 Okay folks before I get on with the business of this book tag video I want to remind everybody about the famous monsters month that's going on at the 50th Street Studio Channel. I'm hosting double features of all the classic monster movies every Saturday in October. We have two weekends left, four movies including Bride of Frankenstein, Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Godzilla. It will all wind up on Halloween night, October 31st with Creature from the Black Lagoon and Godzilla. Link is right here. Please join us. You will enjoy it. This is a video that I should have shot three weeks ago. I saw someone else I follow on YouTube do a try a chapter book tag video and I was like oh I forgot about the try a chapter book tags. I've done plenty of those before. I should do one now. It'll give me an excuse to read to start reading more books and to inject some variety. So I dug through my books looking for titles with Halloween horror death themed titles and I picked out five. All five of them were good. I enjoyed what I read of all five of them. Different levels of enjoyment but we'll get to that and I'll show them to you right now. The first one I found was The Floating Zombie by D.F. Jones. It has the word zombie in it so I assumed okay it's a horror book and even when I bought this I assumed it was about a ghost ship but turns out it isn't. It's not horror it's science fiction. It's about an automated cargo ship. There are five people recruited to act as a minimal skeleton crew for this new robot ship that some guy has invented. I read the first 40 pages or so it was an easy read enjoyable not thrilling. There was a great deal of old-school sexism even though I did enjoy the reading there was a lot of old-school sexism. It's obviously what this is going to be about. There's one woman on the crew. The four men are immediately going to start competing for her attention. She has a terrible scar down one half of her face and they've decided she's taken this gig to try to hide from humanity but all of them have decided they're going to pursue her anyway. It's clear from the beginning that that's what's going to happen but I still I found the writing readable. This is not something that I would continue to read even though it was okay even though I was fine with it so I probably won't continue with this one. Next it's a book I picked up at a public library bookstore in Las Vegas when I visited Vegas last year The Keep. I think it's a title that we're all familiar with because it was made into a movie in the mid 80s and it's well known because of that and again I read the first 40 or 50 pages and I have to say it's well written. F. Paul Wilson did a really good job of setting up the premise and getting right to the meat of the story. It takes place in World War II. A Nazi commander is assigned to this ancient Keep in the Transylvanian Mountains. He wonders why. They received a letter from the previous commander who was sent there saying that something is murdering our men. He arrives there he finds this ancient stone Keep that the locals have been keeping up for generations so long that they don't know why they're keeping it up. They're strangely shaped metallic crosses embedded in almost every brick in the thing. The writing is atmospheric. It lets you know the kind of horror that's coming. I will continue to read this when I can because this is good. Okay now this is something that I mail ordered just recently. I am Legend by Richard Matheson. This is a title that everyone watching this should be familiar with whether you read it or not. It was made into a movie fairly recently starring Will Smith of a movie that is not faithful to the book. I knew that even though I've never read the book. There's a movie from the 1960s a Roger Corman movie starring Vincent Price called The Last Man in the World. I think that that's what it's called that is much more faithful to the book and from what I read again I read the first 40 pages or so and I have to say that the word that came to mind was compelling. The writing was compelling. I didn't want to stop reading. In fact as soon as I'm done with this I'm gonna finish reading. It drops you right in the middle of the action of what's going on. This guy is in the middle of a zombie apocalypse except the zombies are vampires that come out only at night. They sleep during the day. He has walled himself up into his house and he spends the days going from house to house in his city staking sleeping vampires. It is pretty it's pretty horrific idea. Not long it's just a novella and I'm gonna finish it as soon as I'm done with this. Okay big book Who Fears Death by Nettie Okorafor. I've heard about this one. I'm a big fan of Nettie Okorafor. If you watched my reviews you would have seen how much I liked Binti. This book starts off with exactly what I expected from Okorafor. A young black woman in a post apocalypse Africa. She is an orphan. Her mother was a victim of rape and because of that she is half-breed and taboo. She is a determined little girl. She finds her own stepfather. She finds this impressive super strong and apparently super powered blacksmith in town whom she visits every day just to watch him work. He becomes her stepfather. The book begins with his funeral and again this is exactly the kind of writing I expected from Okorafor. She immediately gets you immersed in this world in the life of this young woman. You are immediately able to understand her. You are immediately sympathetic with her. That is Okorafor's power and I definitely want to continue reading this one. Alright Skull Duggery Pleasant by Derek Landy the first in the series. I heard about this because Becky M on YouTube has read all the books in the series. It was my understanding that these were humorous books and yeah the first few chapters of what I read here were written in a very humorous style very readable. Like the previous book it starts with a funeral but it's more of again more lighthearted more of a comedy. This young woman notices a mysterious figure at the funeral who is completely wrapped up in a cloak and a hat and a scarf can't see his face. I'm imagining I mean what what else could it be. The same mysterious figure shows up at the reading of the will. He moves in a bizarre manner. He doesn't seem right somehow. The young girl ends up inheriting everything from her her bizarre uncle who is who has just died. Yeah I definitely want to know what's happening. If what I'm what I've heard from other reviewers is right I'll probably want to read the series. Okay I have one other surprise a book that just arrived in the mail so I'm going to unbox it right now. Okay this is Space Opera. Let's get this out of here by Catherine M Valenti. This is another book another recent book that I've heard really good things about. Every one every review I've read of it says that it's fantastic that it's very original and I'm going to go read the first 30 or 40 pages right now and I'll be right back with my impression. All right three days later after laying down to read and falling asleep I didn't feel like getting back in front of the camera and now I've developed a really nasty sore throat this morning. Let's hope it's nothing anyway. We had a real winning streak going there. It ended with this. I can sum this book up in one word. Unreadable. I have never in my life seen writing like this. Every sentence is half a page long and I'm not exaggerating. For the first couple of pages it made me laugh because it was kind of funny but then every sentence throughout the first chapter throughout the second chapter throughout the third chapter every sentence is a marathon run on sentence and it's exhausting. I determined to read the first 30 pages which is the first three chapters. I had to stop at page 18 because I couldn't stand it. I picked it up again later and I pushed on through to page 27 and had to stop and I found myself skimming because the writing style was so grating. It was so exhausting. Every paragraph is like a Dennis Miller stand-up act. If you don't know what I mean Google it. Look it up on YouTube. In chapter two she introduces her protagonist a guy named Decibel Jones who's supposed to be some kind of cyberpunk rock star. I had no sympathy for the guy none. And also in chapter two she made an obscene sexual reference that I have never seen in a book before. I had to stop and say to myself am I seeing that word in this book? So no I don't like this book at all and I will be getting rid of it. So that's it for for this particular tri-chapter book tag video. I'm not going to actually tag anybody anybody who watches my videos is welcome to pick this up and do it themselves and credit me with inspiring them to do it. Anyway join me Saturday at the 50th Street Studios Twitch Channel for Bride of Frankenstein and the Wolfman double feature and again on Halloween for Creature from the Black Lagoon and Godzilla. Thanks for watching. Bye.