Robynettely

This was in the corporate library, highly recommended by the director of my group, so in order to kiss ass a little bit in a way that is of low cost to me (as I read a lot anyway), I picked it up. My favourite part of this book was on p.7. This is where the author mentioned that Yes! Attitude is in fact trademarked, so if you want to use it in your powerpoints or other training material, you have to contact him first. He talked early on about the difference between stupid and hokey. Stupid doesn't work; hokey does. I liked that. However, I didn't even pay for this book (it came out of the corporate library), and I felt ripped off by it. Every few pages, there was a comment to "check out the author's website and enter in this secret code in order to find out the seven ways that you can sell shit to people with diarrhea" or whatever. I am already investing time in this book, I don't want to have to save my place, go boot up the computer, go to the website and pr...

This is I believe book 12 of a series. I haven't read any of the preceding books. It's an interesting exercise to read, because I always feel like editors force authors to put in little explanations for the benefit of people who haven't read the other books, and those little gifts are annoying to me as a reader-from-the-beginning. Well, let me tell you, those little gifts are annoying to me as a reader-for-this-volume-only as well. I wish there was a better way to work in that Marianne was Anita's therapist a little more smoothly. I feel like the editor wrote on "Introduce" or something in various spots, and the author did so in the most hostile way possible. There was no massaging. Either that, or the author was writing 1300 words per day come hell or high water in order to finish the draft and had a projected page count that was way higher than suited the plot, so it was all written stream-of-consciousness. So the book opens with a wedding, and then our hero...

Every once in a while something happens that reminds me that I've lived here a really long time. I mean, usually we live our separate lives, Toronto and me. I don't attend any of the fabulous cultural activities that are available here, or visit many of its sights or sites, or dine in any of the fine, unique restaurants. But today my old apartment burned down. I walked past it on the news on the TV near my desk a few times this morning -- 6 alarm blaze, Queen St. W. I thought nothing of it. A colleague pointed it out as some big fire, and said a famous, historic bike shop had burned down. I said I'd bought a bike there, and felt I'd been ripped off. (That was wrong, actually. I bought the bike farther down Queen W., and it was when I was still thinking the fire was on the north side. That was probably because the TV faced northwest in my office, which is a little snippet of insight into my bizarre geographical sense and nothing else.) Someone else came in and said ...

I didn't like the first hundred or so pages that much. I felt like it needed massaging. It seemed like the first book in a harry potter-like series, they were trying to set too much up. There was too much dialog, not enough action. And every once in a while it felt like DL was introducing an item just to move the plot along. The book opens with the death of 12-year-old Stephanie's uncle. At the funeral and then the reading of the will, Stephanie sees the title character. She's left pretty much everything in the will, except for a car, a boat, a vacation home, and some ugly jewellery. She decides to stay in her new mansion overnight, and that's when the bad things start to happen. Eventually things improved. The characters stopped talking quite so much and started doing things. They bought clothes and rode around in cars, got horrible injuries just like adults in thrillers and kept going anyway in order to save the world. They did magic and created alliances and got doub...

Nonfiction, horribly depressing. I read this over Christmas, actually. My dad had asked for it, I think because the author went to BU (though not at the same time as him). It's about why so many US women have bad birthing experiences (C-sections and inductions, etc). It seemed extremely one-sided, and the doctors and OB/GYNs came off pretty badly. And as usual, the drug companies didn't come off that well, either. I would have found the argument more convincing if every mention of the doctors doing all this inducing and C-sectioning hadn't been so snide. The book made me think, though. For example, one time I was sitting around chatting with a couple of female coworkers, and I said I had been induced, and one of the others said "oh, we were all induced". Interesting. Why? And that in Canada, not the US, where the book is about. I have a short story in my head about this, actually. Maybe when I'm done the draft of what I'm working on now (when I'm done ...