Reading
I read a lot, mostly in the form of audiobooks. I have enough audiobooks that I built an app to manage the files. Here’s what I’m reading, what I’ve read, and what I’m looking to read next.
Read
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Gardens of the Moon
Finished
I almost DNF’ed this book around 30%. The opening half hour of the audiobook is like a parody of fantasy written by someone who hates fantasy. A mishmash of prologues, pull-quotes, time jumps, and “Part One” / “Book One” / “Chapter One” … I feel like there were more. At 30%, I still had no idea what was happening in this book or what characters I was even following. Some fans of the series advised me that the series gets better, and that Erikson didn’t have an editor for this one (dunno if that’s true, but it jibes for sure). The novel settles and develops a narrative arc eventually. After that, it’s fine. I’ve read worse fantasy, and I’ve read much better. A number of characters, especially but not exclusively the Bridge Burners, blend together and I forgot anything unique about each of them. Now that it’s over, I have a general idea of what happened in the book, but the specifics are … vague. I would probably give the second half of this book closer to a 3, 3.25, but the first third drags it down some, so 2.5.
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Strange Houses
Finished
I have mixed feelings about this book. For one: it hooked me right away; it’s the first book I’ve read cover-to-cover in a written format in years—I’m working on a few other, longer books, but mostly I’m listening to audiobooks. And I was entertained the whole way through. So for that: four stars. But also, it’s kind of silly. For me that was actually probably a good thing; I’m not a big horror reader and I don’t like the feeling of being terrified. So the silliness reduced the initial creepiness to a tolerable level. But now that I’m done, I can’t really shake that silliness.
Within the first few chapters, Uketsu and Kurihara have apparently figured out the absurd scenario at the center of this all, with basically no mistakes. The scenario is silly and far-fetched, and there are so many other ways to read these house plans—sinister ways, even—that the fact that they supposedly got it just right is bothersome.
I’ll say this, though: if it was the author’s intent to leave people theorizing, they’ve certainly got me there. But the most satisfying theory I can come up with just feels a bit too far from any possible author’s intent, or at least any well-written plot:
that the whole thing presented by the two women was a fabrication, simply to satisfy the curiosity of these people who were investigating, by engaging the theories they had published in the newspaper; sending them in the wrong direction, and wrapping it up with a bow. In that way, they engaged these silly, paranoid delusions, and threw them off the scent of any number of much simpler criminal conspiracies. We never meet either of the children supposedly at the center of this plot, nor even their mother. They’re conveniently in hiding by the end of it all. The loose end this leaves is the neighbor, but I suppose that could just be one more person sent to shore up the story. All of this is why I have to give this book a decent rating: despite the many flaws that can be pointed out, in the end, I was engaged and it’s kept me thinking about it since.
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When We're in Charge The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership
Finished
I think this book has a lot of interesting things to say, some interesting insights about trying to be a person, and a leader, without losing your soul. A lot of it isn’t actually specific to the younger generations, except insofar as older generations were not, I guess, raised with the idea or expectation that their job, and their selves at their job, should be some kind of reflection of their own values and priorities. There are certainly parts of the book that feel a little cold, stereotypically capitalist—arguably still hanging onto an older way of doing things—but I think a lot of that is at least a valid perspective to be considered, even if I sometimes felt that I wanted to push back, and the intent behind even those sections was one of trying to survive or thrive in a the world that we all live in.
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Camp Zero
Finished
I really thought I’d like this more than I did. It was interesting, but it seemed to have a “point”… that it never really got to. Like there were undercurrents of a philosophical or ethical statement being made, and plenty of broader ideas were clear—the world is cruel to women; capitalism is a monster; the environment will change—and I generally agree, but it never added up to any more compelling thesis. Also the fixation on overpopulation was strange to read; it feels like a theme from a prior era, and dampened the anti-corporate argument. It all seemed to build toward something and then just kind of end. Which left me with just the impact of the vignettes it pieced together, which were interesting but a little disappointing as a whole.
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The Spider
Finished
It took me a little while to get into this one. I had forgotten where the last left off, and a decent way into the book it still rang very few bells. But it got going, I got back into the swing of the characters, and I enjoyed the third act. I’m really curious how the trilogy resolves, because while Carew is intent on ensuring “gray-ness” in his characters, Bellamus is hardly a villain, and if Roper’s plans are essentially
genocide -
A Stranger in the House A Novel
Finished
I was largely entertained by this book, and it generally kept me guessing, which is most of what I want out of a thriller. A good thriller has enough “a-ha, I thought so” moments without letting you guess the whole thing, and this did well enough on that front, for me. I’m deducting points for the
woman lies about abuse for personal gain -
You Shouldn't Have Come Here
Finished
This was … not good. A good 60% of the book had no plot movement, no tension except for a mild will they/won’t they. The writing was extremely corny. I enjoyed Jeneva Rose’s “Perfect” books for what they were, but this – written, I think, before those? – was not even that. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t rate this lower, but I suppose a few points for the mildly interesting “twist” that came about five minutes after anything resembling plot started taking place and ten before the end of the book. But even then,
from the beginning, it did seem pretty likely that they were actually both the bad guy – if there was even going to be a bad guy, which was not clear for most of the book. Both, or neither! But yep, both. -
Lessons in Magic and Disaster
Finished
I had less fun reading this book than others I’ve read by Anders. Which is not to say it’s a bad book, because it’s not. It’s just a different kind of book. There’s a lot of pain in this one, a lot of reckoning with a world full of hate and bigotry. Not every book needs to be an escape, but I’m not sure I prepared myself for how tough some of this book would be. Still definitely recommend it, as with basically everything else in the CJA catalog.
