Christine

A heroine awakes in an imposing Victorian asylum, with no memory of how she got there. There's a shadow of hereditary madness, family secrets, and mounting paranoia. Journal entries and old letters are gradually discovered. Will this all end with the manse-turned-asylum in flames one dark, foreboding night? Probably. In summary, this has everything you could want if you love Gothic mysteries. I enjoyed not quite knowing what was happening, and slowly getting new clues. The paranoia is absolutely infectious, and there are several scenes where I felt real physical tension as a sympathetic character tried to elude or escape capture. At the same time, there are some fun, winking references to great Gothic literature, from Aunt Vida (who's surely a nod to [b:The Thirteenth Tale 40440 The Thirteenth Tale Diane Setterfield https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1346267826s/40440.jpg 849453]) to someone named after Dracula's home-away-from-home.As is typical of Harwood, the ending accelerates quickly, and reaches heights of melodrama and action that may seem a little over the top. But I still loved it. This is the perfect book to read on a dark and stormy day, while sitting with a cup of tea before a crackling fire.

This was a fun and satisfying ending to the story begun in [b:Six of Crows 23437156 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1) Leigh Bardugo https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1459349344s/23437156.jpg 42077459]. The characters are so vivid, I felt like I knew them as real people. There was a good balance of camaraderie and humor, action, drama, and romance. And a skosh of tragedy, but not too much. I was really impressed with Bardugo's crafting of characters with trauma that continues to impact them. These people have Stuff that goes far beyond a Mary Sue's “tragic backstory” and that causes them practical and interpersonal difficulty. And things don't get tied up with a “they won/fell in love and then everything was All Better!” bow. The places everyone ends up are mostly optimistic, but not Pollyanna-level.A specific shout-out should go to the plotting, with plenty of fun and surprising (but mostly earned) reveals. Kaz pulls off gambits that seem improbable unless you're a genius who's spent their entire life learning the workings of a whole city to serve an obsessive need for reven– oh, yeah. Kaz believably pulls of amazing gambits.Another area that stands out is LGBTQ+ representation. I'm an Old so maybe I'm easy to impress, but it's lovely to see a queer romance get equal billing (including kissing scenes) with the straight ‘shipping. Overall, it was fun, I feel like the Dregs are my friends, and I am going to check out more of Bardugo's work!

Nothing better conveys my enjoyment of this book than the fury and disappointment I feel right now. You see, I read the Kindle version, and was humming along around 77% through the book, seeing some new threads develop, the building blocks of a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the hero, some kickass action, and delicious plotting.And then THE END.So yeah, the Kindle version has tons of sample material, acknowledgements, and so on at the end of this FIRST HALF of the story. So be warned. If you're into the story and you want to know what happens next, have [b:Crooked Kingdom 22299763 Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2) Leigh Bardugo https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1456172607s/22299763.jpg 42090179] on deck!So, why did I like it? It's a well-constructed heist story, set against a compelling world where some people have magical abilities (think air/water/blood/metal bending a la Avatar), and their mostly workaday powers become a pivot point for global conflict. The motley crew assembled to retrieve a vital player from an unbreakable prison all have their own backstories that brought them to this caper, and those stories slowly come to light as the adventure progresses. Each character is well-drawn, and the potential romances and URST add some spice. (This is YA, so nothing more than PG-13, but the tension is artfully written.)This reminds me of [b:Head On 35018901 Head On (Lock In, #2) John Scalzi https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497994548s/35018901.jpg 45415409], despite them having nothing in common on the face of it. Both use standard storytelling structures (SoC a heist, HO a police procedural), but they use the tropes well, and set them in a world that raises interesting questions about the human condition. Add in fun, relatable characters who get us invested, and you've got a story guaranteed to keep the pages turning.Better wrap up so I can go dive into The Crooked Kingdom and neglect all my worldly duties till I finish!

Tons of fun, and completely effortless read now that I know the world from Book 1. But Lock In isn't required reading - Scalzi includes enough background and catches new readers up on the world of Haden's Syndrome.

This rests on a pretty standard police procedural framework - and that story is intriguing and generally well-told. There are multiple times when things are a little too convenient for Chris - imagine the luck of living with a ready panel of experts on all the elements of the case! It's unrealistic, but it also avoids rabbit holes exploring tedious FBI process and introducing a bunch of characters we don't care about.

But anyway, for me the investigation is just the required foundation for:
1.) great interplay between characters (Vann is just the best)
2.) speculation about everything from VR and wearable tech to post-gender culture.
3.) Scalzi setting up a parameter then playing with the idea right to its limits. I found the idea of near-teleportation fascinating, for instance.
4.) And of course, there are themes regarding disability, healthcare, economics, cultural identity, and discrimination. All woven neatly into an entertaining narrative.

