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.
Started: 9/23/19
Finished: 9/27/19
I almost put this book down several times out of, not boredom, but kind of a “this isn’t what I want to be reading right now” feeling. I kept convincing myself I wanted to see where it was going. It won the Pulitzer Prize by being about an author who dated a man who won the Pulitzer Prize and who was trying to get his third book published. It got rejected because no one wanted to read another book about a man wandering around his city coming to terms with his life. What was this book about? A man wandering the world coming to terms with his life. I suppose I appreciate the lampshading, but at the same time, it’s kind of disgusting.
So…it was good, but not for me. I finished it anyway.
Started: 9/14/19
Finished: 9/23/19
This is billed as a companion book to Seraphina (which I liked a lot), but it really is a sequel, and it’s just as good, if occasionally a little weirder, than the first one. Although it is a little hard to remember that the main character is supposed to only be about 17 or 18. She’s written older than that, I think, but as long as I didn’t focus on that, I was fine.
Started: 8/23/19
Finished: 9/14/19
I gave up on a different Peter F. Hamilton book a couple of years ago, but Erik convinced me to give the author another try. It started out good – I laughed, but then I got bogged down in some details. Part of the problem is most likely me. I’m too tired to read more than a paragraph at a time.
Update: The focus shifted to a completely different set of characters in a completely different situation, and that part of the plot caught my attention. And THEN I saw how the two sections worked together, and I found myself enjoying the characters and plot in the first section again, so whew. It all came together for me, and I did really like the book. The sequel is on my list.
Started: 8/19/19
Gave up: 8/23/19
Time travel story that’s a little heavy-handed on the SF aspect. I like hard SF, and I like time travel, but there’s something about the way we’re being told about the time travel bureau that feels amateurish. The plot device for it could work, but it’s too clinical, I think. Too much telling, not enough showing, maybe. And the fact that the guy is in trouble for something he a) couldn’t control, and b) CAN’T REMEMBER seems really crappy. Not finishing!
Started: 8/18/19
Finished: 8/19/19
Short story by an author I like, but I was led astray by the title. I assumed, since with one word changed, it’s the title of a Shirley Jackson book, that it would be similar or related to that book. It’s not, not at all. The title is perfectly appropriate to the story, and a cute nod to Shirley Jackson, but I spent a lot of time (for such a short story) trying to figure out the connection. I might have enjoyed it more without that. It’s about a virtual reality game company employee who has “volunteered” to do some training to avoid being fired for being a jerk, basically. Will she learn? Will she grow? Once I let go of the title, I liked it.
Started: 8/12/19
Finished: 8/18/19
Another book that was good but one I don’t know if I liked. It’s a coming of age story, but the framing device was a little confusing…and then I was totally engrossed in the story, and the framing device sort of starts to make sense near the end (most of the story is within the frame, so it doesn’t matter in the moment), but then the very end made NO sense to me. The book includes an essay by the author about the themes and inspirations, and I can tell you I missed all of that. It did make everything make more sense, and I don’t mean to say that the book didn’t make sense (except for the end, which was confusing), and now I’m not making sense, so I’ll end by saying that this book could be taught in a literature course and the students would get a lot out of it.