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First Lie Wins
Finished
This one was a lot of fun. I think I went in expecting, I don’t know what to call it, a “domestic thriller?” And maybe it’s a spoiler, though the first “twist” happens quite early—
it’s more of a heist or crime thriller. -
One Yellow Eye
Finished
I really, really enjoyed this book. It’s very accessible, really keeps you coming back, but it’s also got a lot of layers to it. There is a point in the second act—
when she starts trying to recruit for human trials herself -
The Last Thing He Told Me
Finished
For a book that I’ve seen everywhere, which has now been turned into a miniseries, this was a pretty standard, unsurprising kind of thriller. Not a lot happened; not a lot of red herrings or interesting side plots. And after it was revealed what had happened to the protagonist’s husband, I kept thinking what else there could be—what the next twist would be—because that couldn’t be it. But that was it! If you’d asked me to guess at a cliché after the first chapter, this would’ve been on the list.
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The Poisoned King
Finished
I really like these books. They’re undeniably, overwhelmingly sentimental, but for me at least they pull it off so it just feels lovely, not saccharine or preachy. While the stories feel a bit younger, a bit more fairy-tale-ish, the experience of reading them definitely shares something with my experience of reading the Harry Potter series, before JKR took her castle of gold and became a cartoon villain. This series has some not-so-subtle allegories to real-life villains, and a central theme of this one is the corrupting influence of gold. I hope the author sticks with that and doesn’t turn out to be another disappointment. It would be sad, because again, I like this series a lot.
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Some Desperate Glory
Finished
After just two novels (this and The Incandescent) Tesh has immediately made my list of preorder/instant buy on release authors. This book starts off with a certain set of pretty familiar tropes but very soon it’s clear that there’s more to this world, and not just in that other trope-y way (although, yes, that too). At each stage of this novel’s plot I had no idea where it was going to go next, but each time I was satisfied with what did. Tesh set up a premise that, for me, didn’t have a clear morally-just outcome, and then navigated it through some captivating scenarios to a pretty satisfying conclusion.
One thing that struck me as I finished this book is that I am so often bored out of my skull by stories that are close to this: galaxy-wide stakes, hand-wavy sci-fi devices with minimal grounding rules, all approaching a big race-against-the-clock climax; these things tend to pull back from the characters, especially in the third act, and in doing so they lose my interest. I don’t think that happened here. Maybe because I was very bought-in; maybe because Tesh does well to keep the focus on the characters. Certainly because there are very few drawn-out combat scenes.
I think it was really interesting to watch Kyr’s character develop slowly over the course of the novel, and especially in the end of the first act, when
it kind of becomes clear that she is, at that point, not really a “good guy.” Her attitudes, her indoctrination, encountering the truths out there, is a fascinating thing to watch, and while I think it happened a little quickly, I think Tesh did very well to never make it so plain as “Kyr was wrong and now she’s learning what’s right.” My major gripe is not very major at all:
as the end approached, and it looked like Kyr might die in accomplishing her goal, I was disappointed—but then, when she was snatched from that fate, it felt a little cheap too. -
6:40 to Montreal
Finished
I don’t know. I was very intrigued by the premise of this book, but the execution was underwhelming. Firstly, even with the aid of the fact that it’s winter where I am now, the book didn’t have that kind of cold feel to it, the “we’re trapped inside with the snow piling up outside” feeling. Something about how it was told. And then the resolution of the mystery was … disappointing. I had to go back and read it a few times to see if I’d missed something, but I hadn’t. It’s contrived, kind of out of left field, and with a lot of open questions.
I still don’t get how or why the spider factors into it, and who the guy who died was to our protagonist – nobody? Her husband just killed a stranger to spice up their life? And there’s some implication that things might point at her as the culprit, but why would they? And all of this … with a few months left to live? Your husband murdered a guy so you wouldn’t have an affair before you die? Really? -
The Toll
Finished
I think this wrapped up the series pretty well. I do feel like, at times, it was almost more of a kind of description of a possible ideal (with a big asterisk) future than a novel, and it almost left the characters behind as it did that. And I’m not actually sure I think the eventual state of affairs
on Earth It was interesting that at a certain point, I started wondering if the book was going to wrap up as an appeal to faith. There was a part of the book that very much felt like it was trying to draw parallels (beyond, obviously, the Tonists more explicitly) between The Thunderhead and some kind of deity—not just within the novels’ universe, which happened a lot, but more as a meta-narrative. In the end I don’t think it went that way.
I do kind of wish we learned more about the world Citra and Rowan ended up building—we learned a bit about the Tonists through the theological interludes (and, disappointingly, learned how much information was clearly lost), but we only got a brief look at Citra waking up at the very end.