Started: 12/13/22
Gave Up: 12/14/22
The alien invasion is microorganisms that came in through the water! And everyone loves everyone. If you don’t conform, after many gentle warnings, you get ostracized. Anyway, it didn’t grab me, and I gave up.
Started: 11/28/22
Gave up: 12/1/22
Gentlewomen pirates whose ships are flying houses. So, there’s magic, there’s snobbery, and there are pirates. I should love this, but it just isn’t grabbing me. Moving on!
Started: 10/5/22
Gave up: 10/8/22
I read a Buzzfeed article about cozy fantasy books for the fall, and this sounded promising. Magic hidden in plain sight in Palo Alto, cute little romance. And sure, those things happen. But the characters are in high school, and I just cannot. I literally said, “Ugh, teenagers,” when I put this one down for good.
Started: 10/1/22
Gave up: 10/5/22
I tried really hard to keep reading this book. I’ve read a lot about it, and it gets good reviews, and what the book is eventually saying is stuff I would want to say, but it starts out SUPER rape-y, and it sure feels like the victim is going to fall in love with the rapist, and the rapist is going to see the error of his ways, and gross gross gross. My understanding is that this is NOT how it goes, but I couldn’t get past the initial part. Not for me.
Started: 9/27/22
Gave up: 10/1/22
I have no idea how this book crossed my radar. I usually take better notes about that, and I’m annoyed that I messed up this time. Captain Bluebear falls into adventures, and I suppose each one is a life. Nothing much happens (adventures might not be the right word). It’s a series of vignettes, all fanciful, mildly amusing. Maybe good for bedtime reading. They remind me of The Phantom Tollbooth and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but without the morals, the lessons.
I got bored, lost interest. Might be nice to come back to if I’m looking for something without any suspense.
Started: 9/24/22
Gave up: 9/27/22
I don’t remember what I thought this book was going to be about, but I certainly didn’t expect a bored and thoroughly unpleasant 30-something woman, a somewhat interesting young government thug, and a missing person who sounded like someone I would find pretentious and obnoxious. Not for me. Gave it up.
Oh, wait, I know. I was confusing it with Certain Dark Things, which I am still interested in reading.
Started: 9/22/22
Gave up: 9/24/22
I have been wary of David Mitchell books. Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks sound so impenetrable, and that’s really not what I’m looking for in my fiction. So when Jo Walton wrote basically the same thing and then said that this book (and Utopia Avenue) are completely different and totally wonderful, I figured I would trust her. I HAVE to stop doing that. I started this book, and I guess I just wasn’t in the mood for 17th century Japanese and Dutch morality and hand-wringing and ugh with the overly gross descriptions. So I gave it up. I MIGHT still try Utopia Avenue when I get around to it.
Started: 9/18/22
Gave up: 9/22/22
Giving up two books in a row is never a good sign for my state of mind, but I think I’m justified here. I made it to 72% before I got tired of the drama between 22-year-olds. It started out cute, light, good immigrant family stuff, but at the point where I quit, stuff that had barely been hinted at in the first three quarters of the book was all of a sudden brought out and OH, here’s the obstacle our characters have to overcome, and ugh, I don’t care. Not a good setup.
Started: 9/17/22
Gave up: 9/18/22
The premise is interesting, and it got me through the first 90 pages, but no. Girl (on the eve of her 19th birthday) begins living her life out of order, meaning that her consciousness spends every year in her own body in a random year of her future life. So when she turns 21, maybe she jumps to her body when she’s 30. (I don’t know – I quit before that.)
I quit for two reasons. First, I don’t like the character, and I feel like that’s a failure of the writing, not of my imagination. She’s going through a lot, and I would like to feel sympathic and understanding when she’s bitchy to the people who are trying to help her, but even though the reader is ONLY in her head, there’s not enough to bring me to sympathy. Then again, she’s still a teenager when this begins, so maybe I should give her more slack, but THEN I feel like I shouldn’t have to put in this much effort. So I quit.
Started: 9/6/22
Gave up: 9/6/22
I love Jo Walton, but I do not love all that she recommends. She likes to read a lot of romance, which is not an issue in itself; I like romance, too. I just don’t like the ones SHE likes. This is at least the second one she has really enjoyed that I have put down EARLY.
This one is about two people who fall in love despite bickering the whole book, or so I’m told. I quit before they even met. The woman seemed fine, character-wise, and the writing didn’t bother me, from what little I read, but the man! What an ass. And the writing suffered from his point of view. In a page and a half, I was hit over the head 6 times with how he lives with his little sister. His sister? No, his little sister. Who is an adult with a job. But you say he lives with sister? No, he lives with his little sister. Who cares? How is this important? It’s either bad writing or a deliberate choice to make the guy look like he’s intimidated by his sister’s success and covering it by reminding HIMSELF at every opportunity that he’s older. Either way, it makes me not like him, and why would I bother reading a romance featuring a guy I do not like? He has a job barely works at and doesn’t care about and then tries to get someone fired when she suggests that maybe she could do his job better. Anyway, I quit.
Started: 3/23/22
Gave up: 3/25/22
I just couldn’t with this book. I read an article by the author, and her description of this book was intriguing, but it didn’t work for me. We see alternate futures for this woman, all starting from one moment in time, as she makes minor changes in that moment for every iteration. Fascinating! I love Sliding Doors-type stories! Why only nine? I don’t know. I didn’t make it through all nine because the story was about a married couple who, when they got together and then married, always agreed they didn’t want kids. The woman had NEVER wanted kids. Then the husband changed his mind and basically bullied her into trying. The decision point (very beginning) is when he finds a full bottle of prenatal vitamins, vitamins he bullied her into taking, and proof she’s not taking them and not trying to get pregnant. How she reacts, in major and minor ways, drives each one of the lives.
To start, that’s infuriating. Her reasons for not wanting kids are valid and thought-out, and she has to defend her decisions to EVERYONE. That felt real, legitimate. But THEN – hang on.
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
SPOILERS
In at least two of the lives, she has a baby and never looks back, thinks to herself “how could I ever not want this baby?”, never thinks she should have stuck to her principles.
INFURIATING!
So I gave it up. Maybe she sticks to her principles in lives I didn’t get to, but I stopped caring. I don’t need to read books that make me angry.
Started: 10/26/21
Gave up: 10/27/21
I really liked the short story I read of his last year set in Cairo with a possessed tram car, and there’s a whole series there I’m excited to read, so I was bummed when I couldn’t get into this one. Mashing up Jim Crow and Klansmen with Lovecraftian monsters is a brilliant idea, but I’m a little leery of Lovecraft-related stories, and this one didn’t land for me.
Started: 8/19/21
Gave up: 8/21/21
I loved her Raven Cycle series, and I was totally hooked by the beginning of this one. It’s her writing – I can’t put my finger on it, but I like her writing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into the plot of this one. Magical realism isn’t always my thing, and this book reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude and all the ways I could not read it. So I gave this one up.
Started: 8/8/21
Gave up: 8/8/2021
Light read, supposed to be a fun romance, and OH MY GOD I DON’T CARE. The main character is not relatable, the situations are not funny, and I gave it up the same day I started it. Jo Walton, an author whose books I like and whose recommendations I often enjoy, is WRONG about this one (she thought it was terrific and funny).
Started: 8/6/21
Gave up: 8/8/2021
Interesting premise, bad writing. TERRIBLE METAPHORS. I tried, I gave up.
Started: 7/28/21
Gave up: 7/28/21
I’m not sure exactly what the problem was here, but I was forcing myself through every page, and then I quit. Life’s too short!
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.