|
52 for me, please. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3115956-joanna
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2014 19:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:46 |
|
|
Couch Life posted:#1: Promise of Blood - Brian McClellan. Also just finished this and now am very upset about having to wait months for the second one. (PS anyone have any recommendations for other books with crazy gunpowder magic?)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2014 13:20
|
|
|
1. Countdown City- Ben H. Winters 2. Promise of Blood- Brian McClellan 3. First on the Moon- the editors of Life Magazine 4. London Falling- Paul Cornell 5. Fade to Black- Francis Knight 6. A Country Doctor's Notebook- Mikhail Bulgakov 7. The Haunting of Hill House- Shirley Jackson 8. Hell House- Richard Matheson 9. Unfinished Tales- JRR Tolkien Fade to Black was unbearable boring. I don't know if it was the writing style or the story or what, but it just never managed to grab my attention or make me care about what was going on. I saw another goon on Goodreads say the same thing, so I guess it's not just me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2014 20:02
|
|
|
It's very...silly. Maybe it was scary when it came out, but now it just feels very dated in terms of both what it considers scary and lurid. It's not a terrible read by any means, but don't expect to be actually scared and expect a lot of eye-rolling "you can tell she is possessed by evil because she wants the sex" parts.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2014 06:49
|
|
|
Late February update: 10. Broken Homes- Ben Aaronovitch 11. Feed- Mira Grant 12. The Female Man- Joanna Russ 13. The Dirty Streets of Heaven- Tad Williams 14. Zoo City- Lauren Beukes This was kind of a mess. It seemed like Beukes couldn't really decide what story she wanted to tell, so most of the book is the main character just kind of wandering around and then starting out to do something only to completely change and start something else almost immediately. 15. Parable of the Sower- Octavia E. Butler 16. Master and Commander- Patrick O'Brian 17. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers- Mary Roach 18. Redwall- Brian Jacques 19. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest- Ken Kesey 20. Ishmael- Daniel Quinn Hated this. If you want to read ~200 pages of "hey we should stop loving up the earth" in the most pretentious and least interesting way possible, this is the book for you. Also what is even the point of framing the novel as a dialogue if practically every line out of the narrator's mouth is either "I don't understand" or "yes of course". No More Days posted:War and Peace progress: 930/1359. I really like how much the characters change their opinions/outlooks on life over the course of the book. Also feeling pretty good about where I'm at even though there's still like 400 pages to go.  War and Peace bro. I think I'm a little ahead of where you are (we must have different versions because my page count is different). The changing outlooks is my favorite part as well- I don't think I've ever related to a character as much as Prince Andrei and his endless cycles of "super passionate" and "totally indifferent".
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2014 15:07
|
|
|
21. Graceling- Kristin Cashore: Eh. I liked the idea of magic being limited to skills in one specific area, but it was totally wasted by the fact that the author just arbitrarily changes/expands the main characters' Graces to immediately solve whatever obstacles they encounter. Plus the plot becomes completely uninteresting when the solution to all problems is "oh I just discovered another super convenient thing my magic can do!" instead of the characters, you know, actually working around their limitations. 22. War and Peace- Lev Tolstoy: Amazing. Talked about it a little earlier in the thread, but Tolstoy has an incredible talent for making his characters grow and develop as people in a believable way throughout the novel. 23. Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War: This was the first book I've read specifically about von Braun, but it felt very balanced, going into equal detail about his achievements in the American space program and his complicity in Nazi war crimes and without ending up as nothing but praise or nothing but condemnation.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2014 01:40
|
|
|
April: 24. Anna Karenina- Lev Tolstoy Excellent, but I didn't like it as much as War and Peace. I guess I didn't sympathize as much with the characters in this one. 25. The Golem and the Jinni- Helene Wecker 26. Kindred- Octava E. Butler May: 27. House of Many Ways- Diana Wynne Jones I found it rather lacking the sense of an established world that the first two books had. 28. Champion Textbook on Embalming- Eliab Myers A textbook from like 1900 that I read because I am trying to go back to school for mortuary science. Holy gently caress am I glad not to be a student from back then, though. Wearing gloves while handling the body was only "suggested" for cases of deadly contagious disease. Fun! 29. Thicker Than Water- Mike Carey 30. Let Me In- John Lindqvist Someone on Goodreads asked me what I thought right after I finished this, so I'm just gonna copy that: It was well-written and tense, with a lot of really visceral horror. Objectively I think it's a very successful horror story with an interesting romantic premise that it manages to balance well with all the brutality and horror. Personally, though, I wasn't a huge fan just because I found pretty much all of the characters completely unlikeable. A lot of them are obviously intended to be hated (the pedophile/murderer, for one), but I disliked both Oskar and Eli as well, which I'm sure is the main reason I ended up not really enjoying the book. I also thought the ending was abrupt and a little stupid, as well, but I won't go into details since I don't know if you've read it already or not. Plus I was extremely not a fan of the graphic cat massacre (I almost stopped reading there because the scene just kept going and going) but that's more a personal thing because I just hate reading about animals dying. 31. The Scarlet Pimpernel- Emmuska Orczy 32. The Turn of the Screw-Henry James 33. The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2014 22:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 21:46 |
|
|
I stopped posting because  but I did beat my goal! 56/52 total, 10 nonfiction and 17 female authors. 34. The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett 35. Gone With the Wind- Margaret Mitchell Holy god Scarlett is insufferable 36. The Innocence of Father Brown- GK Chesterton 37. The Templars: The Dramatic History of the Knights Templar, the Most Powerful Military Order of the Crusades- Piers Paul Read Not great. More of a list of historical events the Templars were at rather than an in-depth look at the organization itself. 38. Tales of Neveryon- Samuel R Delany 39. Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed- Henry SF Cooper Jr 40. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made- Greg Sestero Have you seen The Room? Then you should read this. 41. Dawn- Octavia E Butler 42. The Complete Blood, Sweat, and Tea- Tom Reynolds A book about a London EMT's various experiences on the job. Elise the Great's posts in the Healthcare Megathread are both more interesting and better written. 43. Adulthood Rites- Octavia E Butler 44. Imago- Octavia E Butler 45. First Man: The Life of Neil A Armstrong- James R Hansen Very good, and one of the few books that Armstrong himself actually contributed to/helped on. 46. The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne Somehow I never read this in high school. 47. Child of Fire- Harry Connolly 48. Raising Steam- Terry Pratchett 49. Blood Song- Anthony Ryan Fairly generic fantasy well-written enough to still be interesting and a good read. 50. Evgeniy Onegin- Alexander Pushkin 51. Who Fears Death- Nnedi Okorafor drat this was good.From my goodreads right after I finished it: The author doesn't pull any punches when it comes to depicting oppression (be in racial or sexual), so parts of it are hard to read just because of how violent and disturbing it is. But those parts are also based entirely on real events so it's not the grimdark "look how edgy I am" flavor of a lot of western fantasy/sci-fi. From wikipedia- "The novel was inspired in part by Emily Wax's 2004 Washington Post article "We Want to Make a Light Baby," which discussed the use of weaponized rape by Arab militiamen against Black African women in the Darfur conflict." 52. The Thousand Names- Django Wexler 53. The Crimson Petal and the White- Michel Faber 54. Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission- Andrew Kessler 55. The Fellowship of the Ring- JRR Tolkien Annual reread because they're my favorite books. I'll probably finish Two Towers before the end of the year.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2014 01:42
|
|