melreads | Entries tagged with 2020

Spoilers always possible here!

Tuesday, July 21, 2020
These books (meaning the Expanse series) are really "boy" books, in a way. Lots of violence, I prefer my action without a whole lot of actual killing, but I'm not likely to get that wish unless I go back to reading romance novels. Even "girl" books usually have some violence. Heck, even romance novels often have some level of violence. Often there's a little murder mystery, or a violent suitor or something like that.

(Later) I was trying to remember one romance where an evil guy deliberately eggs somebody on to kill themself. - It took me a while to figure it out, but i think it's The Proposal - or at least one of the books in that series, a Mary Balogh series where all the protagonists were in the Napoleonic wars and all of them are traumatized. The maybe-suicide that I was thinking about was the heroine's late husband.

(Even later, continuing the thought) To say "maybe-suicide" is not fair to the evil guy. It was a suicide - the guy jumped off a balcony. It's just that the guy who could have been trying to dissuade him, didn't. (And he stood to inherit, so there's definitely motive there.) I've actually started re-reading this now, did I say that? I need an antidote between doses of Expanse, anyway.

Beware - definite spoilers here!

Saturday, July 18, 2020
Finished Abaddon's Gate. I guess moving on to... what's the name of the next one, I can't think. The one on the planet beyond the gate, anyway. (Cibola Burn, I just looked.) I need to look up Cibola, I don't what it means beyond what Trashcan Man says in The Stand. A mythical city? My grasp of mythology beyond the very basics of Greek and Roman gods is tenuous.

Let's see, before we move on, do I have more thoughts about Abaddon? Don't really understand that reference either, beyond Abaddon being a Big Bad. These guys, meaning the authors (I can't think of them as one person) write such good characters. Sam dying feels like a punch in the gut. (I also think of the revelation way later that she and Pa were lovers. Doesn't surprise me that Sam would like girls, but there's hardly even any inference that she knows Pa to speak of. Sam's been on Tycho and I mostly never got the impression that Pa was, although maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, never occurred to me at all.)

Sunday a.m.
I forget every time how depressing Cibola Burn is - actually all these books are pretty depressing, come to that. Dropping rocks on Earth, for god's sake - and we haven't even gotten to that part yet! By that standard, Cibola Burn's terrorists and alien robots and killer snails are minor-league.

Monday
Well into Cibola Burn now - well 10%, according to Kindle. (Still getting rolling, but not the very beginning.) I was thinking that nowadays my brain registers this duality: I think of the characters and I also think of the way the authors are setting things up, to play out later in the book. I think as time goes on I see it from the authors' POV more and more. Maybe that's why I have trouble getting quite as immersed in books in general the way I used to. Or, I don't know, maybe I've been that way for years and I'm just now noticing. (Some of that definitely came from being an English major, though. I think before that, I was oblivious.)

Always a definite possibility of spoilers!

Monday, July 13 (still on Expanse #3)
It occurs to me that I really like the character of Anna, even though she's a preacher and I'm an agnostic. I never have any problem with people from middle-of-the-road religions. It's the zealots I have a problem with. (I was thinking of this more generally but it's also why I hate Ashford so much. Zealotry doesn't have to be about religion.)

Tuesday
I wrote down the quote from Melba about how everybody's bags of meat, there's no souls, and all that matters is your story and your name. (The authors have versions of the "bags of meat" bit scattered around the books - that one and that we're monkeys playing with microwaves. I wonder which story and which name Ms Koh/Mao means, since she has multiples. Or maybe she means Holden.)

Wednesday
I like a lot of what this book says about how people react to tragedy. I think they must have talked to psychologists or something. I think that's why these books work so well - these people are in (almost) unimaginable circumstances but they're just people, & they act the way normal people react. It's very grounded.

Thursday
It's funny how some violent things don't upset me at all, but others really do. I hate the counter-coup bit where they're going around shooting people execution-style. Somehow I find that particularly upsetting. I really, really hate book Ashford. (TV-Ashford is David Strathairn in particularly insane mode, yes, but still, he's somebody that I have difficulty hating.) (Casting is everything.)

Always a definite possibility of spoilers!

