Started: 12/28/19
Finished: 1/4/20
Debut novel of an author I heard speak on a panel at a convention. I’d read a couple of her short stories and really liked them, and I liked her in person, so I was excited to read this one and…I LIKED IT. It was fun, fast, and a little twisty plotwise (in a good way). I’m glad it’s the beginning of a series.
Started: 12/16/19
Finished: 12/28/19
Dolls are scary, right? So I assumed this book would be creepy. It’s not, although one or two parts are a little bit weird in a scary way. It was good, but I don’t think it stuck the ending. It’s about a man who goes on a cross-country trip to meet the woman he loves, who he has only corresponded with via letter. Along the way, he reads a book of short stories by an author the woman is interested in, and the stories are part of this book, too. Those are the parts that get a little creepy, and the main character and his love both think the stories parallel their own lives a little too closely. Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t do anything with that, and I was left hanging.
Started: 12/14/19
Finished: 12/16/19
First in a series a girl who wants to be a knight. I would have eaten this up if I’d found it when I was 10 (it was published in 1983). I enjoyed the first book (and I’ll keep reading), but I’m having a little bit of a hard time believing that this 10-year-old girl would talk the way she does, have the power (magical) that she does, know all these things, be able to do all this stuff, etc. She makes it to age 14 or so by the end of the book, so hopefully her ability to master EVERYTHING will get a little easier to swallow as she gets older.
Started: 12/1/19
Finished: 12/14/19
13 short stories, all SF, all really good. Two in this collection were up for Hugos in the last couple of years.
Started: 11/24/19
Finished: 12/1/19
Military SF with some weird circular time travel and a narrator who doesn’t know what’s going on, with a prisoner interrogation going on as a framing device, and really, I liked it. I’m not sure it got fully explained, or maybe I need to read it again, but it reminded me of Starship Troopers, and I liked it.
Started: 11/19/19
Finished: 11/23/19
Political intrigue on an island nation where the haves live on the mountain and the have-nots live by the sea, and the divide between them is stark and violent. Also, YA and LGBTQ+ and pretty interesting overall. There’s a sequel. I will read it.
Started: 11/19/19
Gave up: 11/19/19
Marketed as a sweeping political drama series with battles and intrigue, it sounded great, but OH the writing. I had hoped it was just the prologue, so I pushed through. It wasn’t just the prologue. I didn’t make it through the first battle.
Started: 11/12/19
Finished: 11/19/19
Recommended by Jo Walton (an author I like and whose recommendations I trust), it’s a somewhat quiet story about a British family who goes to France for a vacation, immediately lose their mother to hospital convalescence, and hang out for the summer in this hotel pretty much on their own, over the objections of the women who run the hotel. The oldest is 16 and is sick for the first half of the book, so basically not a character until later, and the narrator is the next oldest, at 13. There are shenanigans going on the background that the narrator doesn’t understand completely. It’s good, it’s disturbing at times – I think I liked it. It definitely makes me want to go to France.
Started: 11/11/19
Gave up: 11/12/19
I found this mystery series in one of those library/book publisher magazines, too, but I couldn’t get into this one at all. It’s set in Salem, so I assume magic will come into it, but it’s starting with astrology and a dead fake astrologer’s cat named Orion (dead astrologer, live cat), except they change it to O’Ryan because I don’t know why and I quit.
Started: 11/10/19
Finished: 11/11/19
I found this mystery series in one of those library/book publisher magazines. Small town librarian, all the book titles are cute puns, so I figured it was worth trying. And it was…okay. I’m not in a hurry to continue the series, but I did enjoy it, and there was a breakup scene in chapter 3 that was so very satisfying.
Started: 11/3/19
Gave up: 11/10/19
Young adult, time travel, heist/mystery. At around 50%, I’m not sure I’m going to finish it. I’m intrigued by the complication that arose around a quarter of the way in that has not been explained yet, but a) I feel like I can live without knowing what’s going on, and b) I’m not convinced it’s going to be explained in this book. Is this part of a series? I should find out.