(There's also a terrible/wonderful throwaway joke late in the book, that plays with the title. I groaned and laughed in equal measure! Won't spoil it - just go read this!)

This was reasonably entertaining, but it did feel rather like the characters were just pieces being moved around a chess board, not real personalities acting out of their own motivations and constrained by their own knowledge.

It starts out very slow, with a largely irrelevant personal history of a church official, and then segueing into . . . a committee meeting. However, it does gain momentum pretty steadily, and by the end I wanted to know what was going to happen next, and found some of the revelations really intriguing/cool/satisfying.

Unfortunately the resolution involves a plot device verging on deus ex machina, which drained a little energy from what was otherwise a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Still, it was a fun ride.

I love Matthew Inman's online work, but I feel like he was under pressure to create a bunch of extra cat-centered content for this book, and that stuff is pretty ho-hum. He seems to be at his best when he can write stand-alone posts about whatever brain adventure occurs to him. Seriously, check it out. He has made me laugh till I cry, and then on occasion just cry (“It's Going to Be OK” is a really amazing story, for instance).

I think if you're a cat owner, this book will be funnier. And it's a fun gift for someone in your life who owns cats.

I didn't intend to start my day off by weeping, but I'm not sorry I did. Not sure what the point is of the Wizard of Oz reference, but this was a deeply affecting story that had more to do with human relationships than actual space stuff.

What a truly mixed bag! I'm a little confused by this book - what inspired these particular selections? There are a LOT of magnificent public domain ghost stories out there, but Washington went out of his way to secure rights to some right clunkers, and some stories that aren't remotely ghostly. Why?

Anyway, high points were:

“The Body-Snatcher”
“Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad”
“The Open Window” (this made me round up to a 3-star rating)
“The Looking Glass”
“The Highboy” (the nicest surprise in the bunch aside from Saki)

Middling:

“The Monkey's Paw” is rightfully a classic, but not a ghost story.
“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” - disturbing account of a haunting without the need for any supernatural element
“The Happy Autumn Fields” - what's going on? somewhat intriguing and poignant, but didn't know where to go with the concept
“The Visit to the Museum” - highly effective weird tale that is not a ghost story

Painful:

“Clytie” - neither ghostly nor well written. Why does “depressing story about a strange family” read as “quality literature” so often, regardless of actual merit?
“The Circular Ruins” - akin to an acquaintance regaling you with their latest dream - both in content and tone, and in relevance or entertainment value
“Another Fine Mess” - not only entirely without plot or any engaging content, but more schmaltzy than a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. This may literally be the worst thing Bradbury ever wrote. It would put off even Rachel Bloom.

600+ pages absolutely flew by. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next! Scary bad guys, overwhelming odds, unexpected hope, grudging sympathy for the devil, and Chrisjen Avasarala with the best quote I've seen in years!

If you watched the Expanse series and you're jonesing for more, I highly recommend jumping in on this book - you'll be caught up enough by the show to start right in.

I'm glad I went ahead and bought the audio book version, so I can look forward to Nigel Planer reading me to sleep as I revisit this in the near future. Like the other City Watch books, it calls for re-reading both because of the liberally sprinkled jokes and wordplay (parsing the delights from the pure groaners is no doubt a matter of taste), but also because it's so obscure what's actually happening in the early chapters. I like going back and covering that ground again with full knowledge of the mystery.

As always, the characters are wonderful. I certainly hope to see more of Wee Mad Arthur, and Vetinari is his usual dry and calculating self in all the best ways. Once again, I'm missing Sybil, but you can't have everything.

I truly enjoyed the adventures of Bill Door, and Pratchett has some lovely sentiments about the human condition. But I always feel like he's amusing himself far more than he's amusing me, and the wizards' plot grew tiresome. Still, the other side of the story deserves 4 stars on its own, and Mrs. Cake & Ludmilla are well worth getting to know.

I suppose this is really a 4.5-star read for me - some of the individual stories are less than great. However, even the lesser stories benefit hugely from Stephen Fry's reading. It's just pure fun to listen to him recount the adventures of Holmes & Watson. (Even his slightly strained American accent is charming, and his depictions of Holmes and Watson are perfect.) Fry's knowledgeable and fond reflections preface each book, providing a nice peek behind the scenes without distracting from the stories.

