75 Books...More or Less! discussion

I don't think I did too badly last year on the reading front... but I was an utter failure at logging things :/ Here's hoping for a more successful challenge year!

1. Approaches to Literature Another part of The Modern Scholar series, this is from my favorite lecturer. I automatically grab anything he does and, so far, I've never been disappointed.

Stacie wrote: "I don't think I did too badly last year on the reading front... but I was an utter failure at logging things :/ Here's hoping for a more successful challenge year!"

Well, you're off to a good start! Congrats on getting the first one under your belt. Your first read sure looks like it was a meaty one.

...And the failing to keep my posts up-to-date continues, lol! Oh well, at least I've been getting some reading done. Well, listening for the most part, but now that I've got new glasses and shouldn't be getting eye-strain headaches I'll be able to wallow in my print books again ;)

2. Understanding Poetry

3. Understanding Grammar for Powerful Communication Yes, I AM this much of a nerd... I listened to this one for fun :) Also, I actually learned stuff too... did you know there's an easy way to know whether to use who and whom? If you can substitute the word "he" in the sentence and have it be correct you use "who"... if you can substitute "him", then you use "whom". Cool!

4. The Norsemen: Understanding Vikings and their Culture I love just about any lecture series by Professor Drout, so it's no real surprise that I liked this one too.

5. The Modern Scholar: Celts and Germans: The Enduring Heritage of the European Northlands I like Professor Schutt as a lecturer, but this wasn't one of his best. I'd recommend the Drout Norsemen lecture over this one.

6. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

7. The Killing Moon This is the second thing I've read by this author, but definitely won't be the last :) When you read a lot of Fantasy, which I do (or any other genre for that matter), everything starts to seem familiar. The neat thing about Jemisin is that- in addition to being good with characterizations, dialog and structure- she takes me to places that I haven't been before.

Stacie wrote: "...And the failing to keep my posts up-to-date continues, lol! Oh well, at least I've been getting some reading done..."

Well, the reading IS the important part! We are here as motivation and support; I don't think anyone is going to come knocking on your door because you forgot to add your most recent book to the list.

I might... ;)

LOL... good to know that I'm not the only one who stalks people's lists!

8. The Island Part 1 This is part one of a 5 book series (or, more accurately, one story broken down into 5 separate installments). I wasn't sure wether to count it as one or five (should I finish all of them) but since they were actually published separately and have different ASIN designations I'm going with the 'five book series' theory ;) On the whole I enjoyed this installment, and have already started the second one. It kind of reminded me of pulp stories...not great but still entertaining.

Edit: After finishing all five parts, I've decided to count this as one book since the other parts don't stand on their own. On the whole I'm giving this a low 3 star rating. It started out well, but about two-thirds of the way in the internal logic started to disintegrate and by the end the plot was... just a mess. It seemed like the author couldn't quite decide what he wanted his story to be and so none of the elements quite stuck together (kind of like he tried to mix Terry Brooks' Shannara prequels and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies together and couldn't get it to work right). This book is the set up for a series, but it's pretty unlikely I'll pursue this storyline any farther. However, it wasn't a total loss or anything like that... there were some great descriptions and action scenes (several of which were down-right ookie- the "Wall Street" camp scene comes to mind... actually, it hasn't left my mind since I read it!), and I got a fair amount of enjoyment out of it.

9. Demonsouled An uncomplicated 'sword and sorcery' fantasy in the vein of Robert E. Howard (think Conan the Barbarian- the books not those dreadful movies!- set in a more realistic than usual medieval setting... not historical novel levels, but also not Hollywood glamour). I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing and editing, since this was from a small press I'd never heard of (oh, Smashwords! How you've jaded me!). There were zero surprises in the plot, the characters were exactly what I expected and the ending was satisfying- precisely what I needed this week, LOL!

10. Soul of Tyrants More brain-candy. There are some editing glitches (more than in the first book in the series, actually) but nothing so bad it makes the book unreadable.

11. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz I'd never actually read any of the Oz books before so I thought I'd pick one up. I would have loved this as a child. Now... it's ok. Eh.

12. Solomon Kane: The Complete Tales

Oh I can't read books that have excessive amounts of grammatical errors!

I can't either... and apparently my idea of 'excessive' is draconian (at least, that's what I've been told- I think my standards are perfectly reasonable, even generous, lol!)

These were things like a (very) few words running together, or incorrect spacing... things like that (which are the editor's or printer's fault) not word usage or basic grammatical structuring (which would be the author's fault).

13. Evolutionary Biology: The Darwinian Revolutions Part 1 The information was interesting and well organized but the delivery was the weak part... the lecturer delivered every quote (and there were many, some lengthy) in various (usually bad) accents. *shudder*

14. The Broken Kingdoms

15. Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit This is an in depth discussion of The Hobbit that I would recommend to anyone who either likes the book and wants to geek out over their love for it, or who has read the book and wants to understand why other people seem to love it so much ;)

16. A Game of Thrones This was a 'revisit' since I'd read it when the book first came out (many years ago!) but didn't really care for it. So many of my friends rave about this series, though, that I thought I'd give it another try (it did, after all take me six tries to make it all the way through The Lord of the Rings, which I now love). This time I tried the audiobook and while the narrator and production were good, and there was some really great writing, I really... REALLY... do not like this story. In fact, I liked it LESS the second time around.

