. But it’s important to think about it, he says, because it reminds us to keep moving. I’m Tanner. Russell plucked me from the rain when I was two.

Fourteen years ago we left Philadelphia. As the water rose, we moved west, hoping the elevation would keep us warm and dry. Pittsburg, Indianapolis, Sioux Falls, Rapid City. Now we’re stranded on the islands in Wyoming. Russell thinks they used to be the Bighorn mountains. But we can’t go back now. There’s no warm and there’s no dry anymore. Just a rumor about a place where it isn't raining. So we’re going to try to make it—520 miles south to Leadville. But we can’t drift east, the Great Plains have become waterspout alley, a raging tomb of moving water. Together we push on, surviving, heading to Leadville. But something is wrong with him now. He says it’s nothing. But his breathing doesn’t sound that way.

Exposure, pruned hands, and infection. But since, Rapid City, it’s the face eaters too. And the crack in the canoe that’s growing. And the ice I think I see on the water. Russell thinks it’s my imagination. We cling to the last strips of the veneer. And each other.

My Review:
I liked the sound of the plot for the book. A man and a girl try to survive together in a world flooded by many years of continual rain, trying to find a legendary town where the ground is high and the rain has stopped. They are tracked by face eaters, humans who are cannibals and want to eat other survivors to stay alive. With a sinking canoe and dwindling supplies, life is getting grim.

There is no real character development in the book. The two heroes barely speak to each other in the present or interact with each other to make you warm to them and their plight. Instead the author just tells us about things. We are told that Russell saves her. We are told that Russell educated her about how life used to be. We are told briefly of places they stayed. But we never SEE anything! We are never shown anything to draw us into their adventures. I found myself feeling as if I was reading a report about two strangers written by someone who never knew or cared about them. The thing that really annoyed me was her endless droning on about the veneer, a concept that made no sense to me and I had no interest in the countless times that she went on about it.

The book was just one long narrative which made the story drag. A lot of it talked about past events which seemed to be emotionless info dumps. It talks of how happy they were on a big cruiser but you never feel invested in the disaster that followed and you don't feel anything for the people that they lost. There was no detail about that disaster which was a pity. It could have been covered in a dream that she was having where the reader gets to see and feel what happens instead of just being blandly told about it. We only get a few bits about that boat, usually just the rumours that the passengers exchanged and then we get told the hurricane came, they fought over life boats and that is all the detail we get. It is like one long monologue about the places that they have visited and what we saw there, but there is little detail of interest and no emotion in the writing at all.

The period set in the present should have been more interesting but it was not. They are being tailed by cannibals who want to take their supplies and kill them, but the lack of emotion in the writing meant that there was no tension building or scary moments. It was all described in that same kind of dull monotone that goes right through the story. There was no excitement or feeling of danger and it was just a bit dull. The author never swept me up in the story or got me to feel anything for his characters so I was never invested in it.

I found reading this to be more of a chore than a pleasure to be honest and I certainly will not be reading on with the rest of this series. It is disappointing because I have read some really good short stories by this author. 

Stacking the Shelves #65

Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga’s Reviews

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! Click on the link under the book to find its page on Goodreads or Smashwords.

                  

Please note that I always leave a message on your STS/SP if you visit me, but if you use DISQUS or a similar third party I will not be able to leave a comment on your page. And sometimes, I have problems leaving messages on blogs hosted by Wordpress. 

So here we are in a New Year at last and I've got my first haul of the year. More effort needs to be made to get through my tbrs and I've already finished my first book of the year. Yay! Well, it's a start I guess. I need more time to catch up on all these great TV series that I want to watch as well so getting both done could be a bit tricky!

This week is a small haul, just a few books that I picked up in the last few days to start off my year. I need to show some restraint in January so my tbr seems to be going down, not up!

FREE DOWNLOADS:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18528870-flesh-worn-stone

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17322991-masterchef-cookery-course

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8064867-the-zombies-of-lake-woebegotten 

 

 

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Another Year and a New Start

I have finally seen the back of 2014 and I'm glad because it was the worst year of my life so far. Watching someone you love battle cancer is one of the worst things ever and we lost my mum to it after a seven month ordeal in June. Having to then deal with all the practical and financial things over the following months sent my stress levels soaring. It took until November to sort things out and my dad and I are just tired, stressed and trying to get on with things. Christmas, normally our favourite time of the year, was cancelled this year. I doubt we will do anything for Christmas again. Does it get better? I certainly hope so.

So it is 2015 now and I have to concentrate on getting fully back into my normal routine. I have a massive tbr of 650 books that need to be tackled. Most of these are real books sitting on bookshelves in my bedroom. About 130 are on the ereaders. I need to catch up on a lot of series that I started and didn't get round to finishing. Through the end of the year I finished Kelley Armstrongs's 'Women of the Otherworld' which went out with a whimper not a bang and Charlaine Harris 'Sookie Stackhouse' series which came to a satisfying end. I am currently finishing Alyxandra Harvey's 'Drake Chronicles'-I'm on the last book now. I still have to finish a lot of series ie:

Benedict Jacka-Alex Verus
Rachel Caine-Morganville Vampires
Patricia Briggs-Mercy Thompson
Jennifer Rardin-Jaz Parks
Kevin Hearne-Iron Druid
Jennifer Estep-Elemental Assassin
Carrie Vaughn-Kitty Norville
David Estes-The Dwellers

Lots of reading ahead! I also need to catch up on all the TV series that I haven't even started to watch yet like Game of Thrones, Grimm, Lost Girl, Scandal, Homeland, Haven, Sanctuary, Warehouse 13,  Arrow, The Flash, House of Cards US, Teen Wolf, Dollhouse, Strike Back, Vikings, The Strain, Agents of SHIELD, Bitten, Defiance, The Following, The Blacklist, Hannibal, The Leftovers, Once upon a time, Legends, The 100, Penny Dreadful, Resurrection etc. 

I also need to catch up with series I have started watching like The Walking Dead, Nikita, 24, NCIS, NCIS LA, Lost, and lots more. Busy year ahead!

On the blog, I will be uploading more film and book reviews, a few chuckles rants about things in the news, updates on what I'm reading and watching and perhaps a few polls and tens lists to amuse and entertain. Thanks to everyone who has stuck with my blog during these times when I've had limited posting. I hope to avoid that this year, health issues permitting.

Good health to all of you and may your book shelves never be empty!!!