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Starter Villain by John Scalzi is another book that I checked out because of the cover and then proceeded to stay up until 2:00 in the morning to finish it. It was more humorous than I expected, being sardonically narrated by the hapless protagonist. When things are about as low as they can go for poor Charlie, he is informed that his late estranged trillionaire uncle has left Charlie his fortune, which he soon discovers isn't just his uncle's parking garage empire, but a complex organization worthy of a James Bond villain, with spy cats, potty-mouthed security dolphins on strike, and a powerful group of villain enemies who want what Charlie's got.3
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Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey2
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Nine Perfect Strangers - Lianne Moriarty
Finally finished my Q last night. Was a struggle to get through - it made you stop and think though - so I gave it 3 stars.2 -
Getting a jumpstart on my Halloween reading, but sadly my first attempt, Howliday Inn, turned out less spooky and somewhat less fun than its predecessor, Bunnicula. This was certainly an entertaining kid's book but lacked something--it really could have used a celery sucking vegetarian vampire rabbit. The human criminals just didn't do it for me, I prefer paranormal bunnies.3
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I've been working in some graphic novels in my puny attempts to be a more eclectic reader. I read My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. It is an engrossing story about a pariah kid, who lives for monster comics, investigating the murder of her upstairs neighbor. Then, after 400+ pages, the story just stops at no logical stopping place, with no resolution in any of the many intertwining plots. The next was Sheets by Brenna Thummler. This is the first of three volumes, which the writer was kind enough finish, also about a bullied middle school pariah, but this girl is the only functioning member of her family after the mother's death and carries the world on her shoulders. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong and then a runaway child ghost moves into her laundry business. This is a great story that would be suitable for readers from tweens onward. The last one is Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. It is a memoir of the author's dehumanizing experiences working in the oil sand industry in Alberta in order to pay off her college loans. It is an amazing book that obviously took a tremendous amount of work as well as brutal honesty and insight about a period of her youth that marked her deeply.3
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I love graphic novels. I own a bunch of Stephen King's The Dark Tower graphic novels in hardcover, the entire set of Sandman by Neil Gaiman in paperback (10 books), Watchmen by Alan Moore, and Y The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. I remember @beccaboo1276414 was a fan of Saga when we were over at Sparks. I didn't know anyone else here liked graphic novels.
I finished Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey, and like all collections of short stories some were great and some weren't so much. I found one to be particularly enjoyable where an artificial intelligence computer virus infected a refrigerator and replicated to other appliances through the electric wiring. The Roomba robot vacuum escaped the house and the virus leaked to every other machine it could get to.
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I started City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky this weekend (an author I like) but I could not concentrate on it because I threw out my back on Thursday, that is too distracting for a complicated novel. I will revisit the book when I am feeling better.
I picked up The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston instead and it is a much easier read.2 -
Catfish_Fan wrote: »I started City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky this weekend (an author I like) but I could not concentrate on it because I threw out my back on Thursday, that is too distracting for a complicated novel. I will revisit the book when I am feeling better.
I picked up The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston instead and it is a much easier read.
So sorry you are in pain. You never know how important the back is to every movement you make, until it acts up. Been meaning to try Adrian Tchaikovsky but he is one of so many I never get to in my mountainous TBR list. Someday!2 -
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
Ugly tale about ugly people. If you skip this one, you aren't missing much. Glad it's finished and tossed in the garbage.2 -
Catfish_Fan wrote: »I started City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky this weekend (an author I like) but I could not concentrate on it because I threw out my back on Thursday, that is too distracting for a complicated novel. I will revisit the book when I am feeling better.
I picked up The Winter Witch by Paula Brackston instead and it is a much easier read.
Hope your back is doing better - it can difficult to read when you can't get comfortable.1 -
It took some time, but my back is back to being taken for granted once again.
