Book Logging (Paper, ebook)
Dec. 6th, 2019 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckGraff, Lisa. A Tangle of Knots - Read as an Overdrive ebook. I was kind of frustrated by this because there were enough characters to confuse me and because the pieces from each POV were small. I had to read slowly because of the amount of clicking required to page forward, and I felt like I could barely glimpse what was going on. I also felt like the world building was a little off because the world was too much like ours even when it wasn't. The book wasn't terrible, and I think that the target audience would enjoy it more than I did. I'm curious enough to try another of Graff's books, but that will likely depend on what's available in a format I can manage.
Greenwood, Kerry. The Spotted Dog - This is part of Greenwood's modern day mystery series. I enjoyed the book, but the mystery part was disjointed and barely sketched in. The story also never adequately covered the motivation for a couple of the incidents. Still, the series has a bunch of running characters, and it's nice to see them interact and get on with their lives.
Jones, Rachael K. Every River Runs to Salt - I'm not sure of the actual word count of this, but the paperback I got from the library is slimmer than things Tor has published as novellas (which I also get from the library). I don't remember why I put a hold on this. Possibly because it was obviously fantasy and also obviously short, possibly because someone recommended it and I remembered the recommendation when I saw it added to the library catalogue. This is more mythic logic fantasy than fairy tale or epic, and it works really well. I'm sure that I missed some things, but each step in the story fit together in a way that was right even if it wasn't laid out in a grid with square corners and no gaps. Recommended. Also, I finished it in half an hour. It's not a huge time investment to try it.
Lackey, Mercedes. Eye Spy - Another Valdemar book. This one won't, I suspect, make sense as a starting point for a new reader. Returning readers will find the usual Lackey elements, for better and for worse. The book focuses on a girl with the ability to sense structures and their weak points and stresses.
Lackey, Mercedes and James Mallory. The House of the Four Winds - Read as an ebook. Pirates and magic and ship graveyards. I wasn't surprised by anything, but it also didn't set off my water phobia.
Lindgren, Astrid. The Red Bird - This is a picture book, just one with a lot of text. It's also depressing as hell when looked at square on. It's about two orphans being worked to exhaustion and barely fed who find a doorway to paradise. The door has to stay open because, once closed, it won't open again. They keep going back as the world they live in becomes harsher-- colder, grayer, grimmer. Finally, they stay and close the door behind them.
Oneill, Therese. Ungovernable - This is a guide to Victorian era child-rearing practices. The style is light and sarcastic as the author discusses the what and why of things considered best in the US and the UK during that era. The book is fun reading as long as one can avoid thinking too much about real people living like that. The author appears to have done her research. Recommended.
Quick, Amanda. Tightrope - This was a quick read that required no particular effort from me. This is a romance set in a west coast resort town in the 1930s. The hero and heroine were the same characters Quick usually writes. This is one of those things that's wonderful if it's a thing you like and unreadable if it's not. I like Quick's books because I can relax while reading them and not encounter jarring surprises.
Rex, Adam. Unlucky Charms - Book 2 in the Cold Cereal series. This is a book of finding out more information as the situation gets steadily worse. There's still humor in it and character development and things happening, but nothing resolves. Also, there are so many characters that I kept losing track of who was who. I've requested the third book via interlibrary loan, though, and I look forward to reading it.
Riordan, Rick. Son of Sobek; Staff of Serapis; The Crown of Ptolemy - Set of linked short stories that I read via OverDrive. They cross the Percy Jackson stories with the Kane Chronicles. There's not much to these because they're so very short.
Robson, Kelly. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach - This showed me the disadvantage of reading Overdrive ebooks on my laptop. I had no idea how far I was from the end when the checkout period ended. I put in a second hold and waited several weeks only to discover that I'd been four pages from the end. I could have read that in five minutes if I'd realized. As to the story itself, I was kind of fascinated by the set up before the time travel mission. The mission itself felt kind of... I don't know. Was I supposed to enjoy watching the train wreck or find something profound in it? I didn't. I also didn't feel like there was any sort of completion for the POV characters. A few more paragraphs might have done it. As it was, I felt like a couple of non-POV characters got completion, but that involved abandoning everyone else in the mess at the end of the book.
Shurtliff, Liesl. Time Castaways 1: The Mona Lisa Key - This is one of those books that poses many more questions than it answers. Three siblings end up on a time traveling vessel that can change shape and is most often a wooden ship. The book's clearly meant to have many, many sequels. I'm curious as to what's going on, but I'm not desperate to know. If that makes sense? If the books drop into my hands, I'll certainly read them, but I won't go looking.
