gave up

The Undateable by Sarah Title

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.

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano by Donna Freitas

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.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

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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.

All The Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater

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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.

Can You Keep A Secret by Sophie Kinsella

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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).

Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness by Nathanael Johnson

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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.

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi

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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.

A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones

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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.

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.