Dan’s book, Briefs for the Reading Room, made the list of top books with the most views in Full Screen Mode with 228 hits in the month of August.

LK’s book, Misfit McCabe, made the list of top books with the most views in Widget Mode with 4693 hits.

While I myself have not taken advantage of using the BookBuzzr marketing feature, we here at LLBR are big supporters of it and often use the widget in our reviews when posting book previews.

Click here to get started with fReado and BookBuzzr today!

Congrats to LLBR’s reviewer Dan Marvin on his recent interview on Fox 56 in Kentucky about his book, Briefs for the Reading Room.

Without the benefit of super hearing, Alphonse cowered beside his bed and wondered when it would be over. The noise had started well after he was in bed. Like most nights, he had tucked himself in bed. He made the best out of an oversized t-shirt since he had no pajamas to wear. The food in the pantry had run out two days before and the sound of his stomach rumbling was the last thing he heard before falling asleep.
The low murmur of conversation was familiar. Often it wove in and out with the tinny sound of late night TV and the occasional ‘ffffpht’ of a beer can being opened. Sometimes it included a sharp word or a quickly hushed argument. Tonight had been different. Tonight had been scary. Tonight Alphonse had heard the conversation start, then the front door flying open. He had heard the hard words from an unfamiliar voice, and the strident response from his foster father. The tone of his voice had gone from angry to placating to begging in a few sentences. A sharp sound had ended the conversation and Alphonse had jumped behind his bed. That was where he now lay, listening intently and wondering what had happened.
“Alphonse?” A voice sounded outside his door, but it wasn’t a familiar voice. “Alphonse, where are you?” He wondered if he should answer, but some deep-seated sense of self preservation told him it was a bad idea.
“It’s Ben, Alphonse. Ben Latimer. You met me last month at the food bank. We have to go Alphonse. We have to get out of here. I know you’re scared and I know you don’t understand what’s going on, but we have to leave soon. If you can hear me, please answer. I won’t hurt you. In fact, we’ll go get some dinner.” Ben Latimer’s voice didn’t sound scary, it sounded a little worried. Alphonse wasn’t used to people being worried about him. His stomach grumbled at the suggestion of dinner. It had been a long time since his last dinner. Still, he wasn’t sure, what had happened to Larry and Monica? Why weren’t they in the living room anymore? Or were they?
“Alphonse, we need to go now. We really need to go now.” There was another unfamiliar sound, a clicking sound, or maybe it was a ticking noise. And he smelled smoke. “Please tell me where you are!” The door to his room opened and the light came on.
“I’m here. Who are you?” Alphonse rose from behind the bed and shielded his eyes from the light with his arm.
The man quickly hurried to his side of the bed. “My name is Ben. We have to go, Alphonse. We have to go now. Right now.” Alphonse could see the strange orange light from the living room. The flickering orange light. He lifted his arms to Ben and was quickly carried out into the night.

The End

     Drifting without mass through a wall, Reginald vented his frustration with life, or the lack of it. The outward manifestation of his angst was slightly colder spot in an already cold and empty room. The Madison family knew conceptually about him. They knew that he had died, messily, in this very room. They knew that the murderer had never been caught. They knew that late at night they would sometimes hear a creak in the hallway or see a shadow that shouldn’t exist. And they knew that Tuesday was shopping day and on Thursday they watched TV and Jimmy had soccer on Saturday. In other words, they knew about him, and went right on living anyway. How he envied them.
     For the first 100 years or so, Reginald figured that the happy afterlife was waiting for him to figure out how to cross over. That’s what people always said about ghosts, that they had not yet crossed ‘over’. Like a puzzle where you didn’t even know where to find the pieces, Reginald had looked for over so he could cross it without much success. Or any success.
     The next 50 years, he had been a bit of a grouch. He had banged and thumped and tried his hardest to make his displeasure known. The toughest part was the boredom. Being a disembodied spirit without any other disembodied spirits to play with was boring. Really boring.
     Now, 17 years past that, he had settled into a routine and pretty much kept to his cold room and his depressing thoughts. He held out some hope that over would present itself or he would be offered up a choice of two doors or some other spirit would drop by and explain to him why he was stuck here. Mostly though he just moaned and sulked.
     The muffled sound of the doorbell was something vaguely interesting, Reginald decided to check it out. Part of the rules appeared to be that he couldn’t leave the house. Still, he could pop his head out of the eaves over the front door, so he did. Standing on the stoop was a group of youngish people, dressed in the sloppy and disheveled way of the young. Conversation didn’t come through intact to the afterlife so he tried to interpret what they were saying and failed uttlerly. In they trouped and there was a bunch of noise and then all the lights went off. Fair enough, he would retreat back to his room.
     As he drifted and pondered the meaning of this new intrusion, the door opened and a bright light appeared. This had to be it! Bright light, for sure now he would cross over! He headed towards the light not feeling particularly drawn to it but trying to play along.
     From near the light there was an excited buzz. Gages spiked, buzzers buzzed, and someone talked into a microphone attached to a camera. They chased him for the rest of the night, capturing shadows that shouldn’t exist and hearing a muffled sound or two. It was the worst night of his death.

The End

It was a rather cloudy day in 2009 that I decided, once and for all, to give Tuesdays a miss. I had tried with past, misguided attempts to simply circumvent Tuesday. I took a sick day here or canceled an appointment there in the desperate hope that it would be enough to stave off the devastation Tuesday typically wrought in my life. This time, however, I was quite sincere in my desire to cease to exist for 14.3% of the week.
I’m not even clear on when I discovered Tuesday’s scheming ways. For most people, Monday is their stated nemesis. The first day of the work week is a more likely target. We are ripped away from our leisure pursuits and thrust once more into the company of co-workers we did not select. However, Monday is more of a tepid phantom, a perception that things have changed for the worst. Tuesday is the real demon, as real as plague or fire or locusts of the Old Testament. Of the bad events in my life, only a precious few have occurred on days apart from Tuesday.
Armed with this insight into my life, it was only natural that I would try to find a way to correct the imbalance. I went so far as to ask a voodoo practitioner for an amulet or spell to protect me from whatever swirling darkness was casting its pall over my Tuesdays. I saw the hesitation that told me everything I needed to know; in his mind I was as crazy as a loon. Perhaps I am, at that.
So, fast forward with me to present time and this particular dark and gloomy Tuesday. I think Tuesday knows I’m on to it and is trying to fight back with thick clouds and spitting rain. On this Tuesday, I will simply cease to be. On Wednesday I will pick back up with my life already in progress and carry on. I will not be impacted by whatever evil Tuesday has in store for me this week.
The answering machine is turned off. My email account is set to spit out a generic out-of-office message. The doors are locked, my cell phone is off, the post office knows not to deliver mail today. I slip into my bathroom and look at my more advanced preparations. There stands a mirrored box, reflecting back all light and energy. Inside is a pool of body-temperature water. As I lower myself into the isolation chamber, I shut the top and there is no noise, no smell, no sight, no sensation of any kind. Sighing in the anticipation of victory, I slip down into the water and pull up my goggles.
My goggle catches slightly and then gives way when the elastic band stretches over my ear. The fingers sliding it into place fly up and the nail scratches my cornea. I scream. On my way to the hospital I hear the clarion call of the siren. To my mind, it is the sound of Tuesday laughing.

