Books I've Rated 3 / 5

• Snowflakes

  by Ruth Ware

  Finished 2020-08-11

• Please See Us

  by Caitlin Mullen

  Finished 2020-07-09

• The Flight Attendant

  by Chris Bohjalian

  Finished 2020-06-04

• A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

  by Alex White

  Finished 2020-05-30

  I would expect that I’d have enjoyed this more than I did. It was fun enough and relatively novel, magic and sci-fi in an interesting blend, but I found myself regularly losing interest.

  The audiobook is frustrating because at least one character is clearly written as British (or whatever fantasy world equates to British here), with obvious Britishism regularly injected into the dialog—at one point they even pointedly express confusion about “the can” before realizing it means “the loo”—and yet the reader read every character with the same bland and indistinguishable American accent. For such a dynamic and colorful world, the reading was pretty blah. It may have contributed to my disinterest. It wasn’t outright BAD reading but it wasn’t very good either and ignoring obvious speech pattern cues is annoying.

• Children of Ruin

  by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mel Hudson

  Finished 2020-04-20

• Agent Running in the Field

  by John Le Carre

  Finished 2020-04-09

  I was really enjoying this book and then it ended before it resolved. What? A whole lot of loose threads at the end of this one that I wasn’t prepared for because the book was overall so meticulous.

• An Unwanted Guest

  by Shari Lapena

  Finished 2020-04-01

  Entertaining enough. Structured like a Poirot kind of “bottle” mystery but Spoilernot solveable with the clues presented—the eventual culprit was revealed to have motives etc that were not presented to the reader in any way ahead of time

• Leviathan Wakes

  by James S.A. Corey

  Finished 2020-03-09

  It’s a decently entertaining sci-fi read but it’s pretty bad with women and that only becomes more apparent as the book goes on. Three men of varying degrees of gruffness race to save the universe and also obsess over women who have no real agency except as motivators and plot devices.

• An Echo of Things to Come

  by James Islington

  Finished 2020-03-02

• Sing, Unburied, Sing

  by Jesmyn Ward

  Finished 2020-02-09

• Little Girl Lost

  by Carol Wyer

  Finished 2020-02-06

• Assassin's Apprentice

  by Robin Hobb

  Finished 2020-01-09

• Repeat

  by Neal Pollack

  Finished 2019-12-07

• Silver on the Tree

  by Susan Cooper

  Finished 2019-12-03

• Something in the Water

  by Catherine Steadman

  Finished 2019-12-01