gave up

Entangled Life By Merlin Sheldrake

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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.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories by Karen Russell

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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.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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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.

The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton

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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!

A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde

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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.

City of Lies by Sam Hawke

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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.

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

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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.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

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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.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

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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.

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link

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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.

Caught Dead Handed by Carol J. Perry

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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.

Invictus by Ryan Graudin

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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.

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

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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.

Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby

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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.

The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith

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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.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

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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.

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

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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!