A book meme! A meme! About books!
Dec. 27th, 2012 11:30 amWhat are you reading now?
I'm side-eyeing Secret Letters by Leah Scheier, a YA novel about a Victorian teen who thinks she may be Sherlock Holmes' natural daughter.
I'm side-eyeing because I read the first few chapters at work last week, and it was okay, I guess, but the only bits I liked were straight out of Mary Russell, and the love interest is insipid. Like, not as annoying as in Y S Lee's Agency series, but neither of these characters are worth spending time with.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I feel really bad about abandoning it, because I wanted to read it for months, and I bought it in the US and carried it all the way back to Australia, and it seems terribly silly to just stop reading it. And also, what if all the other YA novels I got on my trip are equally boring? WHAT THEN?
What did you just finish reading?
Saga, Volume 1, the trade paperback of the comic by Brian K Vaughan. I started reading the first few pages at![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nonelvis's place, and liked it so much I ordered it from BookDepository to read properly when I got home. Which I finally did. Then I hopped onto ComiXology and bought the next two issues.
It has some epic interstellar warfare, star-crossed lovers and their politically problematic baby, robot royalty, and a bunch of bounty hunters I don't care about. Also lots of sex and swearing and stuff. I like it!
Book-wise, I've been in a bit of a rut lately. I gave up on And All the Stars by Andrea K Host at 83% (according to my Kindle) because I realised around 60% that the guy I had thought was the love interest was actually a different character all together. Then, at 75% there was a plot twist that I had totally expected, only somehow the execution didn't work for me, and I realised that I no longer had any fucks to give.
Which is sad, since this was Australian YA sci-fi with a diverse cast of characters, but it's also self-published, and you could tell. Maybe I should start offering my services to indie authors in need of a plot beta. With notes like, "Don't give two male characters one-syllable names that both end in "sh", because you introduce, like,twenty six guys in one scene and they're all kind of interchangeable."
The last book I managed to finish was Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive by Ben Thompson, which was occasionally amusing and frequently badly written. The Whitehouse letters themselves were interesting, but the chapters surrounding them were inconsistent. And poorly researched -- Thompson claims Whitehouse's objections to Doctor Who had no effect on the program, which would have come as a shock to Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams.
What do you expect to read next?
OH GOD, I HAVE SO MANY BOOKS AND I'M PARALYSED. I keep eyeing For Darkness Shows the Stars, which is a YA SF retelling of Persuasion, but Secret Letters is so relentlessly mediocre, I'm irrationally afraid it's infected all the books it travelled with. I have some non-fiction, but I seem to lack the energy to read it. Seriously, I picked up a book on the history of girls boarding school fiction the other day, and then put it into the too hard basket.
Do I want to read the history of Doctor Who fandom from 1979 to the beginning of the reboot? The book about the Leopold and Loeb murders? I DON'T KNOW. I keep trying to choose, but then the effort makes me tired, and I either have a nap or watch more Parks and Rec. BOOK RUTS ARE THE WORST.
I'm side-eyeing Secret Letters by Leah Scheier, a YA novel about a Victorian teen who thinks she may be Sherlock Holmes' natural daughter.
I'm side-eyeing because I read the first few chapters at work last week, and it was okay, I guess, but the only bits I liked were straight out of Mary Russell, and the love interest is insipid. Like, not as annoying as in Y S Lee's Agency series, but neither of these characters are worth spending time with.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I feel really bad about abandoning it, because I wanted to read it for months, and I bought it in the US and carried it all the way back to Australia, and it seems terribly silly to just stop reading it. And also, what if all the other YA novels I got on my trip are equally boring? WHAT THEN?
What did you just finish reading?
Saga, Volume 1, the trade paperback of the comic by Brian K Vaughan. I started reading the first few pages at
nonelvis's place, and liked it so much I ordered it from BookDepository to read properly when I got home. Which I finally did. Then I hopped onto ComiXology and bought the next two issues. It has some epic interstellar warfare, star-crossed lovers and their politically problematic baby, robot royalty, and a bunch of bounty hunters I don't care about. Also lots of sex and swearing and stuff. I like it!
Book-wise, I've been in a bit of a rut lately. I gave up on And All the Stars by Andrea K Host at 83% (according to my Kindle) because I realised around 60% that the guy I had thought was the love interest was actually a different character all together. Then, at 75% there was a plot twist that I had totally expected, only somehow the execution didn't work for me, and I realised that I no longer had any fucks to give.
Which is sad, since this was Australian YA sci-fi with a diverse cast of characters, but it's also self-published, and you could tell. Maybe I should start offering my services to indie authors in need of a plot beta. With notes like, "Don't give two male characters one-syllable names that both end in "sh", because you introduce, like,
The last book I managed to finish was Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive by Ben Thompson, which was occasionally amusing and frequently badly written. The Whitehouse letters themselves were interesting, but the chapters surrounding them were inconsistent. And poorly researched -- Thompson claims Whitehouse's objections to Doctor Who had no effect on the program, which would have come as a shock to Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams.
What do you expect to read next?
OH GOD, I HAVE SO MANY BOOKS AND I'M PARALYSED. I keep eyeing For Darkness Shows the Stars, which is a YA SF retelling of Persuasion, but Secret Letters is so relentlessly mediocre, I'm irrationally afraid it's infected all the books it travelled with. I have some non-fiction, but I seem to lack the energy to read it. Seriously, I picked up a book on the history of girls boarding school fiction the other day, and then put it into the too hard basket.
Do I want to read the history of Doctor Who fandom from 1979 to the beginning of the reboot? The book about the Leopold and Loeb murders? I DON'T KNOW. I keep trying to choose, but then the effort makes me tired, and I either have a nap or watch more Parks and Rec. BOOK RUTS ARE THE WORST.