Stevens, Robin. Murder Is Bad Manners; Poison Is Not Polite; First Class Murder; Jolly Foul Murder - I've been going through the Wells & Wong mysteries fairly steadily, but I'm limited to interlibrary loan speeds as the local library only has the first book in the series. The two main characters are 14 year old girls attending the same English boarding school in the 1930s. They keep running into-- and solving-- murders. The stories are first person POV narrated by Hazel Wong who is from Hong Kong.
Stratford, Jordan. The Case of the Perilous Palace - This is something like fourth in the series and (so far) the only one I've read. It's a short mystery for children. The author has rearranged historical timelines to let Ada Lovelace and Mary Wollstonecraft be very near the same age so that they can solve mysteries together. This is not the only bit of timeline tweaking. The story is slight but not non-existent. I'm pretty sure that Ada's being written as somewhere on the autism spectrum but cannot speak to how well that's done.
Stross, Charles. The Delirium Brief - The library doesn't have this in audiobook format, and I was sure I couldn't manage the book on paper, so I read the ebook. This is book 8 in the Laundry Files and mostly deals with the fallout from events in book 7. The Laundry and its remit are now public knowledge, and the attacks are coming from all sides, both mundane and not. This is no longer the 'hidden in our world' sort of story. This is the 'how humans fail to deal with being terrified' story and the 'how humans fail to be terrified of the actual threats' story.
Stross, Charles. Down on the Farm - A short (not sure of the exactly length) in the Laundry Files series. I've lost track of which of the stories I read this one was. I think the shorts are mostly readable as supplements to the main series.
Stross, Charles. Equoid - A novella in the Laundry Files series. The horror elements here had less disguise than those in the novels tend to. There's also child harm and death more or less onscreen. I still found it readable even though those are elements I avoid.
Stross, Charles. Overtime - A short story in the Laundry Files series. I've lost track of which of the stories I read this one was, but I think this was the Christmas one.
Tamaki, Mariko. Lumberjanes: Ghost Cabin - The library shelves this as a graphic novel, but it's more a novel with occasional illustrations. The reading difficulty is low, and the plot is rather less complicated than that of most of the Lumberjanes graphic novels. The POV is a head-hopping omniscient that may bother some readers but that I thought fit because the series has no single focal character.
Tesh, Emily. Silver in the Wood - This is probably excellent for people who like things like this. It's a novella, and I could see slivers of adjacent stories that I'd have loved to focus on. I felt detached from the POV character and didn't actually understand how he thought. I also really didn't get the love interest. I wanted the relationship between the two characters either to be something I could solidly feel or to be an extremely minor secondary plot. This story felt neither fish nor fowl and really unsatisfying for me.
Toler, Pamela D. Women Warriors: An Unexpected History - Many the women discussed in this book were people of whom I hadn't previously heard. I recognized some, of course. There's a lot more about European women than about women from other cultural backgrounds. Some of that may be limitations on the sources available to the author, and some of it is likely due to gaps in documentation. There's a lot that either didn't get written down or got written down and then lost or destroyed. In a lot of cases, what's known about the woman in question could be summed up in a few sentences. I noticed some careless wording in a few places in terms of lumping together events/eras that I would consider distinct. The author also very consistently puts scare quotes around masculine pronouns and forms of address that refer to people who lived out their lives as men but were identified as physically female after death. I suspect that the author didn't want to acknowledge the possibility that some of the titular women warriors might not have considered themselves women. The thesis of the book, as far as I can tell, is that women have always participated in war and revolution and such simply because that sort of violence is part of the human world. There's just not a vast amount of documentation, so giving up any bit of supporting evidence that attaches to a name and specifics of a life must be wrenching because it supports the idea that those people only fought because they weren't actually women, because they were exceptional. The final chapter pretty much ticks off everything on the list of how to erase a group's participation in history as reasons why we don't know more about women's participation in wars through the ages. I just really got pissed off by the scare quotes, and I'm cis, so it wasn't hitting me on anything personally hurtful.
Van Eekhout, Greg. Voyage of the Dogs - This is an SF book aimed at kids. The premise is that dogs have been engineered, physically and mentally, to partner humans traveling in space. This particular ship has had an accident that killed all of the humans, but many of the dogs have survived. They're trying to keep the ship going and waiting for rescue. If this book had been aimed a touch older, I suspect that the ending would have gone very, very grim, but it didn't.
Yang, JY. The Ascent to Godhood - My general feeling on this novella is the same as on Yang's other works in the series. The worldbuilding is fascinating, but the novellas don't make sense as separate things.
Greenwood, Kerry. The Spotted Dog - This is part of Greenwood's modern day mystery series. I enjoyed the book, but the mystery part was disjointed and barely sketched in. The story also never adequately covered the motivation for a couple of the incidents. Still, the series has a bunch of running characters, and it's nice to see them interact and get on with their lives.
