Read
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Eon
Finished
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Fatherland
Finished
Very quick read. Kind of a strange approach to telling the story, but definitely interesting, communicative, informative. Surprisingly sympathetic (without of course condoning some terrible acts). The art is well-crafted and a also relatively unusual style in the medium – you see a lot of faux-amateur indie comics; a few photorealistic; plenty that mimic the mainstream. You don’t see a ton with this sort of Wall Street Journal portrait crosshatching/stippling style. Or, at least, I don’t.
I did find it interesting how the author anglicized not just names and nicknames (somewhat reasonable, though I realized I kind of expect at least some foreign words thrown into conversation between foreigners in media) but also the conversational style. I had to remind myself that these conversations were (presumably, though never explicitly stated) taking place in Serbo-Croatian. Even a few place names got anglicized: Niš became “Nish,” for example. But Dejan wasn’t “Deyan.” This won’t be a thing for most people, but as someone who spends a lot of time around Serbs (girlfriend and family), I actually found it kind of distracting.
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An Ember in the Ashes
Finished
Really enjoyable. I guess I wasn’t entirely aware what the plan was for future books, so I was a little caught off guard by the very, very unresolved ending. But I get it – it feels less unresolved with the understanding that it’s part of a series. It’s just that I had certain expectations, certain theories about prophecies etc that I thought would be resolved at a certain point, but weren’t.
The universe is unique and exciting and the two character’s voices are genuine and compelling. Good book. Will eagerly await the next.
I am a little confused about whether this is YA or not? It mostly reads like YA, and that’s how it was presented to me, but there’s a lot of discussion of/threat of rape. It’d be one thing if this were a book discussing actual history, but as “flavoring” in a fantasy novel, I don’t tend to like that in adult books, let alone YA. I dunno. Unresolved feelings about that.
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The Fifth Gospel
Finished
Better than Dan Brown. A bit of a strange anticlimax though. The last third of the book was a bit of, “is this the big secret? no, is this the big secret? No… is this ? …oh, it’s over?”
That’s probably an exaggeration. But there was at least some of that confusion about what the whole thing was about, as the end approached. Anyway, it’s still better than Dan Brown. I enjoyed it. I’d probably read something else by this guy.
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Yes Please
Finished
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Death in Holy Orders
Finished
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The Girl on the Train
Finished
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Snow Crash
Finished
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An Unwelcome Quest
Finished
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Ready Player OneA Novel
Finished
Pretty fun. Listened to most of it on audio. Something about the cover, and the way it had been presented, had led me to believe that this book was as bit more, I don’t know, literary? It’s not. It’s a fun science fiction adventure, and that’s about it. The language is plain, the characters are secondary to the adventure. It’s a nerd fantasy in the extreme, and sometimes that sort of takes you out of it a bit. But I am still a pretty big nerd. So I mostly enjoyed it, and now I’m moving on with my day.
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The Dark Is Rising
Finished
I remember liking [b:Over Sea, Under Stone|11312|Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark is Rising, #1)|Susan Cooper|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166468889s/11312.jpg|742] a lot more than this one, but I finished that one years ago.
This felt a lot less like an adventure and a lot more like …a kid who had a bunch of stuff happen to him. And it wasn’t even, like, “kid gets swept up in major adventure.” More like “kid goes about his day, but every now and then weird stuff happens that he’s somehow an important part of… without his actually making any decisions about those things.”
That’s my major takeaway from the story. My impression, and my objection.
Really wanted to love this series. Not sure I want to invest more time in it, after this one. Maybe I will in a while.
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Child 44
Finished
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I Don't Care If My Best Friend's Mom is a Sasquatch, She's Hot and I'm Taking a Shower With Her
Finished
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Revenge of the Witch
Finished
Picked it up because a movie’s coming out and I figured I’d read it before I (potentially) watched it. Having read it, I’ll say it looks like the movie won’t even be vaguely similar to the book.
Anyway: it was fine. The antagonists were not characters for the most part - more just abstract bad guys. But I did like some of the spookier writing. Not really a genre I care about, but it did give me the creeps a few times. Pretty formulaic; not a ton of world building at all - by which I mean I know next to nothing about the world they lived in. But not bad. Very quick. May pick up a sequel at some point.
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Spell or High Water
Finished
