our out of you’re mind.”

That was about the worst sentence I ever read in a book purchased off a shelf, a little vanity press number I got from a local bookstore by a local author (perhaps “Author” is too strong a word here. “Typist” might be better).

I’ve read bad books before. Sometimes they come at you at times in your life (see, at least I know how to use “your”) when you are not in the mood for its mystery, its adventure, its craziness. But sometimes they are bad. And occasionally they are awful.

Yeah, I’ve read a couple of bad books that have come through agencies. Some have political agendas they play against straw men (which is like watching a child be victorious with toy soldiers). Some are too slow, too fast, their concepts preposterous. But sometimes they are just bad.

And as a reviewer, I have to be careful on this. Usually if I’m not happy with a book at all, I’ll gently point out why I didn’t like it and what my problem was. Of course, this once earned me a rebuke from an author angry that I did not get the point of his mercenaries chortling over a bone-chilling plan to allow a comrade to die – he claimed they were being “subtle”. But in the case of my opening line above, it was in a truly horrible book, one loaded with typos and grammatical errors. In the end, the hero enjoyed a stroke of luck so good I half-expected God Himself to take a bow. Let me put it this way, I HATED that book. I grimaced as I flipped every page, I watched it get worse and worse, but I stuck with it. In the end, I looked at it and decided I couldn’t review it. There was NOTHING good I could say about it. And I know that authors tend to find their books on my site – it’s happened several times in the past.

So I skipped it. Tossed the book in the trash and shuddered to think of it. But yes, there is nothing I can do about reviewing a truly awful book.

And seriously, anyone who ever read or watched Cloud Atlas might know why that was. And like I said, he was a local author. Or typist. Or whatever he was.

He wasn’t a writer, that’s for sure.

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