Started: 5/29/18
Gave up: 5/29/18
The writing drove me crazy and I gave up within a couple of hours. At 7% in, the narrator had mentioned a dozen times how dude’s wife’s research is critical to his business and his health, but she barely rates her own name (always X’s wife). That and the exclamation points are too much. I quit.
Started: 5/28/18
Finished: 5/29/18
A crotchety old man with a farm in Italy finds a unicorn. It’s a lovely story.
Started: 5/26/18
Finished: 5/28/18
A girl at a remote boarding school is determined to solve a decades-old mystery about a disappearance from that very school. Fun read, but only the first in the series is out. The first book does NOT wrap everything up neatly. You’ve been warned.
Started: 5/23/18
Finished: 5/26/18
There’s a secret society whose members steal rare books from all the universes to store in the invisible library between the universes. Sounds awesome. The execution was not awesome. It was okay and sometimes interesting, but I felt let down.
Started: 5/20/18
Finished: 5/22/18
Third in the Enchantment Emporium series. The world is actually ending. What can the family do to stop it? Let’s find out!
Started: 5/17/18
Finished: 5/20/18
Second in the Enchantment Emporium series. We take a step away from the family and focus on one character and selkies, which was a surprise. Fun, but not as fun as the first.
Started: 5/13/18
Finished: 5/17/18
First in the Enchantment Emporium series. Intro to the family who takes care of the world, largely with a lot of infighting, power grabs, and squicky incest. That last bit was a surprise and a pretty big departure from other Tanya Huff novels. The story was good – one of the family is trying to carve her own path (and find her grandmother, who is missing) – but this series isn’t my favorite by this author.
Started: 5/6/18
Finished: 5/13/18
I feel like I’ve read this book before. The story is too familiar. It’s The Stand, it’s World War Z with vampires. It’s about a government experiment that unleashes the apocalypse and then, decades later, how what society is left is dealing with it (and eventually, hopefully, defeating it). This is the first in a trilogy (something I didn’t know when I started it). I will admit here that I read the summaries on Wikipedia and Goodreads to see what happens in the other two books rather than read them myself.
My blogging muscle appears to have atrophied. I don’t know if I just don’t have anything to say, or if I’m avoiding it because I’m a little single-minded lately and I don’t want to be repetitive, or if I just haven’t felt like it and when I think about it, I decide I’d rather be reading.
It’s a little of all three and a lot of the last one, which is kind of funny because I’ve also fallen into a book funk. AND my book list broke because it got too big and I’m going to have to change the format of it, and I need a test version of my site so I can poke around and try things, and I haven’t gotten around to doing that, and maybe that’s also a little bit of why I’ve stayed away?
Anyway, the book funk. The last book I read that I LOVED was 13 books ago. Of the 12 since then, including the one I’m reading now, I liked six okay, really liked only one (The Trespasser by Tana French), thought two were meh but finished them anyway, and I gave up on three.
The books I gave up on:
Thankfully, the book I picked up after giving up on those last two IN A ROW was one of the Hugo nominees, and while it had a slow start, I ended up liking it just fine. Now I’m reading one that I’m enjoying, but I don’t love – I don’t have that need to drop everything else so I can have more time to read.
I am confident that I can climb out of my book funk, though. There’s a Tanya Huff trilogy I haven’t read yet staring at me from the shelf, and the Hugo Voter Packet should arrive soonish, which is SUPER exciting and which I’ll tell you all about when it gets here.
Started: 5/2/18
Finished: 5/6/18
Set in the same universe as the Imperial Radch series, it’s completely different. The plot hinges on whether or not someone is who they say they are (or rather, who they say they aren’t) and whether a certain artifact is real. Also, there’s some fun with proxies. It doesn’t sound riveting, but it kept my attention. I really need to read the other two books in the Ancillary series.
Started: 4/29/18
Gave up: 5/1/18
It’s a thriller, but I didn’t like the protagonist, and the whole thing felt weirdly paced and plotted. I don’t think I made it a third of the way in before I gave up.