Head On by John Scalzi
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.
What I’ve Been Reading
The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
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.
Lock In by John Scalzi
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.
The Days of Tao by Wesley Chu
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!
Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby
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
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
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.
We Will Never Meet In Real Life by Samantha Irby
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.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
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.
Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman
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.
Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton
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.
Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen
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!
We Have Always Died In The Castle by Elizabeth Bear
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.
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
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.
Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer
Started: 8/4/19
Finished: 8/12/19
A gender-swapped take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with magic (okay, like explicit magic). And demons. And sword-fighting! I didn’t love it. It was slow to start, and the two main characters were pretty annoying (they got better), and the demon plot took FOREVER to roll, and the two main characters got the same information from different sources, but the information was identical, and WE, the lucky readers, got to read about it both times, and okay, maybe I didn’t like it, either. I mean, I didn’t hate it. But I probably won’t read the sequel.
The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay
Started: 8/3/19
Finished: 8/4/19
I can’t tell you if I liked this book because I don’t know. There’s a really nice, very real family, maybe an apocalypse, definitely a home invasion, something TRULY AWFUL happens, and then…so, it was good? I mean, it was GOOD, but I don’t know if I liked it.
Cloudbound by Fran Wilde
Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 8/3/19
Sequel to Updraft, which I enjoyed, but I have nearly put this down more than once. It’s plenty good, and the main character is a somewhat realistic 20-year-old (which is kind of annoying, but I guess good?). The problem is that I DO want to know how this world is constructed (at the moment, my best guess is that the towers these people live on and fly between are spines on the back of an enormous turtle), but I don’t care enough about the plot to keep reading to find out.
Update: I kept reading, I DID finish it, and I’ll tell you offline what I know about how the world is constructed if you ask nicely. Also, I don’t plan to read the third one. These books aren’t bad, but I just don’t care that much.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho
Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19
This was the very last Hugo-eligible story I read, and it took a serious run at the top of my novelette list (I landed on #2 for it, but it was close). It’s a refreshingly NICE story, and I am moving the author’s novels higher up my to-read list.
STET by Sarah Gailey
Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19
Super short, and very moving, but it’s mostly in the footnotes and the editing comments, so it takes a little maneuvering to get at it.
A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow
Started: 7/28/19
Finished: 7/28/19
I LOVE THIS STORY SO MUCH. I am not ashamed to admit I cried at the end. I was reading it out loud to Jack and he wasn’t sure what to do with me.