Roxy
I thought this was really fun! It's a short story so it doesn't overstay it's welcome. It has a single goal (to tell a murder mystery, whodunit... but in a space kitchen), it commits to it, and it pulls it off. There are no connections to the larger Star Wars universe, except some name dropping and obviously the fact that it exists in the same setting, and it's better for it!
Honestly, the main plot idea is... great. I LOVE the thought of a cooking competition being done to weed out a murderer who stole a recipe book from the murder victim. It's so interesting and creative! Rian Johnson, take notes for the next Knives Out movie, please.
This was the first read on my Star Wars Canon Adventure, being as the lovely people over at Wookiepedia decided that certain lines in this made it set 100 years before The Phantom Menace, apparently. It's not an entirely bad way to start the journey. Quite a refreshing one, actually.
going through this again for the first time in years, especially during everything going on with the author, I didn't expect to like this, let alone find it pretty delightful. it's got all of the flaws that become pretty glaring later on, but it feels like a kids book in a way that kind of makes most of those flaws moot (with the exception of the way jk's awful identity politics already worked their way in). it's just a goofy little book about kids going to a magic school!! Wish a TERF didn't write it!!
it's a becky chambers novel so i'm fully into it. really loved this one's themes about the disconnect between body and mind and what you can do to bring the two together. as a trans person, this hits with me pretty intensely!! the idea of “purpose” and how we inherently do not have any but need to make one for ourselves, is something i really connect with too, and it's cool to see it crop up here a little before becoming a major part of one of her later works. super bummed that it both seems like the wayfarers series has ended/gone on pause and that the very nature of it means i probably wont see sidra and pepper and tak again, or at least for a while. wanna check in with them right away!!
Really good! Really graphic and creepy and it never SCARED me but I definitely felt a little off put by it. Illustrations were good, writing was really good, and it left me wanting more immediately.
extremely dense, very interesting and well read, found it a little difficult to get into. didn't feel as groundbreaking to me as i thought it would going into it, but that very may be because i read it 54 years after its publication. still, what a galaxy brain and very well explored premise.
been wanting to get into discworld ever since i read good omens for the first time like, a decade ago, and i'm so glad i did.
i really understand why people don't want newcomers to start with this one. i decided to because release order is the order any fan who has been into it since the beginning had to read it, and i wanted to experience the series that way, but it does just throw you right into the middle of wacky situations. confusing lingo, and a pretty wild format, but here's the thing - i LOVE that. i love sci-fi and and fantasy that has worldbuilding and characters and events solely for the sake of theme and tone, and this feels like peak that to me. i don't care if everything i'm reading can be neatly categorized and placed into an encyclopedia, just hit me with it! also don't make the characters act like they've never encountered normal things in their universe.
this first discworld book does neither of those things and i love it for that, and i'm very excited to keep reading them and get to the ones the fans consider better than this!
even a slight discworld book is wonderful! i feel like i've heard that rincewind is the least popular of the main discworld protagonists, but i can't help but love a character who's presence in a story even makes death groan out loud. strangely also felt like one of the most british books of the series so far, which is an amusing plus in my book.
i read this in preparation to watch the film so i could listen to the new KINGCAST and follow along! and... i liked it! a good amount! it was a fun dystopian story with a future that's pretty recognizable to our own. a single narrative focus, which i'm really fond of. a pretty compelling (if sort of standard, boring, not NEW by any means) main character. a really good length! and a pretty tense format, what with the counting down throughout all of the chapters.
some complaints: i would have liked some more scenes centered around trying to evade the hunters, as opposed to the standoff format that came a little over halfway through. everything between ben starting out and him taking whatshername hostage was really tense, and while the rest of it was still pretty tense, i wanted a little more of the before parts.
also, king's prose just gets a little tiresome at some points. especially when it's about a COMPLETELY fictional world. it's easy to just completely lose track of what he's saying. sometimes i'm into that, but i feel like it just didn't really fit in with the character he created here? and one thing that always strikes me is it that feels like he writes narration like it's from the point of view of the character it's focusing on. and in this case, his weird rambling paragraphs didn't really fit. neither did the racism/homophobia, either. it's easier to excuse when it's characterizing a negative person (even though i don't particularly care for it then, either) but it just didn't make sense to me for ben, here.
Wow! This was my first Stephen King book, and it was REALLY good! Really tense all the way through, really effective use of its premise (I know its 45 years old and its spoiled in the synopsis probably but I don't even want to give away what the central conceit of the book is, because I had no idea what it was going into it and got spoiled from a stray internet headline and I regret knowing and not being surprised), and a really great pace throughout the entire thing. I'm really excited to read more Stephen King now! Next up (after a brief jaunt into Hill House because GOD does this man love this book).... It!!!
Wow! That was really excellent. I read it in preparation to read Doctor Sleep for the movie in a few months, and was really only mildly interested, but it quickly became my favorite King novel so far (out of ‘Salem's Lot, It, and this). The sense of dread and terror really built up in an effective way and wasn't bogged down by the physical presence of it (at least until the end), a factor I think kept the rest of his books from being truly SCARY to me so far.
Besides that it's a much more manageable length than some of his others, with a smaller cast to dig deep into, and I appreciated that. Still felt insanely like him, still had the seemingly requisite Hill House reference (which this also felt the closest to!)
On to Doctor Sleep!
Really interesting look into the mindset of the German soldier during World War II... as the title implies. Uses letters, quotes, and narratives written by soldiers to get a “uncut” view into how they thought. Fascinating to see the similarities and differences between how you'd expect “normal” soldiers would react and how these soldiers, in the midst of large-scale ethnic cleansing programs and riding high on propaganda of hate and intolerance, dealt with the war.
Falters a bit in its presentation, though. The book was separated not in terms of time period (in fact, the time periods were mixed all together, which I think took away a neat aspect in seeing how their headspaces would have changed as the war went on) but subject matter, I suppose. How the German soldier saw death, how they saw the people they were around, how they saw the horrors discovered (and reexamined) at the end of the war... But these differences weren't clearly defined and it often felt like the subjects the chapters were supposed to be about blended together in a repetitive way. Would have definitely preferred a more timeline based approach, but I see why this approach wasn't taken - to put less of an emphasis on the events and politics of the war but more on the person at the very bottom of the chain.