The End

The last time James had walked this way, he was sure the path had bent more to the left. The difference was a little thing, but it sounded an alarm bell in his head. It wasn’t like he was an infrequent visitor to this small patch of woods, he came this way at least twice a week. When he didn’t feel like riding the bus (usually on nice, sunny days) he took this route. The path wound behind the house of the old lady who didn’t like you to hit your baseball into her flowers, then cut behind the house owned by the man with the dog that barks a lot, then connected to James’ back yard.
Once again the path looked different. An ancient oak tree that usually flanked the left side of the path was now on the right. He knew intellectually that ancient oak trees didn’t get up and move, but at his core he started getting worried. Either he was going nuts, or things had changed considerably since last Tuesday.
James debated turning around. When he turned and looked back, the dappled sunlit path was more menacing than encouraging. Ahead looked a bit more reassuring, he saw the remains of a clubhouse his older brother had built. Yet, the graffiti was different. Instead of “Jake and Lois 4 ever,” the black spray paint now read “Belzeba Rules.” He had never heard of anyone named Belzeba.
The sun had a strange greenish cast to it. Yes, it always looked a little green coming down through the canopy of the leaves but even the parts he could see directly looked green today. He started running down the path, eager to get home, sure that when he burst out into his own back yard everything would return to normal.
He ran and ran, but no opening ever came into view, no back yard welcomed him home. He came to a stream he had never seen with strange, bug-eyed frogs croaking in unison. True panic began to set in but he continued to run onward, deeper into a forest that normally wasn’t this big. The path got narrower and the undergrowth got thicker. The sun was definitely green now, and more graffiti was scratched into the trees he passed. Belzeba had apparently been here as well.
James stopped, his lungs heaving from the unusual exertion, his blood rushing in his ears. He leaned on his legs with his head down and eyes closed and said a little prayer that when he opened them the world would have returned to normal. When he felt the hand on his shoulder, he screamed and nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Jeez, take it easy squirt. Dad said it’s time for dinner and sent me to find you. Why are you all sweaty and gross?” James had never been as happy to see his brother as he was now. Meekly, he followed Jake home.

The End

Sevron 4000 walked towards the kitchen pod, his face empty but his heart full. Well, it wasn’t exactly his heart, but it was a knot of servos and transistors that fulfilled the same function of keeping him alive. He had been activated 78 terrestrial years prior and came into the world knowing that he was different. The self diagnostic software at MANCO (Marvcorp Android and Nanobot Co) hadn’t detected the positronic pathway anomaly and he wasn’t about to tell them any different.

While the rest of the artificial man community went unfeelingly about their business, Sevron 4000 had emotions. He spent his 78 years observing humans much like a toddler learning to sort through them. While human babies seemed to put theirs in order fairly quickly and were able to laugh and cry and love without arousing suspicion, Sevron 4000 had to keep his under wraps. Now, however, he was overwhelmed with an emotion that had caught him off guard.

Perhaps another neural pathway had been created, or perhaps this wonderful, terrible emotion had always been inside of him waiting to spring forth. He wasn’t sure, and he also wasn’t sure how to keep this one under wraps. He wasn’t the first artificial man to be different. With the complexity of his inner workings, it was a statistical certainty that something would be not exactly right. In most androids, this translated into a right arm that shook occasionally or a word that wouldn’t come out quite right and was quickly diagnosed and corrected. For Sevron 4000, it translated into happiness and sadness and anger and… love. That was the word for it. He was in love.

The danger of being seen as ‘defective’ haunted him every day. He enjoyed feeling, he’d never known any other way of being. The thought of going back to the factory and being sold at Big Lots as factory remanufactured sent a shudder down his titanium support stack. No, he would have to keep this emotion under wraps like the rest of them. There was a big therapy bill in his future.

It was with excitement that he opened the door to the kitchen pod. There she was, her sleek metallic skin slightly luminous in the low light from over the sink. He went about his duties first, cleaning off the dishes and placing them in the sink for his family but all the while he was getting up his nerve. Tonight, finally tonight he would say something.

“Hey cutie, want to go grab some oil after the kids are in bed?” he asked as smoothly as he could muster. The toaster oven sat there and said nothing. Its beauty was apparently only skin deep. He waited for an answer until it was obvious that one was not forthcoming. Crestfallen, he retreated to his recharging closet. Deep in his positronic brain another emotion swirled. Sevron 4000 felt rejection.

The End

Bathroom duty has been the subject of many books, mostly targeted toward children.  Some of my favorites are The Gas We Pass and Everyone Poops.  But just search the word “poop” at Amazon and you’ll find books for adults as well.  Dan Marvin’s book, Briefs for the Reading Room, is one such book, but don’t worry.  It’s not about what’s in the bowl, but instead is a book designed to give you something to read while waiting for the end result.

In Dan’s introduction, he jokes that we probably spend about 14 years of our life in the bathroom.  I tried Googling that theory to see how close to the truth he might be.  The first answer I found to my question of how long do we actually spend on the toilet was “Depends if the book I’m reading is a good one.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  And at long last, an author has created a book of “micro-novels” specifically designed to make better use of the time we spend on the throne or “in the library.”

