Books 2023
This was the biggest year for reading I've ever had as long as I've been recording it. It's not out of the question that I possibly had a year with more books as a kid, but it doesn't seem likely. I completed 133 books and read a significant chunk of another 4 before quitting because they were stupid and/or boring.
1. Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI by Candice DeLong-Memoir by a podcaster I listen to of her FBI career.
2. Wizard and Glass by Stephen King-This one took me a while to get through even though I was liking it. It's a really long book, but still. I'm not sure if knowing the ending is part of the problem, as it kind of reminded me of the issue I had with the Suneater books (which I need to read again since there have been a couple of novels and a bunch of short stories come out) or what, but I think I'm going to take a little break from the Dark Tower and get some shorter, snappier books in.
3. The Community: A Memoir by N. Jamiyla Chilshom-This was a "notable book from 2022" from Amazon and advertised about being about a cult. It was really more about how the author's parents, particularly her mother, were shitty. It's hard to take anything she had to say about the cult very seriously, not because I don't believe it was a cult, but because she was in it at ages 2-4 and was ascribing all sorts of thoughts, emotions, and memories a kid that young would not have. Very few people remember that far back in their lives in the first place. I am one of the few and I was not having the complex, sophisticated thoughts she claims to have had while dragged into the horrible compound. I'm pretty sure she mostly would have been scared and upset that she was separated from her mother, not having all the complex thoughts about how she didn't believe all the stuff she was being told and how she wanted to escape. I hate finished this book just because it was so short.
4. Rage of Angels (r) by Sidney Sheldon-I'd read this years and years ago when I first got my Kindle and bits had stuck with me. I had to go searching to try to find the title but thankfully there are websites out there able to give book suggestions based off the vague, spoilery bits I remembered.
5. Affluenza by John de Graaf (unfinished)-The premise of the book I appreciate, but the author is such a Luddite and is flat out lying in cases that I got infuriated and stopped reading. This is a dude who claims that people didn't have washing machines in 1970. Such bullshit.
6. Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton-This is an annotated expansion of Wil Wheaton's autobiography. He said some stuff at the first that made me worry that it was going to be a woke diatribe, especially since I didn't remember the original book being problematic, but the stuff he said was problematic really was for the most part. I think the worry about the term lame was a bit much, but everything else he was cringing at his past self for writing was pretty gross. It's interesting to see the peace he's come to in recent years. He himself compares it to the series of memoirs from Leonard Nemoy of I Am Not Spock and the later I Am Spock.
7. Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King-This was a book written after a long gap and there are a lot of people who don't like the later books in this series that came after the gap. Meanwhile, this was the book that I liked the best so far and had the easiest time getting into. It was very long but was the shortest time I've spent with any of them because I couldn't put it down.
8. Song of Susannah by Stephen King-Didn't like this as much as Wolves of the Calla, but it was still decent. These newer books are a lot easier to get through. We'll see if I hate the ending or not, but thus far I think the long time fans are nuts.
9. The Dark Tower by Stephen King-I see why people were freaking out about how this ended, but I find the trolling hilarious. Having not had to wait 20 years to get the entire series finished, I was fine with it.
10. Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford-I read this for Black History Month and I'm torn. She had some crappy stuff happen to her, but she also responded to it in bad ways. Where does the line get drawn between the bad actions of others and taking personal responsibility for your own actions? I'm not entirely sure. It was also a reminder that you need to be open with kids about potential dangers without freaking them out completely as this woman's mother did.
11. Widows-in-Law by Michele W. Miller-I think this was my Kindle First title and it was a fun romp. The ex-wife and widow of a guy who was messing around with organized crime team up to save themselves and their daughter from the consequences of his idiocy.
12. To Marry Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon-I think this is the first Sturgeon book I've actually read. It was a bit strange with the frequent, seemingly unrelated point of view characters, but it was enjoyable. Hilarious that an intergalactic hive mind alien fungi manages to pick the worst guy ever to integrate humanity into the hive mind as he's too dumb to even understand the concept.
13. Killing Rebecca by K.J. North-Due to my computer being out of commission for almost three weeks, I'm writing this summary weeks after I read the book. It was so totally boring and unremarkable that I literally can't remember a thing about it, even after having looked at the book information on Amazon. Now, I had to check Somebody's Daughter and Widows-in-Law to remind myself of the books in question and make sure I was thinking of the right ones, but I remembered both of them upon reading the summaries. So for me to not remember this one even after looking at the summary...clearly not a good book. Not horrible either, since I'd presumably remember that, but mediocre in the extreme. Don't read.
14. The Fallen Girls by Kathryn Casey-In contrast to the previous mediocre book, this one was good enough that I not only remember it, I actually ended up buying and reading the other two books in the series. Former fake-FLDS member comes home to fake-Hilldale/Colorado City to help find one of her missing sisters. Naturally, as an apostate, she runs into trouble both from those involved as well as her own family.
15. Her Final Prayer by Kathryn Casey-The former fake-FLDS cop from the previous book is now the chief of police in fake-Hilldale and has to investigate murder.
16. The Blessed Bones by Kathryn Casey-There sure are a lot of murders that happen in fake-Hilldale!
17. MEAT by Joseph D'Lacey (u)-This was too stupid to finish. The very concept is retarded beyond belief. In a post-nuclear war world, a small enclave of survivors have picked some other humans to act as cattle. This is supposed to show the horrors of the meat industry. Now, factory farming has a lot of horrors involved. That's why I do what I can to reduce my dependence on it by having chickens to produce our eggs and, the last couple of years, buying 1/8th of a local, small farm, pasture raised cow for our beef supply. However, a lot of the horrific stuff this book was inflicting on the cow humans is just not the kind of stuff even factory farms do to animals (at least not here in the US, and I have my doubts the UK industry he investigated is actually worse). These people were having their teeth ripped out, tags put through their Achilles' heel so they couldn't walk without pain, had their thumbs removed and the rest of the fingers docked down to the first knuckle, their larynxes destroyed, their tongues cut out. I mean, it's utterly ridiculous. That kind of thing is not happening to animals in the factory farming system. Cows and pigs wouldn't be able to eat things like corn without teeth (feed corn is not soft like the sweet corn we eat and is fed dried hard like popcorn, for example. Plus meat cattle do spend a year or so on pasture before they go to the finishing yards to finish getting to market weight). Horn docking and castration is likely done in inhumane ways, but not all beef cattle are even dehorned and it is done to save them from injury from each other. Tags are put in ears, and given that humans are constantly punching holes in their own ears, I can't exactly get worked up about that being cruel. It's clearly not. Aside from all that idiocy, humans would never, ever work as feed animals. We take 15-20 years to reach full size and our full size is very small for a food animal. A feedlot finished cow reaches market weight in about 18 months and weighs at least five times an average sized human. So ten times the time for a fifth of the market weight? Sheer idiocy. It would never work or be done. The common small animal used for food is chicken, and the breeds used for factory farming come to market weight in six weeks. Super fast maturity like that is the only way a smaller animal would be factory farmed for food. You'll notice really big things like, say, elephants or rhinos have never been farmed for food. It's not just the issue of domestication (as elephants in particular have been used for other things by humans). It makes no sense to put those kind of resources into an animal that takes many years to reach full size. Aside from the idiocy of the premise, I just don't think it was well laid out as a horror novel. It's not very effective as a novel when the horror goes from 0-60 in a matter of pages. There's no gradual ramp-up. It's just bam, horrific stuff almost immediately. There was no tension to it, which made it boring. I made it to 31% before I just couldn't take the stupidity any longer. See, boring book from earlier, if you're bad, I might at least rant about you, but you weren't even bad, just blah.
18. Roy: The Most Chaotic Midlife Crisis in Cosmic History by Zachary Wheeler-Very amusing book about The Incident, an event that happened on a giant space station. What The Incident was is left to be a mystery until the climax of the book, but it was an amusing read.
19. The Host by Stephenie Meyer (r)-After To Marry Medusa and Roy, I felt like more science fiction and it had been a while since I read this. Loved it as always, even though I tend to leak tears through the entire second half.
20. Kaine's Sanctuary by D.M. Pruden-More science fiction! A new officer gets assigned to a dump of a ship at the outer reaches of human space, far from his intended career path of a diplomatic career. This is about the unexpected stuff his ship finds and how he comes to terms with deciding the trajectory of his life for himself instead of going along with his father's path.
21. Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)-I was checking to see if there was any new Penric stuff and I found a video interview Bujold did with someone at Baen a couple of months ago. Listening to her talk about the World of Five Gods made me go-MUST READ. It had been a lot longer since I'd read all the novels rather than the Penric novellas, so I decided to start there. I'm sure I'll go through Penric stuff too because how can I not?
22. Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)-More World of Five Gods.
23. The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
24. Penric's Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
25. Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
26. Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
27. Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
28. Penric's Mission by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
29. The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
30. The Orphans of Raspay by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
31. The Physicians of Vilnoc by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
32. The Assassins of Thasalon by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
33. Woke Racism by John McWhorter-A black liberal Democrat professor takes on the errors of wokeness. I apparently wasn't the audience for the book, because I agreed with almost everything he said, but that's all right.
34. The Ghost Club by Kate Winkler Dawson (audiobook)-I've started listening to a podcast with this lady sometimes and she made this audiobook she released recently sound very interesting. I actually had just signed up with Audible again (three months free is hard to beat even not being a fan of audiobooks), so I went ahead and grabbed it. There were some interesting bits, but it was meh overall.
35. The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer-I saw stuff about this at the end of The Host. I've read that ebook copy of The Host before, so I don't know why it was such a surprise to me. I genuinely did not remember ever hearing about the book. So I decided to give it a go and it was a fun time. Very different from her other offerings, it's a suspense novel about a government agent on the run.
36. Day Boy by Trent Jamieson-Boys in Australia who serve vampires after the end of the world. Very interesting.
37. Console Kings by Dennis Burkett (unfinished)-Self published book about the 25 best selling video game consoles I heard mentioned on a podcast. It was on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to try it. Awful. Just awful. Set up in a completely bizarre way (in order of sales from least to greatest, which made no sense historically) and full of factual errors that made me unable to trust information that was new to me. Horrible formatting errors too.
38. The Magicians by Lev Grossman-I'd heard about these years ago and picked up the first on sale. The second popped up on sale too, so I grabbed it and started reading the first. To my surprise, I was already 27% of the way through. I'm not sure when or why I gave up at that point. Later in the book the protagonist becomes extremely unlikable, but I wasn't at that point when I quit initially. It's a mystery.
39. The Magician King by Lev Grossman-The protagonist improved greatly in this book. I'm glad I soldiered through.
40. The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman-The trilogy ended nicely. I frequently have real problems with the whole grow up and give up magic/the magic land/whatever type endings. I'm still hurt over The High King after more than thirty years (though Taran's need to fulfill his promises I could at least understand) and the last How to Train Your Dragon movie enrages me. I was actually satisfied with this one, though, even before things worked out in the end. The protagonist grew and changed and improved and he didn't need Not-Narnia anymore.
41. Grendel and Beowulf by C. Gockel (r)-The direct sequel came out, so I wanted to refresh my memory since it's so bad these days and I'd only read the previous one once (admittedly not all that long ago. I love indie authors and how fast a lot of them publish). I didn't bother with the first two since the events were tangential, occurring about thirty years before this one, and two to three reads each had me remembering enough at this point.
42. Mother of Monsters by C. Gockel-More adventures of Grendel and Beowulf. Alas, the story did not conclude and I have to wait until fall for things to wrap things up. Thank goodness for indie authors so I'm not waiting a year or more!
43. 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King-While this was new to me, I had a general understanding of what was going to happen between Callahan's presence in The Dark Tower series and the prologue itself. When a Stephen King prologue mentions just two primary characters in hiding, you know all other characters of significance are going to die. Or I guess otherwise come out of things harmed, since technically Callahan didn't die at that time. I knew everyone but him and the characters in the prologue would be dead by the end, and yep. It was more a matter of finding out how it happened.
44. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (u)-I saw this on the library's webpage and the title was intriguing. The book started out interesting but when I got to a third of the way in and nothing had happened except the protagonist getting called in to have his time machine serviced and 95% of the material had just been ruminating on his relationship with his father, I became bored to tears and decided to be done.
45. The Silent Bride by Shalini Bokand-My Kindle First Reads book for the month. A bride arrives at her wedding and does not recognize her fiance. What has happened? Who is the culprit who messed with her? I was surprised by the ending, so there's that.
46. The Stand by Stephen King (r)-Just felt like re-reading it. For as much as people endlessly go on about this, and it is very good, I think having now read The Dark Tower that I would agree with him that the latter is his real magnum opus. While The Stand is very good, I do think about it at times, and of course reading it post-pandemic gives it even more weight, The Dark Tower just is there, hovering all the time, now that I've read it. I don't know how it changed me, but apparently it did enough that I think about it a lot.
47. Miss Georgiana and the Dragon by Maria Grace-More Pride and Prejudice and dragons. I decided I remembered enough even of the most recent books to just dive in. I enjoyed it as I always do these books.
48. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novak (r)-I thought these books were done after the second, but it turned out not! I bought the third recently and jumped in from the start because my brain does not remember things beyond, "Evil school that kills off its students only that turns out to not be fully the situation in the second book." Such good books though-I ended up by just reading for several days to get through these over playing Tears of the Kingdom. That's how good these books are. And I'm loving Tears of the Kingdom, unlike BotW!
49. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novak (r)
50. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novak-This went places I was really, really not expecting. I've been aware of the author as a name floating around the speculative fiction world for twentyish years or so and even had the first book of another series of hers that I'd never read before. I feel like I've been sleeping on a great author. I can see where a lot of her plots are going and I'll be partly right...then she'll veer off into totally unexpected territory. It's great!
51. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novak-Historical fantasy during the Napoleonic Wars where everyone has dragons as part of their armed forces.
52. Throne of Jade by Naomi Novak-Continuation of the series.
53. The Black Powder War by Naomi Novak-More Temeraire, though the title really doesn't make sense to me given the contents of the book.
54. Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novak
55. Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novak
56. Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novak
57. Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novak
58. Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novak
59. League of Dragons by Naomi Novak
60. Uprooted by Naomi Novak-I ran out of Temeraire books and then was so sad and didn't know what to read because Naomi Novak is such a good author. So I ended up by getting the last two novels she'd written. Sadly, she seems to be a rather slow writer. Many well known speculative fiction authors publish multiple books a year (Piers Anthony used to be a good example of this, and Larry Correia and Brandon Sanderson are current examples, not to mention many of the indie authors I follow), but she's only had fourteen books come out since 2006. I guess I'm going to be sulking around for a long time before more stuff comes out. This and the last book of hers I'm currently reading are unrelated, but set in the same world (a certain city is mentioned in both). It seems to be a fantastical version of Russia and is maybe based on some Russian fairy tales, though not ones I'm familiar with (in fairness, I'm not fully conversant with Russian fairy tales, mostly having been interested in Ivan and the Firebird and of course being aware of Baba Yaga).
61. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novak-Sadness, this is the last of Naomi Novak's books.
62. The Will of the Wanderer by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)-Hadn't read this or Star of the Guardians in a long time so felt like doing so.
63. Role PLaying by Cathy Yardley-Apparently Gen X/Old Millennial fiction of meeting online and/or through gaming is a thing now. This was my Kindle First read for the month and I enjoyed it well enough even if it's annoying being reminded of how old I am.
64. The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix-Fairly decent book but with a character that annoyed the living daylights out of me. It was a prime example of "write what you know." While that's normally a stupid statement for fiction writing, in this case, the author wrote what he didn't know and sounded like a moron to someone who did know. He wrote a character that was a cop in American Fork, Utah in 1990 sounding like a southern Evangelical hick. A cop in American Fork today is most likely LDS. In 1990? There's almost no chance he would be a southern Evangelical talking about accepting Jesus and praying for your daddy and carnal relations and saying Los Angeles like someone from the sticks. The author is from South Carolina and lives in New York now, so apparently he thinks all conservative religious people talk like the people he grew up with even on the other side of the country.
65. The Paladin of the Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)-Man, I always forget how annoying it is to read physical books. That's part of why there were books in between #1 and #2 here of Rose of the Prophet trilogy. If I want to read at night, I have to turn the light on with a physical book and risk setting Saffron off. No thank you, give me my Kindle.
66. Light to the Hills by Bonnie Blaylock-Apparently there were women who rode packhorses around Appalachia as mobile lending libraries in the 1930's. This is a story around one.
67. The Prophet of Akhran by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)
68. The Lost King by Margaret Weis (r)
69. King's Test by Margaret Weis (r)
70. King's Sacrifice by Margaret Weis (r)
71. The Curator by Owen King-I don't know how to describe it. It was weird. It didn't really grab me until the last 30% or so and then I couldn't put it down.
72. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (r)-I felt like re-reading these before suggesting them to Bea.
73. Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr (r)
74. Fragile Eternity by Melissa Marr (r)
75. Radiant Shadows by Melissa Marr (r)
76. Darkest Mercy by Melissa Marr (r)
77. Wicked Mercy by Melissa Marr-I'd read a couple of the short stories/novellas in here, but the other three were new.
78. Cold Iron Heart by Melissa Marr
79. Dark Sun by Melissa Marr-Not sure how I feel about this one. It looks like she's setting up the protagonist from the series to be the bad guy in this sequel series. Also, this released in 2022 and there's no sign of the next book coming out. She has several 2024 releases listed on her website but nothing about the follow-up to this, so I am going to have to wait a really long time and it's annoying.
80. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden-I don't recall how I heard about this book, but it was on Kindle Unlimited, so I gave it a try. It was fun. It had kind of a Gone Girl setup, where what you thought you knew was true from the first section completely flipped on its head with new information from a different character viewpoint in the second section. It was a wild ride.
81. The Housemaid's Secret by Freida McFadden-A sequel to the previous. I thought there couldn't be an exciting twist after the previous one, but I was wrong.
82. Never Lie by Freida McFadden-I'm starting to get the sense that I will never anticipate where she's taking a story.
83. Ward D by Freida McFadden-I've come to accept I will be surprised. She is riveting.
84. The Inmate by Freida McFadden-I try to figure out where she's going and I had some wild guesses, but I still ended up being wrong.
85. The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden
86. The Locked Door by Freida McFadden-Yes, I'm on a kick. Her books are quick, easy reads that always surprise me, so they're fun.
87. The Coworker by Freida McFadden
88. Do Not Disturb by Freida McFadden
89. One by One by Freida McFadden-This appears to be one of her earlier books and I didn't like it as well.
90. Do You Remember by Freida McFadden-This one still had a twist, but it wasn't a whodunnit twist, but rather why, so that was interesting.
91. Suicide Med by Freida McFadden-This one was very different. Kind of a horror novel from different perspectives. I was actually starting to think there was some supernatural stuff going on, but all but one bit of it ended up explained (and there was sort of an explanation for part of that bit).
92. The Perfect Son by Freida McFadden
93. Want to Know a Secret by Freida McFadden-I didn't like this one so much. I hated all the characters, including the first viewpoint character, even before all the awful stuff she'd done had been revealed.
94. The Ex by Freida McFadden-This one really got me. I mean, I'm always surprised even after fifteen books of hers, but this one really got me.
95. Brain Damage by Freida McFadden-This one started out really boring. The part where the main character is extremely damaged and doing very little lasts too long. This is the least twisty book of all of hers as well. I actually figured out what happened! It was still enjoyable in the end, though.
96. The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden-The main plot point was as expected here with the titular surrogate mother causing problems, but there were some big surprises nonetheless.
97. The Gift by Freida McFadden-This was a very short novelette and if she had other short stuff I'd combine it for a count, but alas, she's just got the one. And I read it, so here it is. It seems like it's going to be a riff off O. Henry's Christmas story, but it goes way off from expectations.
98. The Devil Wears Scrubs by Freida McFadden-I ran out of thrillers and so I moved on to the small number of medical novels she wrote. It's funny, because where reading something like James Herriot makes me want to be a vet, no matter how bad it can be, these medical novels made me never want to be a doctor and feel even more distrusting of them because of their lack of sleep, lack of empathy, and the way they really feel about their patients.
99. The Devil You Know by Freida McFadden-This is a direct sequel to the previous. I'd at least liked the protagonist in that one, but she becomes very unlikable here. I just ended up hating all of the characters.
100. Baby City by Freida McFadden and Kelley Stoddard-I hadn't been as happy reading the previous two medical novels from her as I had been her thrillers, but this one just made me actively dislike all three. Horrible, unlikable characters demonstrating all the attitudes and poor practices that make maternal care in the US so shoddy and problematic. And at the end, the acknowledgements thanks Dr. Amy Tuetor, who is a notoriously hateful blogger. It's ironic how much the left screams about the right just viewing women as baby factories, because it seems like that's all leftist medical professionals view women if they're choosing not to kill their babies. At that point, all that matters is the baby. The mother's experience, treatment, or health doesn't-just the baby surviving. And the attitudes in the book were exactly along those lines. When a doula for a woman in labor presented a birthing plan, the protagonist was inwardly annoyed, especially by such inconvenient requests like asking permission before doing cervical checks. I mean, the nerve of the woman, wanting to be asked before someone sticks their hand in her vagina! And the doula and midwife in the book were characterized in the most stereotypical, negative ways you could imagine. It's like if an OB/GYN was written to be like the dude in Pennsylvania who was raping patients, giving them abortions without permission, and so on some years back. Doctors would be offended if that was being portrayed as typical, yet that's basically how the author was treating the doula and midwife, as uncaring opportunists just out for a buck who engage in criminal behavior. Meanwhile, there was a very c-section happy doctor that everyone knew was doing it for convenience and even left the premises when he was attending and didn't answer his page when an emergency occurred (after yanking out a placenta before it released naturally and leaving some of it behind). No one did anything until he hurt the patient and even then, the residents all got in trouble because one of them told the family that the doctor screwed up so they were going to sue. So apparently behind the scenes, they're just like cops, all about covering each others' butts instead of doing what's right. Arrrrrgh. It was very readable, but oh, the book infuriated me.
101. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Bea was reading this for school and made it sound so interesting, I finally just snatched it from her after she'd done her assigned reading and consumed it. Turns out it was on Kindle Unlimited, so I didn't need to deprive her (even for the short time) or hurt my hands reading a physical book, but oh well. It was in fact really good! An asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer to the Earth, leading to catastrophe.
102. The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Sequel to the previous.
103. This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer
104. The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Bea's teacher was apparently kind of dubious when she heard I not only read the book assigned to the class, but I'd grabbed the rest of the series, as she didn't like the sequels as much. I understand that reaction and don't disagree, but I'd also argue it's pretty much how any dystopian, post-apocalyptic series ends up. The first book is always the most interesting. I haven't been able to think of any exceptions that I've read. The surpises of the new setting compared to how the world is now is part of the appeal of those, especially the YA ones. I liked this last book the least of all (I'd say my preference goes 1>3>2>4), but I did enjoy the series as a whole and I'm glad I read it. I'm kind of surprised I hadn't heard about them before, the first came out in 2006. My lack of reading Naomi Novik had been just lack of getting to it. I'd certainly heard of her stuff before this year!
105. The Summer Dragon by Todd Lockwood-Apparently the author normally paints dragons for book covers, but in this case, he wrote a novel. And it was great! Except for the fact it came out in 2016 and has no sequel...yet. My timing could have been better on it, but the good news is that a sequel is in the works, as in the very day I finished and started looking for any hints of news, he'd responded to a comment on Facebook stating that the initial book was done and was out to readers so he could start editing. So given the speed traditional publishing works at, hopefully it'll be out in the next year and a half or two years.
106. Just Stay Away by Tony Wirt-This was my free Kindle book for the month. It was interesting, but it also stressed me out with how dumb the parents were with their parenting and how poorly the wife was treating the protagonist for no apparent reason (and at the end, it was said they worked out other issues during counseling that he hadn't realized were issues without any real understanding for the reader of what the problem was and why she was so quick to think he was a liar). I think I need to lay off the thriller type books for a while, I'm getting too worked up about them.
107. Kaiju Protection Society by John Scalzi-I was looking for a book to read that met the requirements for an achievement for my Kindle summer reading in the Kindle Unlimited list. When I saw a Scalzi novel I thought, "Oh, hey, Scalzi. I didn't stop reading him because I disliked his writing, I stopped reading him because I hate his politics, stopped reading his blog because of it, and thus was unaware of any of his new releases. This should be fun." Oh my word. No, it was not fun. His politics have infected his writing to the point it's distracting. It could have been fun if he'd let his politics get out of the way of the story instead of smashing it into the readers' faces so that it was distracting and if there'd been some variation in tone. It was almost all crazy hijinks with witty comments from start to finish, though, and it got so very old. I'd read more Scalzi if it was set in front of me (like I went ahead and read the excerpt for another book that was at the back), but I don't think I'm going to actively seek him out again. I'm reading Larry Correia now as a palate cleanser. Take that, Worldcon posse, I'm with the Sad Puppies.
108. Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia (r)-As noted, I was annoyed enough by Scalzi's wokeness that I decided to read the anti-Scalzi.
109. Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia-I initially marked this as a reread, but as I finished it and read the next one, I don't think I actually read the second two books in the collection I had. I think I started the second and was so overcome by the gun porn I just went and read the Ghost series by John Ringo.
110. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (r)-I saw people talking about the Metaverse being tech bros reading things like Snow Crash and Ready Player One and taking them as instruction manuals rather than dystopian nightmares we should be trying to avoid. I wanted a refresher on how bad the world was in RPO and sure enough...so horrible. The narcissism of the dude who made the contest really bothered me this time. Rather than just sharing what he loved and seeing if people would feel the same (which we do plenty of with our kids. Usually they do love it too. Sometimes they don't, which is fine.), he basically forced people to be obsessed with the stupidest, trivial things. Just very yucky.
111. Monster Hunter Alpha by Larry Correia-As I said, I thought I'd read these (it was marked as read), but nothing at all was familiar in the second and third books. So I think this was the first read.
112. Monster Hunter Legion by Larry Correia-These books are oddly inconsistent. Some are first person from the point of view of the protagonist in the first book. Some go to third person with a different character. This one had both! It's not quite as annoying as I remember finding some L.E. Modesitt books back in the day that switched back and forth, but it is a little off-putting.
113. Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia
114. Monster Hunter Siege by Larry Correia-I had a hard time getting into this one for some reason. Once I finally hit the last 20%, though, it finally clicked for me and I flew through the rest.
115. Monster Hunter Guardian by Larry Corriea and Sarah A. Hoyt-I was a bit confused as to why just this one mainline book had a co-author. Upon reading it, it became obvious, between the stuff related to motherhood and the stuff related to Portugal, where Sarah Hoyt is from.
116. Monster Hunter Bloodlines by Larry Correia-So annoying! Ends on a total cliffhanger and he's not even done with the next one, so with traditional publishing we're probably like two years out at least.
117. Mother of Monsters by C. Gockel (r)-Yeah, yeah, I read it earlier this year, but I couldn't remember it and the next book came out. So I felt I remembered enough about Grendel and Beowulf to skip it this time, but I needed to read this one again. Seems to take two to three times for details to sink in for me these days. And sure enough, while I remembered a few things, about 95% of it I didn't remember, so it was a necessary choice to go into the next one.
118. Monsters and Empire by C. Gockel-Sadly, it seems likely I might remember this one pretty well because it kind of upset me. I normally love this author but she screwed up big time with this book. She put way too much into it and had major plot points and character development happen off screen. As it was, it was more than 50% longer than the previous two books dealing with Grendel and Bayo. She clearly should have developed the off-screen stuff more fully and split the book into two (or had one really long one, but we're talking about an indie author who publishes multiple books a year. She'd split it and that's fine.). Show don't tell is overused as writing advice and isn't always the case, but she really needed to here. It felt so disjointed. As she says she's done with this series, it's a really disappointing ending to it.
119. The Last Caretaker by Jessica Strawser-A woman goes to be a caretaker for a nature preserve after a divorce and finds there's a lot more to the job than advertised when a battered woman appears at her door one night.
120. Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins-Excellent biography of Mitt Romney. I felt like it substantiated both my dislike of what he was doing while running for president and my like for him as senator. Funny how actually being true to himself and being a good person against all the forces arrayed against him makes me like a person better. On a note, while admittedly it's including a few unfinished and Penric novellas, this makes for the longer list I've made in the years since I started tracking my reading again. Given that there's another month and a half, even accounting for the shorter things, this is clearly the most I've read in a year in while.
121. Female Erasure edited by Ruth Barrett-A book of essays and statements talking about the problems and misogyny inherent with trans activism. One chapter (10, I believe) was so good I made Eric and Bea read it too. Some of it was so good I had to quote it or discuss it with people. Some of it was so bad I couldn't even get through an essay, full of hippy dippy woman power goddess nonsense and claims of matriarchies reigning through most of human existence before the evil patriarchy erased them. I think it's worth reading to understand why women need spaces of their own. And when I say women, I mean women, not trans women. They no doubt need spaces of their own and they should have them. Just not by taking away ours.
122. Tales from the Gas Station Volume One by Jack Townsend-Hilarious and weird fake journal from a supernatural gas station.
123. When the Stars Alight by Camilla Andrew (u-25%)-The cover was gorgeous and caught my attention, but the book was boring and I hated the main character and her indulgent life of luxury. When I realized I was doing things like arguing on Reddit to avoid reading it, I gave it one more go, still was stuck between boredom and hating it, and decided screw it. I lost over a week to this book.
124. Lad the Dog by Albert Payson Terhune (r)-I read this book when I was a dog obsessed fourth grader, having found it in the school library. As an adult, I thought it must have been written to capitalize the Lassie phenomenon, but upon looking it up, it actually predated Lassie (so maybe Lassie was the copycat!). It's a very dated book in many ways. It had some gross racism in it and the way people act and animals are treated are pretty awful. Like a kid tries to burn a kitten to death because it scratched him! And even the very good Master who owns Lad is mentioned as having beaten the dogs twice (though he learned his lesson from the second one). That being said, the author is clearly very animal welfare oriented for the time period. He goes on diatribes against the mob killings of "mad dogs," talks about how horrible dog shows are for the dogs, and so on. He says much of what happens in the book is based on true events with his dog. Hard to say if that means the stuff actually happened and he's just saying the dog-centric viewpoint is what's authorial discretion or if he's exaggerating what actually happened. Regardless, Lad sounds like he was a pretty remarkable dog. I've always had a fondness for collies due to the book even though I don't think I've ever even countered one in person. Lots of border collies around here, not a lot of collie collies. If it weren't for the grooming requirements even the smooth (short haired) ones have, I'd totally want one. Even the smooth ones require quite a bit of grooming, supposedly due to their double coats. I don't know why theirs are so mat prone. Llyr has a double coat and neither inner nor outer hairs mat. I'm just not likely to even remember to brush once or twice a week.
125. Further Adventures of Lad by Albert Payson Terhune-Not sure if I read this one as a kid or not. Reading through the later stories in the first book, I wondered what happened to Lady, Lad's mate. This book answered the question. She was hit by a car because the people just let their dogs run loose and she was a car chaser. Just kind of horrifying what was considered acceptable treatment. I don't care if you have five acres, fence it in if you're going to let your dogs loose! More dog attacks that would never be acceptable today, more racism, just all kinds of weirdness. And yet, the author so clearly loved dogs and clearly wanted the best for them. He just...didn't know better about so many things. He also claimed that all wildfires are started by humans and bad, which is the kind of nonsense that led to the Yellowstone fires in the 1980's. My stepdad, Bruce, had been a forest ranger and considered Smokey the Bear and his campaign to be one of the worst things to happen to the nation's forests. Obviously people shouldn't be starting fires, but lots of areas evolved to have them and there are plants that need a fire to germinate, many trees have evolved to survive regular fires and only die if too much brush builds up that makes fires burn hotter, etc.
126. The Echo of Old books by Barbara Davis-I got the option of getting a second book from a previous month of Kindle free books. I don't know what I got the month this book came out, but I probably should have gotten this. It was excellent. The main character, the proprietor of a rare books shop, acquires a pair of mysterious books and tries to hunt down their origin.
127. Starter Villain by John Scalzi-I know I said I wasn't going to actively seek him out, but the back of the Kaiju book I read had an excerpt from this and I was interested enough to put a hold on it at the library. It just took forever to become available. It was short and silly. Nothing deep, but amusing.
128. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden-The debut novel of this particular author. I guess this is a year for Russian fairy tale adaptations, because this is more of that. Maybe when I finish the series I can finish the year up with Mercedes Lackey's Firebird.
129. The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden-Continuing adventures of Vasya. I'm amused by how close her diminutive is to one of my WoW character names.
130. The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden-The conclusion of the trilogy.
131. Firebird by Mercedes Lackey (r)-I felt like more Russian fairy tale stuff!
132. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull (r)-I've been meaning to reread these for a while so I can finish reading all the Dragonwatch books. I only read the first one or two of those.
133. Rise of the Evening Star by Brandon Mull (r)
134. Grip of the Shadow Plague by Brandon Mull (r)
135. Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull (r)
136. Keys to the Demon Prison by Brandon Mull (r)
137. Dragonwatch by Brandon Mull (r)-On to the series that I haven't read all of.
1. Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI by Candice DeLong-Memoir by a podcaster I listen to of her FBI career.
