It's not quite review time, but since this keeps turning up in all my feeds, I figured you fine people couldn't help but enjoy a look-see if you haven't seen it yet.

Exciting, right? It's a fun effort, though I want to shake him until his pretty white teeth rattle out every time he feels the need to "rock up" the Phantom, and I'm not a big fan of his weird tempo shifts in the final lair scene. But hey, I can't sing in two different registers, so a toast to him.

Back to the horrors of ancient Persia!

I come bearing a review of marked confusion. And I come bearing it before the end of the month, so take that, naysayers.

Oh, lord, if Love Never Dies really gets optioned for film, I'm going to have to read a lot faster.

A new year, and we're kicking it off on the right foot with a new review, which will continue to elevate the quality of this site--

Okay, no, sadly this book was both unrelated AND horribly, brain-meltingly bad. Sorry, everybody. We'll make 2012 the year of moving right along.

Curses! While I was going to read Ann C. Hall's collection of impressions next, thus continuing my Quest for Knowledge through nonfiction, after a quick skim through it's become obvious that it's not possible until after I've done my own reading of some of the materials involved. Blast! Another time, Hall.

Instead: Hospital Phantom. It's happening.

REVIEW! IT'S DONE! Oh, praise the lord, et cetera, I finished something during the holidays.

And if you guys think that's good, wait until I read another book soon. Oh, yeah. I'm that kind of bad, baby.

(Seriously, happy holidays all around. This Christmas day I discovered that I'll be marrying the love of my life, the fabulous and long-suffering John, so consider me un-Grinched for the season.)

I do not have a review up yet, but check out what I do have instead: an eagle-eyed internet spelunker Jade just sent me this amazing link to the best thing ever, which she describes as "the laziest Mary Sue I have ever seen". If you've ever wanted to be as completely ridiculous as possible about the Phantom story, now you can do so without even writing your own bad fanfiction: these guys will do it for you!

Except, you know, with Leroux, so it'll be better. I think. I can't actually tell what translation or retelling is going on there, plus the character selector defaults Christine to dark brown hair, so your guess is as good as mine (but the Persian is there!).

Clearly, I need to own one just for the lulz. But also for Serious Scholarly Study. Yes. That's what this is about.

EDIT: It says "Adapted from the classic by Gaston Leroux." The opportunities for comedy are really endless.

Jiminy Christmas. I complained a while ago about eBooks that I couldn't get because I don't have a Kindle, and apparently that made the market explode with them. I turned up four new ones today while digging around on Amazon. Oh, Amazon, you're making me crazy.

It's not that I don't want eBooks to succeed, because I totally do. I think it's great that people can publish much more accessibly (though when I'm going to be having to read things like this, occasionally positivity is challenging), and it's not like I can complain about the price (would that all the books on my list were less than a dollar). No, it's just that so many of them are currently Kindle-only, and I don't have two to four hundred dollars to dump into an eReader (and let's be honest... I don't have a problem with eReaders, but I'm not excited enough about them to want one of my own at the moment).

I'm just going to have to soldier on somehow. This post brought to you by the Why Haven't I Won the Lottery Yet Foundation.