I gave up at 70%. That’s when they explained exactly how they were going solve their problem. I’m sure it won’t go exactly as planned, but that’s close enough for me to know how it ends, and I put it down. Meh. Also, not part of a series.
Started: 10/21/19
Finished: 11/3/19
Sort of zombies, sort of apocalypse, sort of medical thriller, and really long. Really long is not usually a problem, but I’m reading at a glacial pace lately. It’s a problem.
Update: it reminded me of Stephen King, and separately but also specifically, it’s similar to The Stand. That’s not a bad thing, but I’m not a huge Stephen King fan, so I think it puts this book into the “not for me” category. Despite the fact that I finished it, which is saying something recently. I’ve given up on a LOT of books lately.
Anyway, it was good, made me laugh a couple of times, made me cringe (like HARD cringe, like I kind of wish I hadn’t read that scene because I’ll never be able to get rid of it cringe) at least twice, and if you don’t like books like The Stand, you won’t like this one.
Started: 10/12/19
Finished: 10/21/19
Sequel to Lock In, same issues with dialogue, but otherwise a good story and a good book.
Started: 10/9/19
Gave up: 10/12/19
In my calendar, I wrote that I put this book “on hold”, but who are we kidding? I gave up. I liked the idea of it – the protagonist is the daughter of a pirate captain who, with her help, can navigate to any place, real or imaginary, in any time, as long as the map is well-drawn and the mapmaker believed in it. That’s a cool idea. The issue I had was with the writing. The author kept talking about maps, but ships use charts. I can get ignore the use of walls instead of bulkheads and floors instead of decks and doors instead of hatches, but for some reason, despite my near-total memory loss of everything I learned in the Navy, I can’t get past saying maps instead of charts.
Started: 10/2/19
Finished: 10/9/19
I like John Scalzi’s books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read most of them, and I’ve really liked the vast majority. They’re not perfect – the problem I run into is that all of the characters sound the same way. The dialogue, while on the one hand can be pretty realistic, is basically the same book to book. It feels like every character is a stand-in for the author – smart, an essentially good person, heavy on the snark. HEAVY on the snark. It’s amusing, and his stories are all good, entertaining, fast-paced. I like that his characters tend to have healthy and happy family relationships (it’s a nice change from all the death and orphans and drama I get in nearly everything else I read), but they all talk the same.
So I get stuck on that sometimes.
Started: 10/1/19
Finished: 10/2/19
I chose this novella deliberately as something I knew I would like, since I gave up on the last four books I tried to read. Imagine my relief to find I still like this universe and could enjoy this story. Yay for this series!
Started: 9/30/19
Gave up: 10/1/19
This book is supposed to be a) very good and b) a very good portrayal of an autistic person, from an autistic person’s point of view, written by an autistic person. It may very well be both of those things (all of those things?), but I got lost in the science fiction parts of it. Too many characters, too similar to each other (at least in the beginning), and WAY too many different aliens not differentiated from each other. And you KNOW I’m all about aliens. I gave up.
Started: 9/28/19
Gave up: 9/30/19
I’ve read that this book is funny, and Mel says this book is funny, but I gave up on it because one of the characters is an over-privileged disgusting teenage boy with an attitude and I really did not like being inside his head. I wasn’t a big fan of the other two point-of-view characters, either.
Started: 9/28/19
Gave up: 9/28/19
I’m sure this book is really funny, but I am not its audience: Part 2. Or I was not in the right mood: Part 2. The man climbs out the window right away, but I don’t know why. He leaves his own party and I don’t know why. He STEALS SOMEONE’S SUITCASE at a bus station on, like, the third page, and that just seems really cruel AND I STILL DON’T KNOW WHY, so I gave up.
Started: 9/28/19
Gave up: 9/28/19
I’m sure this book is really funny, but I am not its audience. Or I was not in the right mood. Either way, I gave up on the second essay.