Wednesday, July 8
I'm not sure I'm enjoying The Expanse books as much as I did before. We'll see if that holds as we go along. It might just be that I'm really still in the early setup phase of this book, and once it really starts rolling I'll feel less jumpy. In the first book the setup stage was like one chapter. This one takes quite a bit longer.

Thursday
I'm now to the part of the book where they're traipsing around Ganymede and people keep getting shot (or presumably attacked by the protomolecule monster, but they don't know about that yet) and it's all pretty unpleasant. I'm looking forward to the part where they're back on the ship and at least shooting people from a distance.

Friday
OK, a day later, everybody - or well, Holden and Prax and the whole gang other than Alex - is still on Ganymede, but they're about to get off as soon as Alex gets there with the ship. And Bobbie and Avasarala have now hooked up (metaphorically speaking). So the pace is picking up, which is what I wanted. I don't know how much more reading I'll work in tonight, though. It's early-ish by my standards and I'm already sleepy.

Saturday
I was talking before about how I visualize characters. I just realized that I now hear what Bobbie says with TV-Bobbie's accent. And her hair, mostly! Before I saw TV-Bobbie, I was visualizing her wrong and I knew it - which is to say I was visualizing her as white, even though I knew intellectually she wasn't. It's still hard to tell the back of your brain that it's wrong. So thank goodness for TV-Bobbie, I guess.

Sunday
I finished Caliban's War just now and am starting Abaddon's Gate. All of these books are so good - there's not a dud among them - as I predicted, I whizzed through the second half of Caliban. That's pretty much the only criticism I can come up with for these books, is that there are a few sections like the beginning of Caliban that are slow to get going. (Well, ok, the very beginning is Bobbie's platoon getting killed, that isn't slow. It's after that that it lags.) But also they keep throwing all these new characters in and it takes you a while to get used to them - Bobbie & Prax & Avasarala in the last book, Bull and Clarissa in this one.

I think I should just make this line standard in every entry:
Note: definite possibility of spoilers!
(and then if I get way spoilery like I did way down below with The Expanse, I'll put it in the title, too!)

Monday, June 29
(Writing in my brand-new journal, a Happy Planner Classic Horizontal)
Currently reading: Leviathan Wakes

I can't resist writing here even though it's early. (NOTE that this refers to the paper journal - I was writing in the July start journal even though it was still June.) The plan is that this will be my book journal - we'll see how I stick with that. There's not a lot of room here so I'll have to write short bits here - unless I get behind, which I often do in my regular journal. And if I have anything lengthy to say it'll just have to go elsewhere! So I'm reading Expanse #1 (the one above), but I've stopped for the moment and I'm reading romance novels instead. My favorite romance novelist is Mary Balogh, who writes characters much more realistic than most, it seems to me. (No matter that her sex scenes are in fact mostly the same one over and over, with some variations. Sex scenes don't interest me as much as they used to, anyway.)

Wed., July 1 - I wanted to read "Someone to Remember" which is a novella so it will go fast, but first I re-read Someone to Honour, which is the book before it chronologically, and which has a plot that intertwines with the novella. (All the books in this series are "Someone to _____" which makes it hard to remember which is which.) I just finished the first one so I can read the novella tomorrow.

Thurs. - So, Someone To Remember is the very unusual romance with a middle-aged heroine. The funny thing is that I noticed the minute the author started thinking of her as a person. For the first few books of the series she was a bit of a caricature, the maiden aunt who stayed at home. Then she started to change, gradually. I became convinced a couple of books ago that she would get her own romance, and she did.

Friday - Okay, I veered off to romance-land long enough to read three books, no less, but I'm ready to go back into The Expanse this weekend, skipping some 4 or 5 hundred years in one fell swoop. (The books are vague about what year it is, but the TV series says 23rd century - not the near future but not unimaginably far, either.)

