melreads | Entries tagged with books

This is meant to be the start of a book index - I've done drafts on paper in fits and starts, but I don't ever seem to get anywhere near completion. So I'm trying again, here.

I have at least as many Kindle books as I do paper books, I think, so if it's paper I'll put pb or hb (for paperback or hardback) & otherwise assume it's a Kindle book. I have a few books that are technically borrowed - mostly Amazon's Prime Reading program, which as i understand it is basically a long-term "loan" (presumably good as long as you keep your Prime membership, and I've had mine since there was any such thing as Amazon Prime) so I'll mark those if i know which they are. I don't really think my book collection is fascinating enough that other people are likely to be terribly interested, but this seems like the best place to put it, just the same.

just some more reading-related links:

re Pillars of the Earth
My October Daye obsession
holiday-themed reading + 2023 favorites

Books that defined the 70s
2022 reading
Miss Marple
more about Miss Marple

2021 reading
holiday reading
more holiday reading
what my husband and I both read
Expanse books, and a poem
my goodness, I'd forgotten I did this: virtually everything I read in 2021
more reading

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.)

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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