The Gentleman Who Did Not Like Guns #1 – Chile Con Carnage Lupano*Salomone 2014-08-28 2014-08-28 **1/2
2014-09-07: The title and cover implied humor and someone trying to avoid violence. Instead it was mostly a lot of gun related violence. Too bad the authors couldn’t come up with anything original.
The Martian Andy Weir 2014-08-20 2014-08-24 ***1/2
2014-08-22: Good stuff, very amusing. I’m not sure I buy Mark’s total casualness about his situation.
2014-08-25: Quite good. I both liked and disliked the bits where the author switched to the omniscient to tell us why something was about to go wrong. The info on why it was going wrong was nice but it felt kind of heavy handed and it didn’t quite fit the first person narrative of everything else.
Brisk Money Adam Christopher 2014-08-18 2014-08-19 **1/2
2014-08-22: Enjoyable. A bit predictable.
It’s About Squirrels Lynn Abbey 2014-08-18 2014-08-18 **1/2
2014-08-18: Amusing short story.
Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology Brandon Sanderson, et al 2014-08-15 in-progess in-progess
2014-08-18: I started listening to Writing Excuses because they were on the Hugo ballot and I’ve quite enjoyed the podcast. After listening to the episodes that talked about these stories I purchased the ebook even though two the four stories don’t really interest me. The behind-the-scenes stuff is interesting and I’ll probably read them all, or at least start them, but those topics just aren’t doing anything for me.
The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away Cory Doctorow 2014-08-14 2014-08-15 **
2014-08-15: Meh. Didn’t have anything to do with the song. Very bleak and hopeless.
Two Serpents Rise Max Gladstone 2014-08-08 2014-08-14 ***
2014-08-13: Reading regularly but holy crap this is long. Moon Reader says I still have 13 hours to go. Got my Calibre-server working again. Yay!
2014-08-14: It’s starting to be tedious. It’s too long and I’m pretty sure of the general flow of things. We’ll see.
2014-08-14: I liked it, but I wanted it to be over. The ending didn’t play out exactly like I thought, but there weren’t any surprises there either. Stray question: Why do the gods care if you’ve had sex? In what way does that make you less pure?
The Maker of Universes Philip José Farmer 2014-08-05 2014-08-08 ***
2014-08-09: Pretty good given when it was written.
Ready Player One Ernest Cline 2014-07-27 2014-08-05 ***
2014-07-28: Pretty wordy and not going anywhere so far. Just finished the “history” lesson so maybe it’s finished with the set up and it’ll start going somewhere.
2014-08-02: Not bad, it’s keeping me reading.
2014-08-05: The “romance” was tedious and unneeded. Big eye roll over “skin jobs”.
2014-08-06: Yay! I get to read something else! It wasn’t bad but it was one of those books that just became tedious after a while. The “romance” could have been dropped completely and it would have improved the story (and shortened it). I didn’t so much “suspend” my disbelief as chuck it out the window. I just wasn’t buying a lot of the infiltration scenario. IOI didn’t firewall the slaves off from the rest of the intranet? One guy apparently had access to EVERY system? There was nothing in the network to watch for unusual large file moves and especially for the movement of sensitive data? Maybe it’s because I work on networks but that whole thing was way too easy. I had a major WTF when he said something to the effect of “if the codes don’t work then I just sold myself into a life of slavery for nothing”. My immediate thought was, you didn’t put in a plan to buy your way free in a few months? And about two pages later he reveals that he has in fact, just such a plan, which makes his prior statement seem really stupid. Also, the big fight took like 30 seconds and was a cake walk so, WTF? Anyway, it was a reasonably entertaining read for large parts of it and while I wanted it to be over I didn’t want it enough to just quit.
All you need is kill Hiroshi Sakurazaka 2014-07-26 2014-07-27 ***1/2
2014-07-28: Good, enjoyable, and short, which is a feature these days as editors don’t seem to remember how to tell authors to stop.