I'm sorry to hear you still aren't getting into A Song of Ice and Fire series! :( I love them but George RR Martin has got to be THE most frustrating author I've ever read. Talk about loose ends and going on tangents... but I still love the series and the show is awesome.

17. Insurgent I greatly enjoyed the first book in the series, Divergent, and while there isn't anything wrong with this installment it doesn't really stand on it's own. There's no new ground covered, either in character development or world building. Meh. I am still looking forward to the third book, though :)

Ditto on the second book but still excited for the third! Lol

18. The Modern Scholar: The Biology of Birds

19. The People's Dynasty: Culture and Society in Modern China

20. From Jesus to Christianity: A History of the Early Church

21. Blood in the Skies This was fluffy fun and I enjoyed the banter between the two main characters. It's an action story with lots of running, fighting and explosions and the writing is decent for the most part. Still, there are several things that keep this from being a four star read- the world building is fuzzy, there are a couple of scenes that (while entertaining) are in such a different style that they feel like they came from another story all together... and then there are the ghost-driven mummy/zombie/monster/thingies. That section came across as so... stupid... that I actually almost stopped reading. I pushed on to the end, and it was ok... but not good enough to redeem the 'ghost-driven mummy/zombie/monster/thingies', and I'm not left with any particular need to read the rest of the trilogy.

22. Retribution Falls This was a great deal of fun! Airships, pirates, duels, dogfights, daring escapes, desperate plans, secret hideaways, mysterious maps, demons, scientific magic (or magical science... however you want to look at it) and a rum drinking cat. Seriously, what's not to love?

I'm looking forward to picking up more by this author :)

23. I Hunt Killers I enjoyed this one- kind of 'Dexter' meets the Hardy Boys ;)

24. Baltimore: The Plague Ships I like Mignola's art, and I love a good, old-fashioned evil vampire story, so a double win.

25. A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

26. Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire This classic gothic horror and wouldn't be out of place on a shelf with Dracula or Frankenstein. There was some really evocative prose in this novel (one of my favorite lines was "Even from a distance the City seemed a massive fortress, the shadows between buildings so narrow that a spider of claustrophobia skittered along his spine just from looking at them.") and the frame narrative flowed well. The illustrations add a nice touch, too (I like Mignola's rough, blocky style).

27. Inferno Not his best work, but also not his worst. I guessed most of the twists well before they were revealed (and for the one you got me with, well played Mr. Brown!) and there were parts that moved so slowly that, I have to admit, I started skimming- I kept thinking that it would make a better movie than it did a book because it would cut out most of the 'travelogue'. Still, I was entertained more often than not.

28. John Dies at the End This is not for everyone... it's profane and vulgar, juvenile and silly and quite frequently gross. And I laughed until my sides and throat hurt. If Kevin Smith and Sam Raimi had a love-child who was baby-sat by Terry Gilliam and grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer he might have written this book. I need to go find the next book in the series...

Stacie wrote: "27. Inferno Not his best work, but also not his worst. I guessed most of the twists well before they were revealed (and for the one you got me with, well played Mr. Br..."

I thought this was a big step up from The Lost Symbol, but Angels & Demons is still my favorite of the series.

Charleen wrote: "I thought this was a big step up from The Lost Symbol, but Angels & Demons is still my favorite of the series. ..."

I agree with you there. The only thing I really remember about The Lost Symbol is how very stupid I thought most of it, especially the ending, was! Such a disappointment for me after A&D :/

P.S.- Good to see you back in action, so to speak ;) Glad you got your computer problems sorted (I'm an absolute wreck when my technology fails, lol! I'm the kind of person that, while I may not need to be on the computer all the time, if it's not even an option then computer related activities are all I can think of! It's kind of like having chocolate in the house... it needs to be there, just in case, LOL!)

29. Upon This Rock: A History of the Papacy From Peter to John Paul II I have several other lectures by Professor Madden so there's not a whole lot of new material or different interpretations of events, but I still found it interesting. Plus, Madden is a good lecturer.

Yargh... I'm falling behind again! I got hit by a book hangover after John Dies at the End... it was just so hard to start something else because my brain just would not disengage from that world ;p

At least this selection was actually from my TBR pile! Ok, so not very far back in the pile but I owned it for 8 months before getting to it, which it totally counts as 'clearing out' ;p (I just realized that out of 29 books only 7 of them were cleared from my TBR pile! 0.o)

30. The Trivia Lover's Guide to the World: Geography for the Lost and Found Moderately entertaining. This is one of those things that is good for when you've only got a couple of minutes to pick something up, as opposed to devoting solid blocks of time, and there was quite a lot in it that I didn't know.

31. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone This was a comfort read while I was stuck at the DMV. For three hours.

32. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Well, since I started the first one I might as well continue, right? ;)

33. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

34. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

35. Doctor Sleep

36. The Affinity Bridge

37. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again


(Oh, man! I so completely suck at reading this year :( I'm not going to even come close to my goal)

Stacie wrote: "35. Doctor Sleep"

I'm in the middle of Doctor Sleep right now! So good!

38. Dead Iron. I really enjoy the world she's setting up and her villain is wonderfully ooky :)

39. Three

40. Tin Swift Light, enjoyable escapism :)

41. A Christmas Carol

That was my last finished book of 2013. Man, I missed my goal sooooo badly :(

Not too bad though!