As Dan puts it, “I jump right to the good part, wrap it up in a hurry, and let you get on with your life.” Each story is indeed only 1 or 2 pages long, so you can get through several in…ahem…one sitting.  There’s no character development, no plot set up, no pages and pages of setting, description, or flashbacks to mull over or flip through.  If you like flash fiction, it doesn’t get any flashier than this!  I’ve never tried to write flash fiction myself, but have often read it (some good and some bad).  I know it’s all about size (often less than 200 words) and content (you try telling a good story in 200 words or less).  And I also know Dan Marvin is a genius at it.

There are over 100 tiny tales to get you through some “difficult times.”  Dan’s subject matter ranges from fantasy, to courtroom drama, to mystery, to children’s themes, to just good ole thought provoking fiction.  After about the first 20 stories, I found myself going back and rereading them to figure out if I had missed anything.  I wanted more.  Indeed, in less than a page I was completely engrossed in the character and wanted more from them.  But again and again, I was expecting too much.  Be warned!  Many of the stories will “just be getting good” when they suddenly come to an end, leaving you to wonder what the heck happened.  But that’s the beauty of a book like this; the author wants you to think about each story long after you finished it.  Dan has done a superb job of keeping the stories concise and detailed enough for you to draw your own conclusions.  There is not a single word wasted!

One of my favorites is called “A Victim of Circumstance” in which a quirky Private Eye receives a note from his secretary that something is about to fall on him.  He’s such a good Private Eye that he ponders the note a little bit too much:

I studied the message Lila had given me. It was printed on a “Here’s your Message” Post It note, the kind that one comes off the top and it sticks to stuff but not too tight because you will want to throw it out eventually. You know the type. It looked familiar, much like the paper Lila usually uses to give me messages. That was it! It was a message from Lila, the kind I usually got! Now we were getting somewhere. That’s where you are arriving at a place different from where you were earlier.

Just when the reader (and the detective) should be more concerned about what is about to fall on him, the story comes to a dot dot dot ending right when the detective finally looks up. He never knew what hit him, and neither do we!  But that’s the beauty of writing like this.  We aren’t supposed to know.  The author focuses the reader’s attention on something else quite trivial that in a regular length novel might not otherwise be brought to light.

The majority of the stories also start with a quick and fun introduction almost reminiscent of a sketch comedy show, or a Hitchcock monologue, even Masterpiece Theater…”a hard hitting expose by Dan Marvin, fiction about fiction by Dan Marvin, an epic saga by Dan Marvin, visionary prophecy from the mind of Dan Marvin.”  The list goes on and on.  Add to this some tongue-in-cheek quotes or comments as footnotes at the end of many of the stories as well.  Here are some of my favorites…

This space left intentionally blank.

Phabricated Philosophy – Time goes quickly when you’re having fun. Therefore, to
live a really long life, you should never have any fun. So stop reading this book
and go eat Brussels sprouts or something.

Fabricated Factoid –
78 – Percentage of travelers in recent poll that thought customer service of major airlines had declined in the last five years.
100 – Percentage of major airlines who would never admit it but think deep down that passengers should just stop whining already.

Rent this space! Your ad here!

Erroneous Excerpt – “’Nevermore’ quoth the Raven, after eating a greasy hamburger, fries, and a chocolate shake all in one sitting.” -Edgar Allen Po’boy

Now, for those of you who may be blushing from all of this bathroom humor, don’t worry. You can read this book anywhere.  Dan even gives you a list of places to try it out…the car wash, the soccer game while your kid is on the bench, the dog park, even the operating table two minutes before your anesthesia kicks in!

Move over Uncle John’s Reader and make room for a new book on top of the tank.  Dan Marvin’s Briefs for the Reading Room is a perfect gift for that quirky uncle always telling jokes, or for that friend whose attention span ends at around 30 seconds, or a book you should just treat yourself to when at the end of the day you want to read something but don’t want to commit to a book that’s too heavy.  I give it 5 star flushes!

Insert predictable bowel movement jokes here.

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