Jones, Rachael K. Every River Runs to Salt - I'm not sure of the actual word count of this, but the paperback I got from the library is slimmer than things Tor has published as novellas (which I also get from the library). I don't remember why I put a hold on this. Possibly because it was obviously fantasy and also obviously short, possibly because someone recommended it and I remembered the recommendation when I saw it added to the library catalogue. This is more mythic logic fantasy than fairy tale or epic, and it works really well. I'm sure that I missed some things, but each step in the story fit together in a way that was right even if it wasn't laid out in a grid with square corners and no gaps. Recommended. Also, I finished it in half an hour. It's not a huge time investment to try it.
Lackey, Mercedes. Eye Spy - Another Valdemar book. This one won't, I suspect, make sense as a starting point for a new reader. Returning readers will find the usual Lackey elements, for better and for worse. The book focuses on a girl with the ability to sense structures and their weak points and stresses.
Lackey, Mercedes and James Mallory. The House of the Four Winds - Read as an ebook. Pirates and magic and ship graveyards. I wasn't surprised by anything, but it also didn't set off my water phobia.
Lindgren, Astrid. The Red Bird - This is a picture book, just one with a lot of text. It's also depressing as hell when looked at square on. It's about two orphans being worked to exhaustion and barely fed who find a doorway to paradise. The door has to stay open because, once closed, it won't open again. They keep going back as the world they live in becomes harsher-- colder, grayer, grimmer. Finally, they stay and close the door behind them.
Oneill, Therese. Ungovernable - This is a guide to Victorian era child-rearing practices. The style is light and sarcastic as the author discusses the what and why of things considered best in the US and the UK during that era. The book is fun reading as long as one can avoid thinking too much about real people living like that. The author appears to have done her research. Recommended.
Quick, Amanda. Tightrope - This was a quick read that required no particular effort from me. This is a romance set in a west coast resort town in the 1930s. The hero and heroine were the same characters Quick usually writes. This is one of those things that's wonderful if it's a thing you like and unreadable if it's not. I like Quick's books because I can relax while reading them and not encounter jarring surprises.
Rex, Adam. Unlucky Charms - Book 2 in the Cold Cereal series. This is a book of finding out more information as the situation gets steadily worse. There's still humor in it and character development and things happening, but nothing resolves. Also, there are so many characters that I kept losing track of who was who. I've requested the third book via interlibrary loan, though, and I look forward to reading it.
Riordan, Rick. Son of Sobek; Staff of Serapis; The Crown of Ptolemy - Set of linked short stories that I read via OverDrive. They cross the Percy Jackson stories with the Kane Chronicles. There's not much to these because they're so very short.
Robson, Kelly. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach - This showed me the disadvantage of reading Overdrive ebooks on my laptop. I had no idea how far I was from the end when the checkout period ended. I put in a second hold and waited several weeks only to discover that I'd been four pages from the end. I could have read that in five minutes if I'd realized. As to the story itself, I was kind of fascinated by the set up before the time travel mission. The mission itself felt kind of... I don't know. Was I supposed to enjoy watching the train wreck or find something profound in it? I didn't. I also didn't feel like there was any sort of completion for the POV characters. A few more paragraphs might have done it. As it was, I felt like a couple of non-POV characters got completion, but that involved abandoning everyone else in the mess at the end of the book.
Shurtliff, Liesl. Time Castaways 1: The Mona Lisa Key - This is one of those books that poses many more questions than it answers. Three siblings end up on a time traveling vessel that can change shape and is most often a wooden ship. The book's clearly meant to have many, many sequels. I'm curious as to what's going on, but I'm not desperate to know. If that makes sense? If the books drop into my hands, I'll certainly read them, but I won't go looking.
Stevens, Robin. Murder Is Bad Manners; Poison Is Not Polite; First Class Murder; Jolly Foul Murder - I've been going through the Wells & Wong mysteries fairly steadily, but I'm limited to interlibrary loan speeds as the local library only has the first book in the series. The two main characters are 14 year old girls attending the same English boarding school in the 1930s. They keep running into-- and solving-- murders. The stories are first person POV narrated by Hazel Wong who is from Hong Kong.
Stratford, Jordan. The Case of the Perilous Palace - This is something like fourth in the series and (so far) the only one I've read. It's a short mystery for children. The author has rearranged historical timelines to let Ada Lovelace and Mary Wollstonecraft be very near the same age so that they can solve mysteries together. This is not the only bit of timeline tweaking. The story is slight but not non-existent. I'm pretty sure that Ada's being written as somewhere on the autism spectrum but cannot speak to how well that's done.