Saturday - I am 2/3 of the way through Leviathan Wakes, lest you think I read nothing but romance novels all week. I'm just reading in fits and starts. It's funny how I visualize this in my mind now that I've seen the TV show. Left on my own, the way I visualize book characters is pretty vague. I don't really form much of an idea what they look like, exactly (past whatever description is in the book, I mean), although once in a while I'll realize that I've "cast" some character in my head and I'm thinking of a certain actor, usually without even realizing it for a while. Here, I seem to see them now as somewhere between what I originally saw in my head and the TV actors - except Miller, who I'm pretty definitively seeing as Thomas Jane, most of the time.

Monday, July 6th
OK, done with Expanse #1, on to #2, which is Caliban's War, the one about Ganymede, the one where Bobbie shows up. (After that is the one out at the gate, then the one at the planet on the other side of the gate. Then Marco drops his stealth rocks on Earth - that's the next two. Then the ones about, um, the ex-Martians - Laconians, is that it? That makes eight, right? And #9 isn't out yet. So seven more books to re-read, that'll keep me busy for a while.) Will I go straight into Caliban's War? Yeah, maybe I will - well, maybe not right this minute. But I'm pretty sure I'll at least start it before I veer off into anything else. That book is one of my favorites.

Tues. - I'm now a good way in on Caliban's War - 12%, says the Kindle. Prax is a good character, it's a shame he didn't fit into the other books - but what would be their excuse for carrying around their own botanist? (I do think he and Mei make some brief appearances later.) Avasarala and Bobbie both stay around for ages, so you can't have everything. (Now I'm thinking about character deaths and such. They killed Miller off in book one and he was back for two more books. Amos is also effectively dead but it looks like he'll make it into #9.)

I ranted before about the whole Did Not Finish concept, because (to sum up) I felt like there was a difference between the books you stopped reading because you hated them, and the ones where you just never came back to, for no particular reason. But this list was made before I ever came up with that idea (which I called Type 1 and Type 2), so I can't even say for sure which type these are! But I definitely did not finish them, that's all I can say. And these are presumably 2021 and earlier, because they came from my 2020-21 journal. (And yeah, I know quite a few of these are books people love. No judgment of your taste is implied!)

Twilight
Three Hearts and Three Lions
Crazy Rich Asians
11/22/63
Gone Baby Gone
The Copper Gauntlet
Revelation Space
A Killer's Mind (the series is Zoe Bentley, I think?)
A Curious Beginning
A Discovery of Witches
Agent to the Stars
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (I think I got a long way into this one, too.)
Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
God-Shaped Hole
Murder on the SS Rosa
The House with a Clock in its Walls (despite the fact that it was made into a movie I liked, I think?)
Gideon the Ninth
The Man With One of Those Faces

nonfiction:
Flu (by Gina Kolata) (which I started and stopped multiple times)
Washington's Spies
1776

Oh, and there is a note at the bottom of the page, saying that I didn't count books where I read just a few pages and then never came back to it, I had to at least get through a chapter or two to count as a proper DNF!

This is books that I had not read previously, only. I'm a big re-reader so I keep a separate list for that. I don't usually feel any need to push myself on numbers since I read plenty anyway, but in 2020 I apparently had said that I would read at least one more (new-to-me) book than last year, so the goal was 18, and I had noted on the paper list that I got there in May. I believe I had a Kindle Unlimited account for part of the year, so that influenced what I was reading (an awful lot of various mystery series! I know that's where the "Lady Violet" bunch came from, among others).

Winterkeep
Star Wars: Aftermath
Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia series)
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
Flying Too High (Miss F #2)
Silent in the Sanctuary (Lady Julia #2)
Silent on the Moors (Lady J #3)
Real Murders (Aurora Teagarden? series, which I never continued with)
Shakespeare's Landlord (Lily Bard #1)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
Murder and the Heir (Violet Carlyle #1)
Kennington House Murder (Violet #2)
Shakespeare's Champion (Lily B #2)
Murder at the Folly (Violet #3)
A Merry Little Murder (Violet #4)
Dark Road to Darjeeling
Murder Among the Roses (Violet #5)
Shakespeare's Christmas (Lily Bard #3)
Murder in the Shallows (Violet #6)
Shakespeare's Trollop (Lily #4)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric & Des)
Shakespeare's Counselor (Lily #5)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia #5)
Night of a Thousand Stars
Gin and Murder (Lady Violet #7)
Obsidian Murder (Lady Violet #8)
Murder at the Ladies' Club (Violet #9)
Wedding Vows & Murder (Violet #10)
The Magic of Found Objects
An Untimely Death (Anna Fairweather #1)
An Unfortunate Demise (Anna F #2)
What the Dead Leave Behind (Gilded Age Mysteries #1)
An Uninvited Corpse (Anna F #3)
An Unexpected Misfortune (Anna F #4)
Shadow Hunter (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar & Grill #1)
Strange Practice (Anna Helsing #1)
The Schoolmistress of Emerson Pass (Emerson Pass #1)
An Unhappy Murder (Anna F #5)
An Untidy End (Anna F #6)

