Kingdom of Knuffel

I just finished This Book Is Not Good For You.

the raven king is destroying my soul. *flies into the sun* goodbye world, it was not nice knowing ya.

Well, I managed to finish "Liar's Moon", even though it was in first person, and I am breathing a HUGE sigh of relief at putting it down.

Read a few chapters of The Rough Riders, then needed something that didn't demand quite so much concentration (or maybe just something I didn't get caught up in so easily, lol) and have switched to "Glamour in Glass", by Mary Robinette Kowal, which is fun without being dangerously engrossing, so it was exactly what I needed.

The master and margarita

war and peace

Finished the Rough Riders, then as it turns out that the Mary Robinette Kowal book was a series, I've checked out all the ones that the library has and have been working through them.
Today I needed a break, though, so I put that down and picked up John Porter's "Anglo-Saxon Riddles". Well, he didn't write the riddles, but I think he was the editor or compiler or whatever you want to call it.

i'm almost done with ready player one by ernest cline. it's... cool? i like the concept, kind of like sword art online but instead of being trapped in a virtual reality game and figuring out a way to escape, it's a contest for a massive fortune where the clues to winning are hidden in a vr game, and each clue is an '80s pop culture reference. there are so many '80s references it actually hurts.

but i really hate the way it's being delivered. the narrator is lowkey cyber-stalking the girl he likes and the way he narrates kinda really makes him sound in love with himself.

also the photo of the author on the dust jacket is a full body black and white picture of him leaning on a delorean from back to the future with a really smug (borderline assholish) grin and i don't really like it tbh. 0/10 not a good photo.

I think I remember that book. I never quite finished it, (my brother-in-law REALLY wanted me to read it, but it's FIRST PERSON, yuck yuck yuck) and wasn't impressed with it. Definitely didn't look up the author to find any others by him.
Parts of it I liked better than others. The bit with the stacks of trailers was fun, I liked that idea and could imagine a lot of fun things to do with the terrain, but it was such a short segment and none of the interesting things I was imagining happened. Which, fine, yes, but it felt a bit wasted. Mostly, though, it's just horrifying to be stuck in someone else's head like that, and frankly it was not a head that I wanted to spend any time in, so the whole thing was a bit like trying to force yourself to eat your host's "specialty" dish when it tastes terrible and you know it's going to make you sick later. Not a fun experience.


I'm reading Ellen Kushner's Riverside books now. Finished "Swordspoint", am almost through "The Privilege of the Sword" (which drives me nuts in that some of the scenes are in first person and if I just skip them I get lost because plot-important stuff happens in them), and have "The Fall of the Kings" ready to go next. Although if THAT one has first person bits, too, I'm probably going to just not read it. Don't have the patience for that now.

Akili Li wrote:Mostly, though, it's just horrifying to be stuck in someone else's head like that, and frankly it was not a head that I wanted to spend any time in, so the whole thing was a bit like trying to force yourself to eat your host's "specialty" dish when it tastes terrible and you know it's going to make you sick later. Not a fun experience.

OMG that's exactly what it is

i might just dnf it and start something else. ene;

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged