Work has been interesting. The students and faculty are checking out books and asking for help with research so I guess things are headed in the right direction. I've created an access database to keep better records of the resources and Populi has upgraded their ILS feature which has made my life a little easier. I can delete resources and change cover pictures now! Very exciting stuff. My boss would be harder to deal with if we worked in the same building but fortunately we don't. She's a driven woman and I believe she's a nice enough person but her idea of management is to criticize every time she sees you. I think it's her way of letting you know she's watching. This would be very depressing if I wasn't getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone else.
My project of "put call numbers on book spines" is going nicely. The only thing I'm really having a little difficulty with is getting more support from the faculty. There are a few full-time staff that are really including me in the academics but without an order from above the rest of them have no incentive to incorporate what I can offer into their lesson plans. I've sent out emails and posted on the Populi news feed but I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. I'll work on it.
Now on to First Drop. Much like the movie Shutter Island seemed to last six hours, First Drop seemed to last about five years. This was not a good book. Now I don't say this because it was badly written or plotted. I say this because Sharp's characters are some of the most obnoxious, flat, and self-absorbed I've ever read. Charlie Fox has her first job as a bodyguard watching out for a fifteen year old Floridian boy named Trey. She got the job from her boyfriend/boss , Sean, the only character who isn't completely unlikable but this may be because he has no personality and is hardly in the book at all. Anyway, Charlie has come over from England for her first American job. The author obviously did some research or took a vacation in Florida or something so that aspect wasn't too terrible. The dialogue though wasn't particularly good and that was rather distracting. All the teenagers sounded like fake Californian valley girls and Ms. Sharp doesn't seem to realize that certain grammatical rules apply even to speech filled with "like" and "totally". The retired CIA agent Walt and his nephew were constantly calling Charlie "missy" and "little lady" which was just inappropriate under the circumstances and just in general most of the dialogue was filled with colloquial American English that would be right in certain cases but that she didn't know how to use properly. There were a few things that were obviously British in-jokes, like having a character named "Randy" and having the teenagers not understand sarcasm (or as she called it, "irony". Here's an interesting post on the difference between the way the two countries look at this topic http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarcasm-and-irony.html) Teenagers are generally the masters of this form of communication. The other thing that stuck out was the plot point wherein Charlie and Trey are on the beach and oh no! they are in trouble because the police are checking everybody's IDs (due to a murder committed nearly 200 miles away) and once the police get to them they'll be finished! They've got to get away! And I'm like, wait, what gives the police the right to randomly demand all beach-goers to present their IDs? Oh, and apparently Ms. Fox and Trey rode the 240 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona on a motorcycle. And not on I-95 which would make sense but on a state road which would lengthen their journey to about 6 hours. They must've needed an alarm clock and smelling salts just to wake their backsides up enough to not fall flat on their faces as soon as they dismounted.
As for Charlie herself. She was utterly unprofessional: She expected the adolescent she was supposed to protect to do her job for her. He's her charge and she should expect nothing from him. She's utterly without the ability to empathize or put herself in another's shoes: When Trey gets upset and storms off during a conversation where it becomes clear that his father may have hired people to kill him she huffs and thinks to herself that she doesn't have time to deal with "a stroppy teenager". She's incompetent: When things started getting dangerous, instead of dragging a fifteen year old around with her while she tries to clear her name she should have driven to another state, dropped him off at a police station and then made her way to the British embassy. Trey would have been protected, fewer people would have died, and things would generally have been less of a mess. She's completely self-absorbed: When Trey, who has understandable trust issues, questions her commitment to protecting him after she uses him as a human meat shield, she gets angry that he would question her ability to do her job.
Charlie Fox is basically a horrible human being. When she gets upset at Trey's inability to deal with all the mayhem she tells him that people died because of him and that she herself killed a man for his sake. That is not cool. She argues the semantics of sex with him and angrily blurts out her gang-rape in the hopes that further traumatizing him might make him think twice before participating in one himself (I have no idea why she thought he might to begin with.) Her feelings are the only ones she allows to be valid. She's always in the right. She's a bad ass fighter who gains fanboys and can pass for a teenager. She's basically a really weird self-insert character.
Anyway, the majority of the characters were horrible people, the main character being the worst. I also have to remark on the female characters. There are only three other females in the book among the multitude of guys. One is a matronly female who makes pancakes. She's of no consequence. The other is a teenager who acts as support to Charlie; buying her supplies, smoothing the mood, and doing a little fangirling. The other is a hard nosed cowardly bitch who acts (badly) as a red herring and is summarily shot. Charlie is not allowed competition.
Okay, I just need to get that off my chest. I don't know why I bothered finishing the book. It was teeth grinding-ly bad. It was so bad I don't think I could make a semi-humorous post about it though I might like to try.
I'm re-charging with other books. I read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, an alternative interpretation of the series. I don't quite like the way he portrayed Watson but for a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper book (something that's been done to death by now) it's quite good.
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