Read
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Lock In
Finished
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Disclaimer
Finished
Not a lot to say about this book that wouldn’t ruin it but I really enjoyed it. It’s pulpy and a bit graphic, in sometimes maybe unnecessary ways, but it’s really well put-together and unpredictable start-to-finish.
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The False Prince
Finished
Fun. I think this one was ruined a bit by listening to it rather than reading it – the reader wasn’t bad, but was very much present in my mind, meaning I couldn’t entirely lose myself in the story. It took a weird turn in the middle, not so much plot-wise but storytelling-wise. But it’s interesting enough that I may try to pick up the next at some point.
It is one more YA novel where I didn’t get a very good feel for the world – the author was too caught up in a few (pretty standard) characters and telling the general plot. I’d like to know more about the world, the way it feels, looks, operates. I think authors can get lost in worldbuilding and that’s never good, but YA novels too often forego setting the stage, establishing the setting. This is one of those novels. Maybe now that we’ve established some characters etc, she’ll build out the world a bit more in the next one?
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Outlining Your Novel
Finished
A bunch of similar stuff from Structuring. Good food for thought. Again nothing groundbreaking but just listening to it made me look at some stuff from a different perspective.
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Bird by Bird
Finished
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The 8-Minute Writing Habit
Finished
A lot of self-promotion, not a ton of actual information. A few breakdowns of things like how to go from outline to sketch to draft (etc) were helpful to me as someone who’s still trying to figure out the process. Short enough that I feel like it wasn’t a waste of my time. Got a few things and can move on to the next thing. Might try to read something else from this author with a bit more in-depth discussion.
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A Darker Shade of Magic
Finished
Not bad. I really like the concept of the multiple Londons and how that world was built, but none of them got particularly fleshed out or realized. The characters were alright, but I didn’t feel much connection with either of the protagonists by the time the book ended. I think the narrative arc could’ve used a bit more restraint – some pauses, some time to get to know the setting and the characters. It felt like a pretty standard YA arc, where something propels the characters on some half-explained adventure, generally fraught with nondescript streets and halls full of faceless bad guys and some general sense of evil, building up with few twists until the final confrontation. The concepts that were introduced were fun and interesting but I think the author was afraid to let up for a minute, which left me at the end less invested or interested in the whole story. Not that it was particularly chaotic, it just felt like the story lacked … texture?
Part of this may just be due to the audiobook format in which I experienced it. I’d recommend you read it rather than listen to the audio, either way. The guy’s voices were … weird.
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The Big Short
Finished
I think I only understood about 30% of this book. That’s not a criticism of the book, more a caveat of my review. But it was interesting how much time was spent emphasizing how nobody could understand CODs, credit default swaps etc, and then assuming I understood it.
The overarching plot was interesting and I liked the writing style but I kept waiting for it all to click and the Big Short to be laid bare … and then it was over. I was left with the understanding that yeah, everything they’d bet on had I guess come true and that was bad and also I must be pretty dense to have made it all the way through this book without really understanding some of the key issues.
I’d probably look them up if I were on my kindle but I listened to this on Audible. I should probably go back and fill in the gaps.
Tl;dr - probably a good book that deserved a more informed audience than me.
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Carry On
Finished
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The Silkworm
Finished
Note: please see my 2025 blog post re: Rowling
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Bossypants
Finished
Having listened to Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please” and Mindy Kaling’s “Why Not Me” before this, I’d say this was my favorite of the three. All good, but this one had some of the sharpest stuff in it. Funny stuff, insightful cultural commentary, interesting stories. Each had these (and that’s part of why I group them - the other reason being that they’re of course all semi-autobiographical books by modern women of comedy), but I felt like this one brought the most.
It was weird though to hear her talk about 30 Rock like it’s still on.
And the chapter about her dad was sweet and interesting but in parts really sounded like she was justifying some, at best, “dated” (more realistically: racist) views. I think she was just sort of explaining how her dad grew up and came to believe what he believed but there were a few things that seemed to dance close to justification rather than just … I don’t know, explanation. Don’t even know if this paragraph makes sense. I just felt like it got a bit uncomfortable for a minute in that chapter.
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Why Not Me?
Finished
Pretty smart and entertaining. Not a ton to it – would’ve liked her to continue a bit more on any number of topics. A few of the essays felt like filler.
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Modern Romance
Finished
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Throne of the Crescent Moon
Finished
I picked this book up a while back and put it down pretty quickly because I just couldn’t get past the constant and verbose references to God and God’s will. That’s not to say I was offended or upset in any way, I just found it really distracting. I’m not a religious person, so that may be part of it, and though English has its own set of curses and invocations – “oh my God,” “God willing,” etc, these were long sentences, sometimes paragraphs, with very little to do with the actual conversation. I wondered if they were translations of common Muslim utterances? This is of course a fictional world, but it appears to be built around something like Islam the same way much Anglo/Western fantasy is built around Arthurian and therefore Christian myth.
Anyway. I picked it up on Audible more recently, and that made it easier for me to elide these distracting tangents. It became more of a seasoning to the book rather than a heavy-handed and constant thing. At that point, I shot through the rest of the book.
It’s fun to read fantasy that’s not based on the same Anglo tropes – already this year, I read [b: An Ember in the Ashes|20560137|An Ember in the Ashes (An Ember in the Ashes, #1)|Sabaa Tahir|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1417957944s/20560137.jpg|39113604] (Roman/Middle Eastern), [b: Shadow and Bone|10194157|Shadow and Bone (The Grisha, #1)|Leigh Bardugo|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339533695s/10194157.jpg|15093325] (Slavic), and [b: Uprooted|22544764|Uprooted|Naomi Novik|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1420795060s/22544764.jpg|41876730] (a different vein of Slavic), and this was a great addition.
In animation, they teach you to create unique and identifiable silhouettes for every character, and I felt like this book had the literary version of that: each character was unique, built on archetypes but a bit deeper, and each contributed something unique to the adventure and to the story. In my head, they also had literally unique silhouettes – the large, bearded ghul hunter, the stiff and skilled swordsman, the small feral (literally and figuratively) girl, etc.
I found myself wondering how it would all wrap up, which you don’t always do in genre books like this, and at the same time I definitely enjoyed the ride – the spells, the settings, the characters. I’ll definitely end up picking up the next one.
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Between the World and Me
Finished
Brutal but excellent. I’d recommend it to anyone and everyone. I’m not sure I understood all of it, but I plan to keep especially those passages in mind as I continue to learn and grow.
