Books where people taste like something.

So I was reading a dumb teenage girl book today. You know the type. They have sparkly pink or lime green covers with names like "1-800-Boyfriend" or "Spring Fling." The heroine is a charming girl who thinks she's ugly as sin despite consistently having guys drool over her. Her best friend has been friends with her for their entire lives and tends to be either a total ditz or a heartless bitch. It takes her the entire book to find the right guy, even though he's been RIGHT THERE the whole time.

I love those kinds of books. Sure, they can be unbelievably dumb and predictable, but it's nice to read them sometimes. You don't have to think about anything other than the love interest's strong arms from scooping ice cream at the local store with a cutesy name.

The problem is that sometimes things happen in them that I totally can't forgive. This goes beyond the heroine not wanting to tell the baseball player she was totally into that she played baseball, because she didn't want him to think she was a tomboy (??).

I am talking about when they finally kiss, after an emotionally charged baseball game/friend's party/day spent flying kites, and Luis Love-Interest pulls away from Hannah Heroine, gazes passionately into her chocolate-brown eyes, and tells her in his sexy, deep voice:

"You taste like turnips."

Okay, maybe Hannah Heroine really likes turnips. Maybe she has a turnip addiction so bad that her friends are secretly planning an intervention. I don't care. If she hasn't been eating turnips in the past half an hour, I fail to believe that she can taste like them.

That's what happened in this book I was reading, the one with the baseball player. After their first kiss, Baseball Dude told her that she tasted like chocolate cookie dough ice cream. I thought, "Oh, that's kind of cute," since she had been eating the ice cream just a minute ago -- ice cream that he had bought for her just to be nice.

Then he mentioned it again a few chapters later. She hadn't been anywhere near ice cream for at least a day or two, but he still told her, "I love the taste of chocolate chip cookie dough." I thought, "Good for you, but I don't think she tastes like it anymore."

Then they kissed sometime after dinner and she described her own mouth as tasting like chocolate chip cookie dough, despite not having eaten any recently, and I put the book down.

I don't think it's possible to constantly taste like chocolate chip cookie dough. I mean, I eat a lot of that kind of ice cream, and yet I'm pretty damn sure I don't taste like it. Someone is free to come over here and check, but I'm fairly certain I don't taste like food I haven't eaten all day.

It's one thing for a smoker to taste like cigarettes (yum) or someone who's just been eating sugar cubes off a plate to taste like diabetes, but this thing is way too much for me to handle.

And now that I'm done writing, I'm off to finish that book with Miss Cookie Dough.

Twist endings.

Let's say you're reading a book, or watching a movie, or whatever bloats your stoat. It's going pretty well. The plot is gripping! the characters are intriguing! and you're enjoying it. John T. Everyman has finally defeated the monsters that were plaguing the city and is heading back to his family.

You're only pages from the end (or minutes, I guess, if you were watching a movie) when SUDDENLY the whole fictional world turns on its head! Everything you thought previously was a lie! It's like the writers have decided to send you a message, and the message is:

SCREW YOU.

It turns out John T. Everyman was suffering from delusions! Or the monsters weren't real monsters; they were manifestations of his inner anguish that only appeared to him; and now he's wrecked half the city for no reason! Or it was all just a dream! The whole story is not what you thought it was.

I hate it when that happens. Especially when it seems like the story has been building up to this one twist the whole time. Sometimes the twist comes out of NOWHERE. That's even worse, because it means that either I was so dumb I didn't see it coming or the writer was so incompetent that they shouldn't be writing books, let alone ones with crazy twists at the ends.

Twists in the middle are fine. Good, even. I mean, they keep the story moving and stuff. As long as they're not too random, I'm down with that. If there are still a few hundred pages left to explain why this new twist has happened, it is all fine in my book.

I'll even allow twists NEAR the end, because I'm so gracious. John T. can be in the middle of the boss battle with the biggest, most terrifying monster yet when he and his talking sword merge to form a new entity and defeat the monster, if he wants. Sometimes these kinds of things end up seeming like the writer pulled the idea out of thin air, but at least John T. is still himself and still fighting monsters. Nothing happened to ruin my perception of the book.

Because when there's any kind of twist in a book, I have to set it down. (And by set it down I mean slam it down on the nearest flat surface.) Then I have to make a noise of realization, like "ohhh," and maybe run in a few circles while I think about what this will mean for the rest of the book. If there are people around, I blurt things out to them like "John T's sister died five years ago when the monsters ate her! It wasn't really a car crash!"

Then I keep reading.

If it's a twist ENDING, I can't do that. I close the book (with a really loud snap) and throw it at something. Then I make an ANGRY noise of realization, like "what," and go punch something. Like the BRO-BOY. (No, I don't REALLY punch the bro-boy. He punches back.)

You can't do anything after there's a twist ending! There's nothing else! You just have to sit there until it sinks in that John T. Everyman has been hallucinating all his fantastic battles from a mental hospital. Then your whole world just like falls to little fragments around you until you pick up another book and hope this one has an ending that MAKES SENSE.

(By the way, this post was written by the robot that's been pretending to be Libby for the past six months. Everything she's done since then was FAKED by a cold, calculating machine. A machine that's set to self-destruct in five minutes, so you'll never get any answers.)

(Just kidding.)

(At least, that's what it WANTS you to think.)