Novellas:
Lady Julia: Midsummer Night, Silent Night, Bonfire Night
All Systems Red (Murderbot #1)

Also I had a little list on one side of the page that says: "Things I read so long ago I don't remember them" - I assume that means things that might as well be on the new-books list, except that I actually did read them back in the dawn of time! (But you notice I didn't actually put them in the count, so I imagine they'll be on the re-reads list when I get to it.)

Grant Moves South
Grant Takes Command
Coraline
The Alienist (which I think I read when it was first published, so probably 2006)

I should say if you stumble across this that my intent here is to put my old paper reading journals online, so this is an ongoing project! (And the ones I have here start in 2020, thus the list below is from that book.)

Stuff I bought in 2020
(probably mostly in Kindle format, if I know it's not I'll say so). Bold means I know I've read it at some point. Many/most of the others I started reading and just haven't ever finished!

The Physicians of Vilnoc (Penric & Desdemona)
In Their Own Worlds (stories)
Last of the Moon Girls (a freebie - First Reads, something like that)
White Out (First Reads)
A Curse So Dark & Lonely
The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13 - paperback)
Someone to Romance (Westcott series)
Witch Is Where It All Began
Lost Horizon
Girl Waits With Gun (Kopp Sisters #1)
The Unspoken
Vanished (I think this is part of a series but I didn't write the name down)
Spindle's End (Kindle copy; I wore out my paperback)
A Killing Frost (October Daye #14?)
Throne of Glass (this is a series, right? but I never read any further)
Aftermath (paperback) (Chuck Wendig, a Star Wars book)
The Fifth Season
Ancillary Justice (another series)
Ahsoka (Star Wars - obviously!)
Lady Cop Makes Trouble (Kopp Sisters #2)
One Salt Sea (October Daye - another replacement for a paperback that was falling apart)
Masquerade at Lodi (Penric & Desdemona)
Lord of the Rings (it doesn't say but I think this was one big edition with all three books), & also The Hobbit
Touch Not the Cat (a book I had in paperback years ago)

That's the end of that list (because I ran out of room), but there's more on a separate page:
Night of a Thousand Stars
Serpent and Dove
The Assassins of Thasalon (more Penric and Des; that series is mostly novellas)
Thrawn Ascendancy
On Tyranny (pb)
The Once and Future Witches
Winterkeep (the Graceling series)
Silent in the Grave (a Lady Julia mystery)
Aftermath: Life Debt
Black Narcissus
A Court of Thorns and Roses
What the Dead Leave Behind (another mystery series but I don't remember the series name)
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (hardback) and also a book of Sookie-related short stories
From Dead to Worse (pb)
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
God-Shaped Hole (some book club was reading this)
Tears of Amber (1st Reads)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
The Lily Bard series, which is 5 books, I think, and I bought over a couple of months - some in paperback
The Goblin Emperor
U.S. Grant (a combined edition of Catton's Grant/Civil War books, Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command)
The City We Became
A Curious Beginning (a series which I never read any more of)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia series)
Coraline
Lincoln's Admiral

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Entries tagged with 2020

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Flashback to July 2020: gender issues

Flashback: 2020, mid-July (spoilers for Expanse books 3-4)

Flashback to 2020, mid-July (spoilers for The Expanse)

Flashback to 2020, early July (spoilers for The Expanse)

Flashback to 2020: June-July (big spoilers for The Expanse)

Flashback: The DNF list

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