Stross, Charles. The Delirium Brief - The library doesn't have this in audiobook format, and I was sure I couldn't manage the book on paper, so I read the ebook. This is book 8 in the Laundry Files and mostly deals with the fallout from events in book 7. The Laundry and its remit are now public knowledge, and the attacks are coming from all sides, both mundane and not. This is no longer the 'hidden in our world' sort of story. This is the 'how humans fail to deal with being terrified' story and the 'how humans fail to be terrified of the actual threats' story.
Stross, Charles. Down on the Farm - A short (not sure of the exactly length) in the Laundry Files series. I've lost track of which of the stories I read this one was. I think the shorts are mostly readable as supplements to the main series.
Stross, Charles. Equoid - A novella in the Laundry Files series. The horror elements here had less disguise than those in the novels tend to. There's also child harm and death more or less onscreen. I still found it readable even though those are elements I avoid.
Stross, Charles. Overtime - A short story in the Laundry Files series. I've lost track of which of the stories I read this one was, but I think this was the Christmas one.
Tamaki, Mariko. Lumberjanes: Ghost Cabin - The library shelves this as a graphic novel, but it's more a novel with occasional illustrations. The reading difficulty is low, and the plot is rather less complicated than that of most of the Lumberjanes graphic novels. The POV is a head-hopping omniscient that may bother some readers but that I thought fit because the series has no single focal character.
Tesh, Emily. Silver in the Wood - This is probably excellent for people who like things like this. It's a novella, and I could see slivers of adjacent stories that I'd have loved to focus on. I felt detached from the POV character and didn't actually understand how he thought. I also really didn't get the love interest. I wanted the relationship between the two characters either to be something I could solidly feel or to be an extremely minor secondary plot. This story felt neither fish nor fowl and really unsatisfying for me.
Toler, Pamela D. Women Warriors: An Unexpected History - Many the women discussed in this book were people of whom I hadn't previously heard. I recognized some, of course. There's a lot more about European women than about women from other cultural backgrounds. Some of that may be limitations on the sources available to the author, and some of it is likely due to gaps in documentation. There's a lot that either didn't get written down or got written down and then lost or destroyed. In a lot of cases, what's known about the woman in question could be summed up in a few sentences. I noticed some careless wording in a few places in terms of lumping together events/eras that I would consider distinct. The author also very consistently puts scare quotes around masculine pronouns and forms of address that refer to people who lived out their lives as men but were identified as physically female after death. I suspect that the author didn't want to acknowledge the possibility that some of the titular women warriors might not have considered themselves women. The thesis of the book, as far as I can tell, is that women have always participated in war and revolution and such simply because that sort of violence is part of the human world. There's just not a vast amount of documentation, so giving up any bit of supporting evidence that attaches to a name and specifics of a life must be wrenching because it supports the idea that those people only fought because they weren't actually women, because they were exceptional. The final chapter pretty much ticks off everything on the list of how to erase a group's participation in history as reasons why we don't know more about women's participation in wars through the ages. I just really got pissed off by the scare quotes, and I'm cis, so it wasn't hitting me on anything personally hurtful.
Van Eekhout, Greg. Voyage of the Dogs - This is an SF book aimed at kids. The premise is that dogs have been engineered, physically and mentally, to partner humans traveling in space. This particular ship has had an accident that killed all of the humans, but many of the dogs have survived. They're trying to keep the ship going and waiting for rescue. If this book had been aimed a touch older, I suspect that the ending would have gone very, very grim, but it didn't.
Yang, JY. The Ascent to Godhood - My general feeling on this novella is the same as on Yang's other works in the series. The worldbuilding is fascinating, but the novellas don't make sense as separate things.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-07 06:01 am (UTC)With the Robin Stevens murder mysteries, does it matter the order read in? I'm always on the lookout for those kinds of things, but don't want to hunt down a later one if it isn't going to gel.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-07 04:06 pm (UTC)That said, I think it's better to read them in order because the girls are pretty young (14/15 in the ones I've read). The cases each change them a little, and some supporting characters recur. Hazel's feelings about dead bodies are different in book 1 versus book 3. The second book happens at Daisy's family's home, and the third book is on the Orient Express where Hazel's father is trying to keep them away from England during the trial that results from book 2. Book 4 has some conflict between the girls based on one of them writing letters to a boy they met in book 3.
I put the four that I've read in chronological order. Murder Is Bad Manners then Murder Is Not Polite then First Class Murder then Jolly Foul Murder. The first and fourth both take place at their school.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-08 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-08 02:04 pm (UTC)ETA:: https://robin-stevens.co.uk/