Started: 9/29/23
Finished: 10/10/23
Pretty good story, pretty good narrator (for the audiobook, I mean), and the main character pretty much acted her age, which was a nice change. I mean, she still outsmarted lots of people and saved the day, but in a tolerable way. Magic and dangerous grimoires! And libraries!
Started: 9/18/23
Finished: 9/22/23
Thrillers are my favorite kind of book to listen to, so this worked out, but it was a tad confusing, every character was pretty terrible, and there was basically no way for the reader to figure out who did it. Or maybe that’s just me. Enjoyable, not great.
Started: 9/1/23
Finished: 9/15/23
A trilogy of well done space military mysteries, likable main characters, really good narrator for the audiobooks. I flew through these and then emailed the author because I thought he did these so well. Dad would have liked them, I think.
Started: 8/16/23
Gave up: 8/18/23
I don’t remember how I heard of this book, but it’s a time-loop story, and I like those. Except I really didn’t. Didn’t like the character, didn’t enjoy how the plot was unfolding. Gave up!
Started: 4/21/23
Finished: 5/2/23
Time travel and a mystery and a romance and a period drama in Victorian Scotland. But it is NOT Outlander. Yay!
Started: 2/18/23
Finished: 2/24/23
A thriller, audiobook, and I don’t even remember finishing it. I also don’t remember how it ended…who was the killer? This clearly made an impression.
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: 2/12/21
Gave up: 2/14/21
Ugh. Retired military, super-capable, gentlemanly know-it-all has to save his town after an EMP takes out all modern amenities. I have read this book before. I have read better versions of this book. This one feels like a non-writer decided to fictionalize his What To Do In Case Of An EMP report, hoping it would get his point across better. It’s all tell, no show, and Mr. Only I Am Making The Right Decisions is going to be proven right. AND it’s the beginning of a series, so he’s probably going to end up saving the world. I’m sitting this one out.
Started: 12/26/20
Finished: 12/27/20
I can’t remember where I heard about this book, but it starts out HARD. A twenty-something black woman babysits for a white family, and one night, the mother calls her unexpectedly to take the toddler out for a little bit so they can deal with an emergency at home. The babysitter tells her she’s not dressed like she normally is (she was out with friends), and the mother says that’s fine, so she takes the toddler down the street to a local expensive grocery store to just kill time. A shopper calls security on her, implying that she kidnapped the little girl, and it’s a REALLY tense scene. It turns out fine, and the rest of the book talks about the aftermath, but in a very anticlimactic way. Well, until the climax. Anyway, it’s about how all these characters see each other and how they react and think about themselves, and it’s pretty funny and enjoyable, which I did NOT expect after that scary beginning.
Started: 12/5/20
Finished: 12/9/20
I found this thriller on a recommendation, but I can’t remember from where. I think it was described as similar to the movie Get Out, which I haven’t seen yet – not big on horror, but I’d like to see that one if I can psych myself up for it. Anyway, I’m lukewarm on it mostly because the thriller part doesn’t really get going until the last quarter of the book. It’s an uncomfortable read, in a good way – it’s about the evils of gentrification as some truly racist white people get away with small, medium, and large awful things as they move in. And if it hadn’t been billed as a thriller, I would probably feel better about it as a story. The first part was really good (and uncomfortable).
But the male lead being a white guy feels like a sop, like the author was cautioned that “not all white people are bad”, and while on one hand I appreciate that, on the other hand I think it undermines the point.
Started: 8/1/20
Finished: 8/2/20
Talk about a change in tone. I went from a whole bunch of weird SFF short stories (and then Riot Baby) to this charming little story about women who work in a department store in post-WWII Australia. Wish I could remember how I heard about it.
Started: 4/6/19
Finished: 4/7/19
The writing in this book was painful, but also felt painfully real and accurate for a coming of age/coming out story told from the perspective of a teenager. I have diaries from around then (a little younger, but still), and MAN are they painful to read now in exactly the same way. I got over the wincing discomfort and enjoyed this one.
Started: 3/21/19
Finished: 3/22/19
I’m not sure who recommended this book, but whoever it was, I don’t trust them anymore. It’s not bad – the writing is better than the last one I read – but it’s disturbing and it really hammers you over the head with the “men are horrible and it’s women who bear the brunt and feel shame their entire lives” message. I’m not arguing the point, but goodness some awful things happen, and I wasn’t really prepared for that when I started reading.
Started: 2/22/19
Finished: 3/1/19
A cozy mystery set in present-day England with dragons. It’s cute, it’s lightly humorous, it set up a lot of background stuff so I’m hoping for a full series (there’s one sequel, Christmas-related), and even though the whodunit part wasn’t that hard to figure out, I still very much enjoyed it.
Started: 12/17/18
Finished: 12/19/18
A couple meet, fall in love, and flee their Middle Eastern city via a magic door. The writing keeps you at a remove from the characters and the story, so you know how the characters are feeling, but you don’t feel how they’re feeling, but it’s well-done. There have been several sentences I’ve read out loud to John because I liked the phrasing so much.
Started: 9/11/18
Finished: 9/12/18
I don’t remember where I heard about this one, but it was a nice read about a woman trying to recover from her husband’s tragic death a year before. She has a teenage son and a job in advertising, and it was funny and sweet and light, despite the tragic background. (I do occasionally read and enjoy non-SFF books.)
Started: 9/1/18
Finished: 9/3/18
The fourth in the Spotless series. I nearly put this one down (lack of caring what happens to these characters), but it’s the last one (I think), and it was easy enough for me to keep going in the middle of the night when I was soaking my feet in the tub.
Started: 8/29/18
Finished: 9/1/18
The third in the Spotless series. Losing interest, but it was an easy read in the middle of the night when I needed distraction from my itching feet.
Started: 6/10/18
Finished: 6/12/18
Second book in The Withrow Chronicles. Withrow has a mystery to solve. More enjoyable than the first, since it wasn’t broken up into three distinct parts.
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.