I hit pause on the Tchaikovsky book and picked up Better Off Dead by Lee Child, #26 in the Jack Reacher series. I am almost caught up to the most current book in that series, #28 comes out Oct 24 and I won't be reading that one right away unless I win the Goodreads giveaway for it. I have book 27 on my kindle already.2 -
Regretting You by Colleen Hoover. This was overall a good novel but unevenly paced with some well-done engrossing parts but some dragged-out repetitive boring sections as well. The weakest part of the novel was the main character who constantly wallowed in self-pity. Her name was Morgan, so I dubbed her Morgan Moaner, however, once reality handed her something real to justify the self-pity, the story picked up and was worth reading. Usually, if the main character in the book has a teenager, I find the kid the obnoxious one, but in this one the kids are okay. Moaner's daughter, her boyfriend, and her best friend are really well-drawn characters with a lot of witty snarky banter that added some fun to the book.3
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Catfish_Fan wrote: »It took some time, but my back is back to being taken for granted once again.
I hit pause on the Tchaikovsky book and picked up Better Off Dead by Lee Child, #26 in the Jack Reacher series. I am almost caught up to the most current book in that series, #28 comes out Oct 24 and I won't be reading that one right away unless I win the Goodreads giveaway for it. I have book 27 on my kindle already.
Glad you're feeling better again! Back to being taken for granted is the perfect description... Note to self: be grateful every day for the commonplace miracles that surround us.
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Moved on to two Manga.
The Girl from the Other Side, Vol. 1-12 by Nagabe--The first 11 volumes completed the story, and the 12th was a collection of unused vignettes from the happy times in the early volumes. The story grows more serious, but all the mysteries are eventually explained when we learn about the main characters' life histories in the last few volumes. It takes a Taoist philosophical turn at the end with the last conversation between the little girl and the kind monster as they tried to deal with the troubles and suffering caused to mankind by the war between the Light God and the Dark Goddess when they ceased to work in harmony.
The Walking Cat: A Cat's-Eye-View of the Zombie Apocalypse Vols. 1-3 Tomo Kitaokah--This series, Inspired by The Walking Dead, is really good, but unfinished. It will probably need at least three more volumes to finish but was still a great story about a cat that passes into the lives of survivors trying to fight off the zombies. The good news is that animals can't catch the virus that turns people into zombies. The bad news is that zombies still eat cats or any other living creature they can catch.
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Finished Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty 4*. Was the break I needed from serious stuff.
Next up - A Green and Ancient Light - Frederic S. Durbin3 -
Not one of the remaining letters I need, but I decided to check out Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. I enjoyed her Reading Lolita in Tehran much more than I did reading Lolita.3
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Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan by John Taliaferro
This wasn't a Tarzan story but a biography of one of my favorite writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I always pictured EGR churning out books, raking in the dough, and living in luxury at Tarzana, so it was both surprising and sad to learn how little respect and income he received until the last few years of his life.3 -
I finished The Midnight Witch by Paula Brackston tonight, which I really liked despite many vocal critics. I don't read reviews or synopses before plunging into books for this reason, I don't want my opinions to be skewed by the naysayers.
I started the 1100 page Ken Follett book Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy #3) after that. It will probably take me the rest of the month to finish this one, I would be surprised to get it done sooner.3 -
Maeve Fly by C.J. Leede--Absolutely ugh. It read like a D- movie that would be titled Fifty Shades of an American Girl Psycho. Feel free to miss this one; you won't miss much.2
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I should add that I do like reading what you all write (I check this forum daily), and I am part of a Goodreads Audiobooks forum (again, daily) where people discuss what they are reading in more general terms, that isn't nearly the same as reading the popular reviews of a book I am picking up on Goodreads that may spoil a plot. I don't want those synopses and opinions of people I don't know to skew my opinion of a book I chose before I take the plunge. I am pretty good at finding books and authors that I think I would enjoy and rarely find duds, although it still happens. Keep telling us about what you are reading and if you liked it and why, I use information like this to form my TBR list and move things up in priority (or down as need be). The more participation here the better!
I still have a couple of Cixin Liu and Ken Liu books on my kindle that I found on sale to read because of discussion here. My buddy read Cixin Liu's trilogy (The Three Body Problem and it's sequels) and found it to be very compelling and cerebral. I have five of his books and three by Ken Liu to get to someday; I intend to or I wouldn't have gotten them from Amazon on my kindle on sale for $2.99 each or whatever. It is worth my time to look at the kindle deals daily too, I find a lot of books that I want to read that aren't widely available at my libraries, or are pretty long books and a good value for the three bucks.3
