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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Emperor of Ruin
Finished
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Where the Drowned Girls Go
Finished
This is such a good series. This one gets pretty dark though, for what is I think ostensibly a children’s series; I don’t just mean the kind of spooky or gothy themes of some of the other Doors, which are common in this series, but the Whitethorn Institute is cruel and abusive in a very different way. The Institute’s storyline doesn’t resolve though; I’m hoping future books at least move that along? Which I don’t think is a guarantee in the way this series works.
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All the Missing Girls
Finished
This book is a mess. It’s got a kind of interesting sort-of mystery at the heart of it, told in a way too-clever manner of going backwards in time from an arbitrary point that is both hard to follow and completely incoherent once it all resolves—as you’d expect, the resolution of the mystery is near the end of the book, which puts it near the start of the timeline; so how did she spend the rest of the book not knowing? The resolution is also silly. What she treats as inevitable is anything but.
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Those Beyond the Wall
Finished
I loved the first book. This one didn’t grab me as much; I think the pacing was a bit off and a lot of reveals and flashbacks made some of the twists and turns hard to follow or keep track of what’s happening now, where do we stand, who knows what. Felt more grim than the first book, which still had plenty of grimness to my recollection. And then the final act gave strong Mad Max Fury Road vibes which, to be fair, really only helped my enjoyment because it gave me a strong image in my mind’s eye.
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The Cuckoo
Finished
I really enjoyed this one. The series was fun, but I think this had some of the best, most evocative scenes in the series. The pacing to the end of the book was a little strange, a little anticlimactic, but oddly, I found I kind of appreciated that – not a tidy bow on a series that didn’t have a clearly desirable outcome.
I’m painfully aware of how fantasy is used – often unintentionally – as a vessel for smuggling right-wing and racist ideologies; and a series that centered on two explicitly western European, mostly Anglo, societies trying to genocide each other, with strong Nordic influence and themes deeply intwined with toxic masculinity, is certainly not immune to those criticisms. But in the end, I think it could have been much worse in that regard. Bellamus was a fascinating and sympathetic antagonist, and while men definitely outnumbered women in the story, at least a few women have strength and agency, and the men were generally layered and human. Not a perfect book in that regard, for sure, but far from an outlier in the subgenre.
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Love, Mom
Finished
This was such a perplexing read for me: the central idea is really fun for a thriller, but the execution is awful. I had the twist figured out long, long before it came. People use awkwardly sanitized language. So many uses of “freaking,” and her dad, drunk and bitter, says her mom was “shagging” someone else—this book all takes place in the US, in the present day. But this book has murder, SA, drug use, sex (references, not acts), so it’s not like the language is sanitized to make it PG.
The premise is a bit silly as many thrillers are, but the way it unfolds is even more cartoonish. The pacing gets weird, there’s essentially no climax, and then much of the mystery is just resolved in epilogues.
The way the author treats EJ, I was certain he’d turn out to be bad – my theory was that he was the child given up for adoption – but no, it’s just an excessively cheesy love story side plot. And dad going to prison for life? Did I hear that right? Nah. Silly. A fun story, somewhat disorientingly written.
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A Conspiracy of Truths
Finished
A delightful read. The whimsical storytelling style, in the voice of the protagonist—very much in the vein of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams—could easily be something that took me out of the book, because a voice like that is hard to make natural; but it was very well executed. The constrained first-person perspective had me wishing, at times, to get out and see the world a bit more; but I enjoyed it all the same.
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Things Don't Break on Their Own
Finished
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The Second Rebel
Finished
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Forever and a Day A James Bond Novel
Finished
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You Must Be New Here
Finished
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The Red Winter
Finished
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Abandon
Finished
I’ve enjoyed Blake Crouch’s other works and so I picked this one up, and I suppose I regret it. Boring, poorly-paced—things only start to kick off like 60% or 70% of the way through the book—and not entertaining in the process. Sometimes the plot takes a while but the characters get you there; this was not one of those times. Maybe in part I just don’t enjoy the Old West as a setting, so I guess that’s on me. I’ll probably still read more of his work, but he’s become a better writer since this one, and come up with more compelling premises.
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Eulalia!
Finished
Wanted to revisit one of my favorite childhood series. Listened to an audiobook that was voiced by Jacques and “A Full Cast,” and surprisingly I think that hurt rather than helped my enjoyment. Part of it is simply that I listen to audiobooks at a higher speed, and the range of voices and accents didn’t do well in those circumstances: if I listened at 1x it was definitely too slow, but the voices were not a uniform speed, so a reasonable speed for the book was still too fast for certain characters. Jacques’s low Liverpudlian accent is lovely, but can also be hard to make out when, e.g., driving. So that’s obviously not a criticism of the book, but it did affect my enjoyment. The book overall felt a little strangely paced, without a clear rising action and climax. Few of the characteristic feasts, and actually very little time at Redwall at all. It was alright, but certainly not my favorite of the series.
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Blood of the Chosen
Finished