Started: 6/8/21
Gave up: 6/11/21
Another non-fiction recommendation by Sarah Gailey. Another pass by me. I don’t think it’s the quality of recommendation so much as my own general lack of interest in non-fiction.
Started: 6/1/21
Gave up: 6/2/21
I like my fiction weird, and I’m happy to be dropped into an unexplained or unexplainable situation right off the bat, but this was incomprehensible to me. Two seemingly normal people dropped into a situation that immediately got super-weird, and they’re barely questioning it. Certainly not panicking like anyone else would. Am I supposed to be reading into it? Probably. Did I have the patience? I did not.
Started: 3/16/21
Gave up: 3/16/21
This was Paul Tremblay’s first book, and it shows. There’s a narcoleptic detective, bad at his job, unwilling to change anything to improve, and why should I care about this character? I don’t. I gave up pretty quickly.
Started: 2/27/21
Gave up: 3/3/21
People LOVE Diana Wynne Jones, but it appears I am not people. I tried one a while back – it was okay. I tried this one about British witches saving the world in the early 1990s – what’s not to like? But I feel very meh about it, so I gave up. She wrote Howl’s Moving Castle, and it’s supposed to be amazing, so I will try that sometime, but if I don’t like that one, I think I might have to be done with her.
Started: 2/3/21
Gave up: 2/4/21
Non-fiction recommendation by Sarah Gailey (I’m kind of obsessed). It’s about fungi. Why would I read (or like) this book? It’s so not me. Except, dude, the author’s name is Merlin Sheldrake. And supposedly, he’s funny in that dry British way. And there are footnotes!
Update: I was promised footnotes! There weren’t any. I must have been thinking of some other book. Also, not that funny. I cannot get excited about fungi, no matter how lyrical prose. Possibly because the lyrical prose.
I gave up.
Started: 11/14/20
Gave up: 11/14/20
I read the first short story in this collection and started the second, and no, thank you. These are not for me. A little too graphic, a little to uncomfortable, a little too “I’m not sure what happened here”, and I decided to move on.
Started: 9/18/20
Gave up: 9/19/20
I gave up on this one, but not through any fault of its own. I just wasn’t in the mood. It’s set in early 20th century Mexico, and maybe it’s fantasy and maybe it’s magical realism (which I generally do NOT like), but there are gods and bargains and LOTS of discussions of towns and their histories, and yeah. Not in the mood. It has really good reviews, so I feel bad about giving up, but not that bad.
Started: 8/28/20
Gave up: 8/30/20
It feels familiar at the beginning, and I wasn’t in the mood for another same-old story, but I’d heard good things about it and the premise is fascinating, so I kept going. Then there were hints of something really dark and awful going on that the heroine is going to find out, and okay, I’m interested, but she doesn’t follow up! Or she’s more interested in the same-old! Are you kidding me? And then I found out that it’s the first in a series, so I’m not even going to find everything out by the end of the book, and you know, I’m making up my mind to quit reading as I’m typing this.
Yup, I just read a few more pages and then skimmed a few more and NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Next!
Started: 7/22/20
Gave Up: 7/22/20
I tried to read this one, and it had an interesting premise, but the writing style got to me. I stopped reading Fran Wilde’s second book – maybe I finished it, and I don’t care to the third? – and this short story had a similar style.
Started: 7/5/20
Gave up: 7/5/20
First in a new series that could be really good, but again, I had formatting issues I can’t get past. It’s a PDF with a watermark across every page that says something like “DO NOT REPRODUCE OR WE WILL COME AFTER YOU”. The watermark is okay, but a PDF on a Kindle is annoying because I have to keep resizing the pages. I tried to convert it to a readable Kindle format (Amazon tells you how), and that process put the words from the watermark into the text of the book. But not in one sentence on each page, no. No, it broke up the watermark sentence and inserted the individual words into the text, making the actual book unreadable because it made no sense. I would like to read this book, but I’ll get it from the library or something. I’m not going to get it done in time for Hugo voting.
Started: 7/5/20
Gave up: 7/5/20
13-year-old goes to space to rescue her older brother, and I am not in the mood. The writing is good, the premise is good, but the formatting on my Kindle is atrocious (it’s a converted PDF), and the mind of this 13-year-old is not as comfortable to live in as the mind of the 12-year-old wizard was (from my last book). I’d like to come back to this later, but I’m not going to finish it in time for Hugo voting.
Started: 6/23/20
Gave up: 6/25/20
YA, possibly Lovecraftian (at least insofar as it includes monsters in the ocean deeps), with an Artful Dodger-like main character, but it didn’t grab me. It seems perfectly readable, and maybe I’ll go back to it, but I have a limited amount of time to read Hugo-nominated books, and I don’t want to spend time on this one.
Started: 2/14/20
Gave up: 3/9/20
I really liked that other Holly Black trilogy, so I picked this book up from the library. I couldn’t find time to start reading the physical copy, so I borrowed the audiobook a few days later and listened to it in the car…for as long as I could. Teenagers and vampires and the angst that goes with a centuries-old vampire who finds something deep and unique and irresistible and different and blah blah blah about a 17-year-old girl and I cannot count the ways in which I do not care.
Started: 1/23/20
Gave up: 2/1/20
I had high hopes for this author, so I picked up this book of her short stories and WOW they’re too weird for me. I liked the first one, but every one after that was…too odd, or I just didn’t get it. Maybe a novel would be different.
Started: 1/17/20
Gave up: 1/18/20
Probably good, but I was not in the mood for an “I’m too old for this shit” kind of ghoul hunter.
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: 11/11/19
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: 11/3/19
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: 10/9/19
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 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: 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.