The stories themselves are remarkably engrossing given their publication dates from 1892-1927. There are of course some cultural references (and sadly, cultural biases) that don't translate well to modern day, but on the whole, the narration provides an easy and natural immersion in Holmes's London, and triggers a keen desire to find out the solution to each mystery. It was delightful to find myself eager to get back to a 100-year-old story to find out what happens next.

This was serviceable enough. Not much really happens, and it seems like DIVORCE is the big bad in this story, to a distracting degree, but it was OK.

I know I shouldn't be surprised anymore at how awful humans can be, but I'm just flabbergasted that there's a Grimm fairy tale where the protagonist tortures, robs, and procures the execution of a Jewish man.

At least this tale does a wonderful job of upending that story, telling it from the point of view of the Jewish man's daughter. This short story does a great job of establishing a feel for the time and place while also making the characters completely relatable. The way Itte's mother carefully weighs every decision to avoid the ire of Christians is heartbreaking, but we also see how the family goes about their daily lives in a pretty normal way. Of course, it only takes a single incident to destroy that normal life.

Itte's revenge is perfectly drawn, and ultimately echoes her mother's attempts at balance. It also sadly brings home how far we still have to go before that Grimm fairytale is only a curious artifact of our bigoted past.

I think this was pretty well written, but not my cup of tea at all. The buildup was adroitly done - creating a background of banal normalcy, yet with lots of good creepy details to set the tone. But, once the characters got to the crisis point, and realized what their situation was, I just didn't care anymore. Without giving too much away, the story is quite obviously hopeless, and I have trouble getting involved in such a case.

This had a lot of potential. The prologue is of course an imitation of Shirley Jackson, but it's a decent imitation! I'm down with it - show me the creepy house that stands, not sane, on the Kansas prairie!

The first chapter is pretty good too. I was on board with the author/professor-character giving me a rundown of his take on Gothic literature, clearly setting out the boxes he was about to check in the narrative. He name-dropped some good classic horror. It was a little on the nose, but what the hell? I felt comfortable that this guy could take me on a scary journey.

Unfortunately, from there, the story undermined itself in multiple ways.
Plot: aimless
Voice: muddled
Characterization: shallow and shaded with thoughtless prejudice (see below regarding Moore, plus fatphobia, and basically one person of color who isn't made into a real character so much as a motivation point for a white guy.)
Length: indulgent to the point of tedium

Amid the intriguing plot developing, there were annoying fanfic-style writing tics. There are way too many strained similes and excess description. A tree branch can't merely claw at the sky, it must claw at the sky like a hand tortured by arthritis. Sam can't have a bad moment where he thinks he smells smoke - no, we have to try to parse whatever this is:

That thin wisp of smoke slithered down his throat and between his lungs, constricting, pushing breath through his teeth. The smoke serpent twisted beneath Sam's ribs and squeezed tighter, its gray head slipping around the ribbed stalk of his trachea. It pressed its upturned snout against the upper lobe of his lungs, probing for a way in.

Barefoot, she was barely five-six, but the power she radiated added half a foot. She was thirty-eight years old and cut like marble. Defined, but not obscenely muscular. Sexy, but not grotesque. Every line, every curve, was deliberate and necessary.

she toweled herself dry. She did not bother getting dressed. Padding naked up the spiral staircase to the first floor, . . . She opened the laptop that rested on a shelf of corrugated steel. For the next two hours, she wrote, her naked body kissed by the early-morning sunlight. . . .

This was a ton of fun. Futuristic pharmaceutical piracy (complete with a stealth submarine!), evil corporations and capitalism run amok, forbidden (or at least socially unacceptable) human-bot love, issues of bot gender, sexuality, and . . . yeah, autonomy.

This definitely lives up to its name, allowing the reader to ponder questions about identity, free will, and love, by looking at a bot grappling with these issues, and seeing that his/her struggles apply equally to us.

But this isn't a stodgy think-piece - it's a swashbuckling tale with lovely characters and interesting relationships. Even the nastiest character gets some depth and sympathy. I almost think too much.

My one complaint is that this suffers from Quick Plot Resolution. Having artfully set all the characters in motion and developed their opposing points of view in a convincing and engaging way, the story left me a little disappointed when it wrapped things up quite suddenly. Where I expected the plot lines to meet, meld, and yield something new, they actually just intersected ever so briefly, which was the end of the story, except for a coda for each player.

It would have been interesting to see a little more detail and an actual redemption arc for the one character we see unapologetically choosing to murder people. There's a gesture in that direction, but I found it largely unsatisfying. I guess the explanation could be “aren't we all subject to programming that other sources installed,” but the story doesn't quite bring me to absolving everything on that basis.

