In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 40/52

11 books last week; that's from the 12th to the 18th of May.

Only five were audiobooks; Shelter, The Great Unexpected, Girls in Love, Girls Under Pressure, and A Hopscotch Summer.

I'm quite glad I listened to The Great Unexpected again; the first time I was in a hurry to get through it and get it off my unread pile, so I didn't follow the story very well.  This time was much more enjoyable.

Two of these I read for bookclubs; Hot Feminist and A Dreadful Murder.  Hot Feminist was for the Birmingham Fems bookclub, which meets this Saturday.  It was interesting, though I did find it quite annoying the way the author kept repeating that she'd never tell anyone they were doing feminism wrong, but people who cared about certain things were stupid.

A Dreadful Murder was disappointing.  It claims to use modern detective skills to solve a hundred year old murder; instead, it just describes the murder.  At least it was a 'Quick Read'.  This was for a bookclub at my local library.  Each month they choose a theme, this one being 'crime'.  I've got a few others to get through.

The bookclub is held in the Children's Library, and while we were in there I spotted The Glass Bird Girl and Doll Bones.  Doll Bones was creepy, though unnecessarily so.  They were doing exactly what the doll wanted, so there was no need for her to go about being creepy all the time.  The Glass Bird Girl was repeatedly compared to Enid Blyton's boarding school stories, on the cover and in reviews, in a kind of desperate, pathetic way.  I wouldn't compare the series to those books any more than I'd compare Harry Potter to them.  So what if they're all set in a boarding school?  That's really not the important element.

NPCs and Insomnia are both books I've read before.  NPCs is fun, about a group of NPCs who end up taking over from the player characters, when the player characters die horribly.  There's a sequel I'd quite like to look into. 

I read Insomnia as part of my Stephen King project.  I was surprised to learn how much I'd forgotten, although considering the book is over 900 pages it wasn't really that surprising.  I'll write a longer post about it later.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 4/52

Only two books this week - 3-9 September.  One audio and one which has been on my unread pile for at least a decade.

I bought my first Asimov novel when I was fifteen or sixteen, after watching The Bicentennial Man and buying my first few Sci-Fi Masterworks novels.  And since then it has been sat on my shelf.  I'm relieved I finally read it.

It was pretty good!  A sci-fi detective story/space opera.  It's the third in a series but I don't think I missed much by not having read the others.

Shelter is another sci-fi novel.  Throughout most of it, I was thinking "Oh, do fuck off Meredith".  Having finished the book, I still don't think much of Meredith.  It was great though.  Normally with audiobooks, even ones I enjoy, I am impatient to get on with them and so I listen at 3x speed.  I barely did that at all with this one.  I embroidered and listened and barely noticed the hours going by.

I start college on Monday.  I give myself permission now to update monthly, or even further apart, whenever I have time.  Things are going to slip; while I enjoy these posts, they are low enough down my list of priorities that nothing disastrous will happen if they slip.