What are you reading at the moment?

Just started Innocence by DEan Koontz... It's interesting so far, but I'm not very far into it.

 

Finally catching up with Fayroll, which is brilliant if you can get past the fact that the irreverent and humorous comments of the MC, which work so well against mobs, are cringingly sexist, homophobic and anti-employee in a real world context.

 

Somehow, I got sucked into A Super Sale on Super Heroes. I'm on book three and I don't know how I got there...

 

Stockholmes?

 

Maybe.
I liked the first one well enough, but the second went off the rails. The third... I just don't know.

 

I agree on both one and two. I haven't read three though. The second book kindda turned me off the author.

 

Third is more like the first so far, but still out there in a way I can't explain. I am enjoying three much more than two though. I burned through Shard Warriors as well since I got KU for 99 cents. It's hurting my writing progress though...

 

I think so! The flow is a more... tempered, if that's the right word.

 

When you write dialogue, to you vocalise it out loud to hear how it sounds?

 

Maybe. It helped a bit for me, when I tried writing dialogue. Have you ever read Robert B Parker's books about Spenser, the PI? He had (imo) by far the best ear for writing natural-sounding dialogue of any author I've read.

 

Innocence started good but ended "Meh."

Just started The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter by Michael J. Sullivan

 

Just started Civil War, which I'm loving so far.

 

I highly second Spencer for PI. Have to read in order I feel.

 

Civil War was fantastic, it's gonna be a hard wait for the next book. I really enjoy the secondary characters, they're quite charming - who couldn't love a softhearted giant troll obsessed with cooking or a giant pet salamander? Also neat to see the real world reacting to what's going on in the game world.

I'm a few chapters into Hunter's Bond, which I'm also enjoying. It promises lots of unique monsters, which gets my ass in the seat.

 

Been on an Agatha Christie kick lately and made a discovery.

She has a series under the pen name Mary Westmacott. Six books where she puts a person/personality under the microscope and follows their life story. No murder or mystery included.

Naturally I had to hunt them down and read them... yeah, totally wasted my money there. Out of the three I got two were unreadable.

Giant's Bread = I litterally fell asleep. It's about a shock artist and how he got to be who and what he was starting from boyhood... boils down to him being different and liking things that are different as well as befriending (and yes I'm not kidding) a rich jewish boy that backed him when they grew up. It's skates around the word gay but never comes out and says it which is annoying as it sounds.

The Burden = Starts off fine though a touch of fae and mystic is added to the characters making them appear more like psychopaths than human. The ending however is unreadable. You have no idea which character is which in the last two chapters so you're not really sure what happened. The ending however... the ending was a bomb that killed whatever little good will this book had up until that point it was so bad...

A Daughter's Daughter = Interesting characters and very, very , very, VERY relatable. The type you met or have lived with. About a teen daughter who chased away her widowed mother's suitor causing a rife between the two. How their relationship changed and suffered after that and how each started acting out suppressed emotions. This one is worth a purchase.


The Rose and the Yew Tree = Yes I know I said I got three of them. This was so forgettable and disjointed that I actually forgot I got the audiobook! Fae girl with a dreamlike personality is waiting for her "prince" to come home and marry her. He does and he wants to marry her. The day of her wedding she runs off with the guy that used her palm as an ashtray... yes literally, a guy that instead of talking would grab her, twist her arm and shove a lit cig into it just to see her reaction. Then we follow a story of abuse from a third party's POV all while the girl is still dreamlike and unaffected by it all... like a mental patient would be. In the end there is an attempt to convince the reader that all that is a type of love... Yeah, no. Just no.

 

In these past few months my internet went offline quite often. I downloaded a lot of fan-translated Japan LN epubs (which I found accidentally when googling), 4 out of 5 they were so bad I wondered why the hell I read these books in the first place--though in the end I completed all of them since with rare internet I really have nothing to do on my chromebook. I learned to skip books with "moe" girls on the cover ever since.

About a dozen volumes of Overlord was pretty good tho.

 

Rouguelike by Paul Bellow. I'm about 10% in and enjoying it so far. Good characters, weird familiar like creatures, and it's funny how the plot keeps changing. It really does have the feel of a rougelike.