Still, the trajectory set up at the end of the story does promise satisfying resolutions, and it's enough to hang your hat on. Given that everything up to that point was entertaining, thoughtful, and well written, I can easily give this 4 stars.

This was diverting, but not great. I think Joe Hill's pacing is just not for me - every time I read a novel by him, I feel like it would have been fabulous if edited down to about 70% of its actual length.

I really enjoyed this - it's very much a cozy mystery, set in a charming Quebec village with lots of fun and interesting characters. But there's a certain level of emotional heft as well. There were enough clues along the way to let me puzzle out who I thought the culprit was, and enough misdirection so it wasn't obvious.

I'm looking forward to reading more Three Pines mysteries soon!

I'll just copy over my comments from the Literally Dead thread:

I finished this today! OK, I “finished” it, having skimmed a lot of the material aside from the narrative of the Navidson Record. This is my second time around and I didn't have patience for a lot of Johnny's story.

I was hovering between a 3 and 4 rating, because I recognize the intricate layering work Danielewski did here, but I also found Johnny's parts insufferable, other than the very early bits in the tattoo shop where he feels something stalking him.

However, I realized a lot of my criticisms just bring up ways that Danielewski anticipated/elicited those criticisms. For example:

* The book can come off as pretentious. But that makes the opening line of the Navidson section a really keen joke: it's a torturously acadamic-ese sentence reflecting on “authenticity.” Cute, MZD.

* The ending of the Navidson narrative struck me as clunky this time around. Karen saves the day with ThE pOwEr Of LoVe. But this does fit with the established theme that the labyrinth reflects what you bring to it. Which - wait a minute - is what the book itself does as well.

*Johnny's voice and the academic Zampano voice aren't distinct. Zampano exhibits Johnny's erroneous “could of” formation within the Navidson Record, while Johnny busts out with $5 words and poetic, fancy wording that doesn't at all match with his history and status. OH, but is that just MZD pointing out to the reader that this is all falsehood and confusion, and reminding us Johnny isn't trustworthy and maybe none of this is legit at all?

And basically, if you start reflecting about the book in any way, you can go down a rabbit hole of deep literary analysis or just fun puzzle-thinking. Surely that deserves a tip toward the higher star rating.

(But I still hated Johnny's preposterous sexcapades and the general Male Gazeyness of the whole thing.)

Short and to the point, with a self-deprecating humor that had me laughing out loud. If you sometimes feel you're an anti-social underachiever, read this and revel in commiserative giggling.

A comic written by Stephen King's son, with a blatant Lovecraft callout? Creepy house with magic keys? Mysterious entity in a well? Are we surprised that I like this?

Upon finishing this, I immediately borrowed the next volume (thank you ComiXology Unlimited!). Can't wait to see what happens next!

I originally got this as an Audible book. Yes - a comic book adapted to audio form. It works better than you'd think, but not well enough to stand on its own, in my opinion. I would recommend reading the comic first, and if you love it, check out the audio version so you can appreciate the great vocal performances without being too confused. Also, it would be a shame to miss out on the fabulous art by Gabriel Rodriguez!

This may be the strongest book in the John Dies at the End series - it retains the delicate balance of goofy humor, existential dread, and grotesque horror, but it hangs together better as a coherent arc, where its predecessors sometimes rambled with less direction.

Wong/Pargin does a great job of setting up a truly disturbing scene, or poignantly addressing depression and its impact on loved ones . . . and then having John barrel through doing something insouciant, egotistical, and ridiculous. It doesn't undo the more serious themes, it just makes them easier to handle. And provides a good portion of laugh-out-loud moments, which is a worthwhile endeavor all on its own.

And blessings on the author for his afterword, addressing the fans who have contacted him about their real-life encounters with monsters - he kindly exhorts these folks to seek medical help, reassuring them both that his work is 100% fiction, and that seeing visions like this is not uncommon, but is very treatable. You wouldn't necessarily expect important and compassionate reflections on mental illness in a book that deals so much with silicone sex butts, but this novel really delivers on both.

This had lots of atmosphere and creeping dread, but collapsed under its own weight toward the end. Evidently the author had very explicit ideas about why things happened in the story, which were never even suggested in the text. Also, her ideas are kind of underwhelming, IMHO. You can check them out here: https://whatdoesnotkillme.com/2019/01/22/kellyrobson/

Murderbot is the lovable, cynical, introverted killing machine you didn't know you needed in your life! This is a snappy adventure story with a surprising amount of heart.

WARNING: the series is addictive, delivering a short, discrete story arc in each volume, with Murderbot's personal story serving as the connecting thread across books. I can't stop buying and obsessively reading them!