2. Wizard and Glass by Stephen King-This one took me a while to get through even though I was liking it. It's a really long book, but still. I'm not sure if knowing the ending is part of the problem, as it kind of reminded me of the issue I had with the Suneater books (which I need to read again since there have been a couple of novels and a bunch of short stories come out) or what, but I think I'm going to take a little break from the Dark Tower and get some shorter, snappier books in.
3. The Community: A Memoir by N. Jamiyla Chilshom-This was a "notable book from 2022" from Amazon and advertised about being about a cult. It was really more about how the author's parents, particularly her mother, were shitty. It's hard to take anything she had to say about the cult very seriously, not because I don't believe it was a cult, but because she was in it at ages 2-4 and was ascribing all sorts of thoughts, emotions, and memories a kid that young would not have. Very few people remember that far back in their lives in the first place. I am one of the few and I was not having the complex, sophisticated thoughts she claims to have had while dragged into the horrible compound. I'm pretty sure she mostly would have been scared and upset that she was separated from her mother, not having all the complex thoughts about how she didn't believe all the stuff she was being told and how she wanted to escape. I hate finished this book just because it was so short.
4. Rage of Angels (r) by Sidney Sheldon-I'd read this years and years ago when I first got my Kindle and bits had stuck with me. I had to go searching to try to find the title but thankfully there are websites out there able to give book suggestions based off the vague, spoilery bits I remembered.
5. Affluenza by John de Graaf (unfinished)-The premise of the book I appreciate, but the author is such a Luddite and is flat out lying in cases that I got infuriated and stopped reading. This is a dude who claims that people didn't have washing machines in 1970. Such bullshit.
6. Still Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton-This is an annotated expansion of Wil Wheaton's autobiography. He said some stuff at the first that made me worry that it was going to be a woke diatribe, especially since I didn't remember the original book being problematic, but the stuff he said was problematic really was for the most part. I think the worry about the term lame was a bit much, but everything else he was cringing at his past self for writing was pretty gross. It's interesting to see the peace he's come to in recent years. He himself compares it to the series of memoirs from Leonard Nemoy of I Am Not Spock and the later I Am Spock.
7. Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King-This was a book written after a long gap and there are a lot of people who don't like the later books in this series that came after the gap. Meanwhile, this was the book that I liked the best so far and had the easiest time getting into. It was very long but was the shortest time I've spent with any of them because I couldn't put it down.
8. Song of Susannah by Stephen King-Didn't like this as much as Wolves of the Calla, but it was still decent. These newer books are a lot easier to get through. We'll see if I hate the ending or not, but thus far I think the long time fans are nuts.
9. The Dark Tower by Stephen King-I see why people were freaking out about how this ended, but I find the trolling hilarious. Having not had to wait 20 years to get the entire series finished, I was fine with it.
10. Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford-I read this for Black History Month and I'm torn. She had some crappy stuff happen to her, but she also responded to it in bad ways. Where does the line get drawn between the bad actions of others and taking personal responsibility for your own actions? I'm not entirely sure. It was also a reminder that you need to be open with kids about potential dangers without freaking them out completely as this woman's mother did.
11. Widows-in-Law by Michele W. Miller-I think this was my Kindle First title and it was a fun romp. The ex-wife and widow of a guy who was messing around with organized crime team up to save themselves and their daughter from the consequences of his idiocy.
12. To Marry Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon-I think this is the first Sturgeon book I've actually read. It was a bit strange with the frequent, seemingly unrelated point of view characters, but it was enjoyable. Hilarious that an intergalactic hive mind alien fungi manages to pick the worst guy ever to integrate humanity into the hive mind as he's too dumb to even understand the concept.
13. Killing Rebecca by K.J. North-Due to my computer being out of commission for almost three weeks, I'm writing this summary weeks after I read the book. It was so totally boring and unremarkable that I literally can't remember a thing about it, even after having looked at the book information on Amazon. Now, I had to check Somebody's Daughter and Widows-in-Law to remind myself of the books in question and make sure I was thinking of the right ones, but I remembered both of them upon reading the summaries. So for me to not remember this one even after looking at the summary...clearly not a good book. Not horrible either, since I'd presumably remember that, but mediocre in the extreme. Don't read.
14. The Fallen Girls by Kathryn Casey-In contrast to the previous mediocre book, this one was good enough that I not only remember it, I actually ended up buying and reading the other two books in the series. Former fake-FLDS member comes home to fake-Hilldale/Colorado City to help find one of her missing sisters. Naturally, as an apostate, she runs into trouble both from those involved as well as her own family.
15. Her Final Prayer by Kathryn Casey-The former fake-FLDS cop from the previous book is now the chief of police in fake-Hilldale and has to investigate murder.
16. The Blessed Bones by Kathryn Casey-There sure are a lot of murders that happen in fake-Hilldale!
17. MEAT by Joseph D'Lacey (u)-This was too stupid to finish. The very concept is retarded beyond belief. In a post-nuclear war world, a small enclave of survivors have picked some other humans to act as cattle. This is supposed to show the horrors of the meat industry. Now, factory farming has a lot of horrors involved. That's why I do what I can to reduce my dependence on it by having chickens to produce our eggs and, the last couple of years, buying 1/8th of a local, small farm, pasture raised cow for our beef supply. However, a lot of the horrific stuff this book was inflicting on the cow humans is just not the kind of stuff even factory farms do to animals (at least not here in the US, and I have my doubts the UK industry he investigated is actually worse). These people were having their teeth ripped out, tags put through their Achilles' heel so they couldn't walk without pain, had their thumbs removed and the rest of the fingers docked down to the first knuckle, their larynxes destroyed, their tongues cut out. I mean, it's utterly ridiculous. That kind of thing is not happening to animals in the factory farming system. Cows and pigs wouldn't be able to eat things like corn without teeth (feed corn is not soft like the sweet corn we eat and is fed dried hard like popcorn, for example. Plus meat cattle do spend a year or so on pasture before they go to the finishing yards to finish getting to market weight). Horn docking and castration is likely done in inhumane ways, but not all beef cattle are even dehorned and it is done to save them from injury from each other. Tags are put in ears, and given that humans are constantly punching holes in their own ears, I can't exactly get worked up about that being cruel. It's clearly not. Aside from all that idiocy, humans would never, ever work as feed animals. We take 15-20 years to reach full size and our full size is very small for a food animal. A feedlot finished cow reaches market weight in about 18 months and weighs at least five times an average sized human. So ten times the time for a fifth of the market weight? Sheer idiocy. It would never work or be done. The common small animal used for food is chicken, and the breeds used for factory farming come to market weight in six weeks. Super fast maturity like that is the only way a smaller animal would be factory farmed for food. You'll notice really big things like, say, elephants or rhinos have never been farmed for food. It's not just the issue of domestication (as elephants in particular have been used for other things by humans). It makes no sense to put those kind of resources into an animal that takes many years to reach full size. Aside from the idiocy of the premise, I just don't think it was well laid out as a horror novel. It's not very effective as a novel when the horror goes from 0-60 in a matter of pages. There's no gradual ramp-up. It's just bam, horrific stuff almost immediately. There was no tension to it, which made it boring. I made it to 31% before I just couldn't take the stupidity any longer. See, boring book from earlier, if you're bad, I might at least rant about you, but you weren't even bad, just blah.
18. Roy: The Most Chaotic Midlife Crisis in Cosmic History by Zachary Wheeler-Very amusing book about The Incident, an event that happened on a giant space station. What The Incident was is left to be a mystery until the climax of the book, but it was an amusing read.
19. The Host by Stephenie Meyer (r)-After To Marry Medusa and Roy, I felt like more science fiction and it had been a while since I read this. Loved it as always, even though I tend to leak tears through the entire second half.
20. Kaine's Sanctuary by D.M. Pruden-More science fiction! A new officer gets assigned to a dump of a ship at the outer reaches of human space, far from his intended career path of a diplomatic career. This is about the unexpected stuff his ship finds and how he comes to terms with deciding the trajectory of his life for himself instead of going along with his father's path.
21. Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)-I was checking to see if there was any new Penric stuff and I found a video interview Bujold did with someone at Baen a couple of months ago. Listening to her talk about the World of Five Gods made me go-MUST READ. It had been a lot longer since I'd read all the novels rather than the Penric novellas, so I decided to start there. I'm sure I'll go through Penric stuff too because how can I not?
22. Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)-More World of Five Gods.
23. The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
24. Penric's Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
25. Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
26. Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
27. Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
28. Penric's Mission by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
29. The Prisoner of Limnos by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
30. The Orphans of Raspay by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
31. The Physicians of Vilnoc by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
32. The Assassins of Thasalon by Lois McMaster Bujold (r)
33. Woke Racism by John McWhorter-A black liberal Democrat professor takes on the errors of wokeness. I apparently wasn't the audience for the book, because I agreed with almost everything he said, but that's all right.
34. The Ghost Club by Kate Winkler Dawson (audiobook)-I've started listening to a podcast with this lady sometimes and she made this audiobook she released recently sound very interesting. I actually had just signed up with Audible again (three months free is hard to beat even not being a fan of audiobooks), so I went ahead and grabbed it. There were some interesting bits, but it was meh overall.
35. The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer-I saw stuff about this at the end of The Host. I've read that ebook copy of The Host before, so I don't know why it was such a surprise to me. I genuinely did not remember ever hearing about the book. So I decided to give it a go and it was a fun time. Very different from her other offerings, it's a suspense novel about a government agent on the run.
36. Day Boy by Trent Jamieson-Boys in Australia who serve vampires after the end of the world. Very interesting.
37. Console Kings by Dennis Burkett (unfinished)-Self published book about the 25 best selling video game consoles I heard mentioned on a podcast. It was on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to try it. Awful. Just awful. Set up in a completely bizarre way (in order of sales from least to greatest, which made no sense historically) and full of factual errors that made me unable to trust information that was new to me. Horrible formatting errors too.
38. The Magicians by Lev Grossman-I'd heard about these years ago and picked up the first on sale. The second popped up on sale too, so I grabbed it and started reading the first. To my surprise, I was already 27% of the way through. I'm not sure when or why I gave up at that point. Later in the book the protagonist becomes extremely unlikable, but I wasn't at that point when I quit initially. It's a mystery.
39. The Magician King by Lev Grossman-The protagonist improved greatly in this book. I'm glad I soldiered through.
40. The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman-The trilogy ended nicely. I frequently have real problems with the whole grow up and give up magic/the magic land/whatever type endings. I'm still hurt over The High King after more than thirty years (though Taran's need to fulfill his promises I could at least understand) and the last How to Train Your Dragon movie enrages me. I was actually satisfied with this one, though, even before things worked out in the end. The protagonist grew and changed and improved and he didn't need Not-Narnia anymore.
41. Grendel and Beowulf by C. Gockel (r)-The direct sequel came out, so I wanted to refresh my memory since it's so bad these days and I'd only read the previous one once (admittedly not all that long ago. I love indie authors and how fast a lot of them publish). I didn't bother with the first two since the events were tangential, occurring about thirty years before this one, and two to three reads each had me remembering enough at this point.
42. Mother of Monsters by C. Gockel-More adventures of Grendel and Beowulf. Alas, the story did not conclude and I have to wait until fall for things to wrap things up. Thank goodness for indie authors so I'm not waiting a year or more!
43. 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King-While this was new to me, I had a general understanding of what was going to happen between Callahan's presence in The Dark Tower series and the prologue itself. When a Stephen King prologue mentions just two primary characters in hiding, you know all other characters of significance are going to die. Or I guess otherwise come out of things harmed, since technically Callahan didn't die at that time. I knew everyone but him and the characters in the prologue would be dead by the end, and yep. It was more a matter of finding out how it happened.
44. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (u)-I saw this on the library's webpage and the title was intriguing. The book started out interesting but when I got to a third of the way in and nothing had happened except the protagonist getting called in to have his time machine serviced and 95% of the material had just been ruminating on his relationship with his father, I became bored to tears and decided to be done.
45. The Silent Bride by Shalini Bokand-My Kindle First Reads book for the month. A bride arrives at her wedding and does not recognize her fiance. What has happened? Who is the culprit who messed with her? I was surprised by the ending, so there's that.
46. The Stand by Stephen King (r)-Just felt like re-reading it. For as much as people endlessly go on about this, and it is very good, I think having now read The Dark Tower that I would agree with him that the latter is his real magnum opus. While The Stand is very good, I do think about it at times, and of course reading it post-pandemic gives it even more weight, The Dark Tower just is there, hovering all the time, now that I've read it. I don't know how it changed me, but apparently it did enough that I think about it a lot.
47. Miss Georgiana and the Dragon by Maria Grace-More Pride and Prejudice and dragons. I decided I remembered enough even of the most recent books to just dive in. I enjoyed it as I always do these books.
48. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novak (r)-I thought these books were done after the second, but it turned out not! I bought the third recently and jumped in from the start because my brain does not remember things beyond, "Evil school that kills off its students only that turns out to not be fully the situation in the second book." Such good books though-I ended up by just reading for several days to get through these over playing Tears of the Kingdom. That's how good these books are. And I'm loving Tears of the Kingdom, unlike BotW!
49. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novak (r)
50. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novak-This went places I was really, really not expecting. I've been aware of the author as a name floating around the speculative fiction world for twentyish years or so and even had the first book of another series of hers that I'd never read before. I feel like I've been sleeping on a great author. I can see where a lot of her plots are going and I'll be partly right...then she'll veer off into totally unexpected territory. It's great!
51. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novak-Historical fantasy during the Napoleonic Wars where everyone has dragons as part of their armed forces.
52. Throne of Jade by Naomi Novak-Continuation of the series.
53. The Black Powder War by Naomi Novak-More Temeraire, though the title really doesn't make sense to me given the contents of the book.
54. Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novak
55. Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novak
56. Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novak
57. Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novak
58. Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novak
59. League of Dragons by Naomi Novak
60. Uprooted by Naomi Novak-I ran out of Temeraire books and then was so sad and didn't know what to read because Naomi Novak is such a good author. So I ended up by getting the last two novels she'd written. Sadly, she seems to be a rather slow writer. Many well known speculative fiction authors publish multiple books a year (Piers Anthony used to be a good example of this, and Larry Correia and Brandon Sanderson are current examples, not to mention many of the indie authors I follow), but she's only had fourteen books come out since 2006. I guess I'm going to be sulking around for a long time before more stuff comes out. This and the last book of hers I'm currently reading are unrelated, but set in the same world (a certain city is mentioned in both). It seems to be a fantastical version of Russia and is maybe based on some Russian fairy tales, though not ones I'm familiar with (in fairness, I'm not fully conversant with Russian fairy tales, mostly having been interested in Ivan and the Firebird and of course being aware of Baba Yaga).
61. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novak-Sadness, this is the last of Naomi Novak's books.
62. The Will of the Wanderer by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)-Hadn't read this or Star of the Guardians in a long time so felt like doing so.
63. Role PLaying by Cathy Yardley-Apparently Gen X/Old Millennial fiction of meeting online and/or through gaming is a thing now. This was my Kindle First read for the month and I enjoyed it well enough even if it's annoying being reminded of how old I am.
64. The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix-Fairly decent book but with a character that annoyed the living daylights out of me. It was a prime example of "write what you know." While that's normally a stupid statement for fiction writing, in this case, the author wrote what he didn't know and sounded like a moron to someone who did know. He wrote a character that was a cop in American Fork, Utah in 1990 sounding like a southern Evangelical hick. A cop in American Fork today is most likely LDS. In 1990? There's almost no chance he would be a southern Evangelical talking about accepting Jesus and praying for your daddy and carnal relations and saying Los Angeles like someone from the sticks. The author is from South Carolina and lives in New York now, so apparently he thinks all conservative religious people talk like the people he grew up with even on the other side of the country.
65. The Paladin of the Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)-Man, I always forget how annoying it is to read physical books. That's part of why there were books in between #1 and #2 here of Rose of the Prophet trilogy. If I want to read at night, I have to turn the light on with a physical book and risk setting Saffron off. No thank you, give me my Kindle.
66. Light to the Hills by Bonnie Blaylock-Apparently there were women who rode packhorses around Appalachia as mobile lending libraries in the 1930's. This is a story around one.
67. The Prophet of Akhran by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (r)
68. The Lost King by Margaret Weis (r)
69. King's Test by Margaret Weis (r)
70. King's Sacrifice by Margaret Weis (r)
71. The Curator by Owen King-I don't know how to describe it. It was weird. It didn't really grab me until the last 30% or so and then I couldn't put it down.
72. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (r)-I felt like re-reading these before suggesting them to Bea.
73. Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr (r)
74. Fragile Eternity by Melissa Marr (r)
75. Radiant Shadows by Melissa Marr (r)
76. Darkest Mercy by Melissa Marr (r)
77. Wicked Mercy by Melissa Marr-I'd read a couple of the short stories/novellas in here, but the other three were new.
78. Cold Iron Heart by Melissa Marr
79. Dark Sun by Melissa Marr-Not sure how I feel about this one. It looks like she's setting up the protagonist from the series to be the bad guy in this sequel series. Also, this released in 2022 and there's no sign of the next book coming out. She has several 2024 releases listed on her website but nothing about the follow-up to this, so I am going to have to wait a really long time and it's annoying.
80. The Housemaid by Freida McFadden-I don't recall how I heard about this book, but it was on Kindle Unlimited, so I gave it a try. It was fun. It had kind of a Gone Girl setup, where what you thought you knew was true from the first section completely flipped on its head with new information from a different character viewpoint in the second section. It was a wild ride.
81. The Housemaid's Secret by Freida McFadden-A sequel to the previous. I thought there couldn't be an exciting twist after the previous one, but I was wrong.
82. Never Lie by Freida McFadden-I'm starting to get the sense that I will never anticipate where she's taking a story.
83. Ward D by Freida McFadden-I've come to accept I will be surprised. She is riveting.
84. The Inmate by Freida McFadden-I try to figure out where she's going and I had some wild guesses, but I still ended up being wrong.
85. The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden
86. The Locked Door by Freida McFadden-Yes, I'm on a kick. Her books are quick, easy reads that always surprise me, so they're fun.
87. The Coworker by Freida McFadden
88. Do Not Disturb by Freida McFadden
89. One by One by Freida McFadden-This appears to be one of her earlier books and I didn't like it as well.
90. Do You Remember by Freida McFadden-This one still had a twist, but it wasn't a whodunnit twist, but rather why, so that was interesting.
91. Suicide Med by Freida McFadden-This one was very different. Kind of a horror novel from different perspectives. I was actually starting to think there was some supernatural stuff going on, but all but one bit of it ended up explained (and there was sort of an explanation for part of that bit).
92. The Perfect Son by Freida McFadden
93. Want to Know a Secret by Freida McFadden-I didn't like this one so much. I hated all the characters, including the first viewpoint character, even before all the awful stuff she'd done had been revealed.
94. The Ex by Freida McFadden-This one really got me. I mean, I'm always surprised even after fifteen books of hers, but this one really got me.
95. Brain Damage by Freida McFadden-This one started out really boring. The part where the main character is extremely damaged and doing very little lasts too long. This is the least twisty book of all of hers as well. I actually figured out what happened! It was still enjoyable in the end, though.
96. The Surrogate Mother by Freida McFadden-The main plot point was as expected here with the titular surrogate mother causing problems, but there were some big surprises nonetheless.
97. The Gift by Freida McFadden-This was a very short novelette and if she had other short stuff I'd combine it for a count, but alas, she's just got the one. And I read it, so here it is. It seems like it's going to be a riff off O. Henry's Christmas story, but it goes way off from expectations.
98. The Devil Wears Scrubs by Freida McFadden-I ran out of thrillers and so I moved on to the small number of medical novels she wrote. It's funny, because where reading something like James Herriot makes me want to be a vet, no matter how bad it can be, these medical novels made me never want to be a doctor and feel even more distrusting of them because of their lack of sleep, lack of empathy, and the way they really feel about their patients.
99. The Devil You Know by Freida McFadden-This is a direct sequel to the previous. I'd at least liked the protagonist in that one, but she becomes very unlikable here. I just ended up hating all of the characters.
100. Baby City by Freida McFadden and Kelley Stoddard-I hadn't been as happy reading the previous two medical novels from her as I had been her thrillers, but this one just made me actively dislike all three. Horrible, unlikable characters demonstrating all the attitudes and poor practices that make maternal care in the US so shoddy and problematic. And at the end, the acknowledgements thanks Dr. Amy Tuetor, who is a notoriously hateful blogger. It's ironic how much the left screams about the right just viewing women as baby factories, because it seems like that's all leftist medical professionals view women if they're choosing not to kill their babies. At that point, all that matters is the baby. The mother's experience, treatment, or health doesn't-just the baby surviving. And the attitudes in the book were exactly along those lines. When a doula for a woman in labor presented a birthing plan, the protagonist was inwardly annoyed, especially by such inconvenient requests like asking permission before doing cervical checks. I mean, the nerve of the woman, wanting to be asked before someone sticks their hand in her vagina! And the doula and midwife in the book were characterized in the most stereotypical, negative ways you could imagine. It's like if an OB/GYN was written to be like the dude in Pennsylvania who was raping patients, giving them abortions without permission, and so on some years back. Doctors would be offended if that was being portrayed as typical, yet that's basically how the author was treating the doula and midwife, as uncaring opportunists just out for a buck who engage in criminal behavior. Meanwhile, there was a very c-section happy doctor that everyone knew was doing it for convenience and even left the premises when he was attending and didn't answer his page when an emergency occurred (after yanking out a placenta before it released naturally and leaving some of it behind). No one did anything until he hurt the patient and even then, the residents all got in trouble because one of them told the family that the doctor screwed up so they were going to sue. So apparently behind the scenes, they're just like cops, all about covering each others' butts instead of doing what's right. Arrrrrgh. It was very readable, but oh, the book infuriated me.
101. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Bea was reading this for school and made it sound so interesting, I finally just snatched it from her after she'd done her assigned reading and consumed it. Turns out it was on Kindle Unlimited, so I didn't need to deprive her (even for the short time) or hurt my hands reading a physical book, but oh well. It was in fact really good! An asteroid hits the moon and knocks it closer to the Earth, leading to catastrophe.
102. The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Sequel to the previous.
103. This World We Live In by Susan Beth Pfeffer
104. The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer-Bea's teacher was apparently kind of dubious when she heard I not only read the book assigned to the class, but I'd grabbed the rest of the series, as she didn't like the sequels as much. I understand that reaction and don't disagree, but I'd also argue it's pretty much how any dystopian, post-apocalyptic series ends up. The first book is always the most interesting. I haven't been able to think of any exceptions that I've read. The surpises of the new setting compared to how the world is now is part of the appeal of those, especially the YA ones. I liked this last book the least of all (I'd say my preference goes 1>3>2>4), but I did enjoy the series as a whole and I'm glad I read it. I'm kind of surprised I hadn't heard about them before, the first came out in 2006. My lack of reading Naomi Novik had been just lack of getting to it. I'd certainly heard of her stuff before this year!
105. The Summer Dragon by Todd Lockwood-Apparently the author normally paints dragons for book covers, but in this case, he wrote a novel. And it was great! Except for the fact it came out in 2016 and has no sequel...yet. My timing could have been better on it, but the good news is that a sequel is in the works, as in the very day I finished and started looking for any hints of news, he'd responded to a comment on Facebook stating that the initial book was done and was out to readers so he could start editing. So given the speed traditional publishing works at, hopefully it'll be out in the next year and a half or two years.
106. Just Stay Away by Tony Wirt-This was my free Kindle book for the month. It was interesting, but it also stressed me out with how dumb the parents were with their parenting and how poorly the wife was treating the protagonist for no apparent reason (and at the end, it was said they worked out other issues during counseling that he hadn't realized were issues without any real understanding for the reader of what the problem was and why she was so quick to think he was a liar). I think I need to lay off the thriller type books for a while, I'm getting too worked up about them.
107. Kaiju Protection Society by John Scalzi-I was looking for a book to read that met the requirements for an achievement for my Kindle summer reading in the Kindle Unlimited list. When I saw a Scalzi novel I thought, "Oh, hey, Scalzi. I didn't stop reading him because I disliked his writing, I stopped reading him because I hate his politics, stopped reading his blog because of it, and thus was unaware of any of his new releases. This should be fun." Oh my word. No, it was not fun. His politics have infected his writing to the point it's distracting. It could have been fun if he'd let his politics get out of the way of the story instead of smashing it into the readers' faces so that it was distracting and if there'd been some variation in tone. It was almost all crazy hijinks with witty comments from start to finish, though, and it got so very old. I'd read more Scalzi if it was set in front of me (like I went ahead and read the excerpt for another book that was at the back), but I don't think I'm going to actively seek him out again. I'm reading Larry Correia now as a palate cleanser. Take that, Worldcon posse, I'm with the Sad Puppies.
108. Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia (r)-As noted, I was annoyed enough by Scalzi's wokeness that I decided to read the anti-Scalzi.
109. Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia-I initially marked this as a reread, but as I finished it and read the next one, I don't think I actually read the second two books in the collection I had. I think I started the second and was so overcome by the gun porn I just went and read the Ghost series by John Ringo.
110. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (r)-I saw people talking about the Metaverse being tech bros reading things like Snow Crash and Ready Player One and taking them as instruction manuals rather than dystopian nightmares we should be trying to avoid. I wanted a refresher on how bad the world was in RPO and sure enough...so horrible. The narcissism of the dude who made the contest really bothered me this time. Rather than just sharing what he loved and seeing if people would feel the same (which we do plenty of with our kids. Usually they do love it too. Sometimes they don't, which is fine.), he basically forced people to be obsessed with the stupidest, trivial things. Just very yucky.
111. Monster Hunter Alpha by Larry Correia-As I said, I thought I'd read these (it was marked as read), but nothing at all was familiar in the second and third books. So I think this was the first read.
112. Monster Hunter Legion by Larry Correia-These books are oddly inconsistent. Some are first person from the point of view of the protagonist in the first book. Some go to third person with a different character. This one had both! It's not quite as annoying as I remember finding some L.E. Modesitt books back in the day that switched back and forth, but it is a little off-putting.
113. Monster Hunter Nemesis by Larry Correia
114. Monster Hunter Siege by Larry Correia-I had a hard time getting into this one for some reason. Once I finally hit the last 20%, though, it finally clicked for me and I flew through the rest.
115. Monster Hunter Guardian by Larry Corriea and Sarah A. Hoyt-I was a bit confused as to why just this one mainline book had a co-author. Upon reading it, it became obvious, between the stuff related to motherhood and the stuff related to Portugal, where Sarah Hoyt is from.
116. Monster Hunter Bloodlines by Larry Correia-So annoying! Ends on a total cliffhanger and he's not even done with the next one, so with traditional publishing we're probably like two years out at least.
117. Mother of Monsters by C. Gockel (r)-Yeah, yeah, I read it earlier this year, but I couldn't remember it and the next book came out. So I felt I remembered enough about Grendel and Beowulf to skip it this time, but I needed to read this one again. Seems to take two to three times for details to sink in for me these days. And sure enough, while I remembered a few things, about 95% of it I didn't remember, so it was a necessary choice to go into the next one.
118. Monsters and Empire by C. Gockel-Sadly, it seems likely I might remember this one pretty well because it kind of upset me. I normally love this author but she screwed up big time with this book. She put way too much into it and had major plot points and character development happen off screen. As it was, it was more than 50% longer than the previous two books dealing with Grendel and Bayo. She clearly should have developed the off-screen stuff more fully and split the book into two (or had one really long one, but we're talking about an indie author who publishes multiple books a year. She'd split it and that's fine.). Show don't tell is overused as writing advice and isn't always the case, but she really needed to here. It felt so disjointed. As she says she's done with this series, it's a really disappointing ending to it.
119. The Last Caretaker by Jessica Strawser-A woman goes to be a caretaker for a nature preserve after a divorce and finds there's a lot more to the job than advertised when a battered woman appears at her door one night.
120. Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins-Excellent biography of Mitt Romney. I felt like it substantiated both my dislike of what he was doing while running for president and my like for him as senator. Funny how actually being true to himself and being a good person against all the forces arrayed against him makes me like a person better. On a note, while admittedly it's including a few unfinished and Penric novellas, this makes for the longer list I've made in the years since I started tracking my reading again. Given that there's another month and a half, even accounting for the shorter things, this is clearly the most I've read in a year in while.
121. Female Erasure edited by Ruth Barrett-A book of essays and statements talking about the problems and misogyny inherent with trans activism. One chapter (10, I believe) was so good I made Eric and Bea read it too. Some of it was so good I had to quote it or discuss it with people. Some of it was so bad I couldn't even get through an essay, full of hippy dippy woman power goddess nonsense and claims of matriarchies reigning through most of human existence before the evil patriarchy erased them. I think it's worth reading to understand why women need spaces of their own. And when I say women, I mean women, not trans women. They no doubt need spaces of their own and they should have them. Just not by taking away ours.
122. Tales from the Gas Station Volume One by Jack Townsend-Hilarious and weird fake journal from a supernatural gas station.
123. When the Stars Alight by Camilla Andrew (u-25%)-The cover was gorgeous and caught my attention, but the book was boring and I hated the main character and her indulgent life of luxury. When I realized I was doing things like arguing on Reddit to avoid reading it, I gave it one more go, still was stuck between boredom and hating it, and decided screw it. I lost over a week to this book.
124. Lad the Dog by Albert Payson Terhune (r)-I read this book when I was a dog obsessed fourth grader, having found it in the school library. As an adult, I thought it must have been written to capitalize the Lassie phenomenon, but upon looking it up, it actually predated Lassie (so maybe Lassie was the copycat!). It's a very dated book in many ways. It had some gross racism in it and the way people act and animals are treated are pretty awful. Like a kid tries to burn a kitten to death because it scratched him! And even the very good Master who owns Lad is mentioned as having beaten the dogs twice (though he learned his lesson from the second one). That being said, the author is clearly very animal welfare oriented for the time period. He goes on diatribes against the mob killings of "mad dogs," talks about how horrible dog shows are for the dogs, and so on. He says much of what happens in the book is based on true events with his dog. Hard to say if that means the stuff actually happened and he's just saying the dog-centric viewpoint is what's authorial discretion or if he's exaggerating what actually happened. Regardless, Lad sounds like he was a pretty remarkable dog. I've always had a fondness for collies due to the book even though I don't think I've ever even countered one in person. Lots of border collies around here, not a lot of collie collies. If it weren't for the grooming requirements even the smooth (short haired) ones have, I'd totally want one. Even the smooth ones require quite a bit of grooming, supposedly due to their double coats. I don't know why theirs are so mat prone. Llyr has a double coat and neither inner nor outer hairs mat. I'm just not likely to even remember to brush once or twice a week.
125. Further Adventures of Lad by Albert Payson Terhune-Not sure if I read this one as a kid or not. Reading through the later stories in the first book, I wondered what happened to Lady, Lad's mate. This book answered the question. She was hit by a car because the people just let their dogs run loose and she was a car chaser. Just kind of horrifying what was considered acceptable treatment. I don't care if you have five acres, fence it in if you're going to let your dogs loose! More dog attacks that would never be acceptable today, more racism, just all kinds of weirdness. And yet, the author so clearly loved dogs and clearly wanted the best for them. He just...didn't know better about so many things. He also claimed that all wildfires are started by humans and bad, which is the kind of nonsense that led to the Yellowstone fires in the 1980's. My stepdad, Bruce, had been a forest ranger and considered Smokey the Bear and his campaign to be one of the worst things to happen to the nation's forests. Obviously people shouldn't be starting fires, but lots of areas evolved to have them and there are plants that need a fire to germinate, many trees have evolved to survive regular fires and only die if too much brush builds up that makes fires burn hotter, etc.
126. The Echo of Old books by Barbara Davis-I got the option of getting a second book from a previous month of Kindle free books. I don't know what I got the month this book came out, but I probably should have gotten this. It was excellent. The main character, the proprietor of a rare books shop, acquires a pair of mysterious books and tries to hunt down their origin.
127. Starter Villain by John Scalzi-I know I said I wasn't going to actively seek him out, but the back of the Kaiju book I read had an excerpt from this and I was interested enough to put a hold on it at the library. It just took forever to become available. It was short and silly. Nothing deep, but amusing.
128. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden-The debut novel of this particular author. I guess this is a year for Russian fairy tale adaptations, because this is more of that. Maybe when I finish the series I can finish the year up with Mercedes Lackey's Firebird.
129. The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden-Continuing adventures of Vasya. I'm amused by how close her diminutive is to one of my WoW character names.
130. The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden-The conclusion of the trilogy.
131. Firebird by Mercedes Lackey (r)-I felt like more Russian fairy tale stuff!
132. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull (r)-I've been meaning to reread these for a while so I can finish reading all the Dragonwatch books. I only read the first one or two of those.
133. Rise of the Evening Star by Brandon Mull (r)
134. Grip of the Shadow Plague by Brandon Mull (r)
135. Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull (r)
136. Keys to the Demon Prison by Brandon Mull (r)
137. Dragonwatch by Brandon Mull (r)-On to the series that I haven't read all of.