Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was a more recent CBR9 book exchange gift. The backlash for the book was pretty intense, but with the recent film adaptation, I was curious to read it for myself. Thus, I was glad my Mocha Girls Read book club picked it for our white male author theme. I ended up finishing it over 4th of July and surprisingly enjoyed the pop culture filled story. The story follows Wade on an epic quest to essentially save the internet from a […]
John Scalzi is reliably fascinating
This was my second attempt to read this book, and I’m glad I gave it another go. I haven’t been let down by Scalzi before, and Lock In was no different. This is a fairly typical Scalzi novel, in that the world is well developed and multi-layered. From what I’ve read of him (Redshirts, the Old Man’s War series, and The Dispatchers), he’s very adept at centering his stories around a big idea, and this is no different. Set in the future, a disease has […]
This is war. Chaos. Chance. Death.
I cannot emphasize enough how much I am loving the Red Rising series. I’m pre-grieving my reading and finishing of the next and final book. But, I’m also so addicted that as soon as the library checks it out to me, I’m going to devour it. This is dystopian fiction at its finest: fully fleshed out, incredibly exciting, completely believable, deeply poetic. The protagonist, Darrow has my heart. He’s driven, he’s thoughtful, he’s pure but emotional, and he’s young and beautiful. The villains of the […]
When we finally learn to time travel, it will probably be just as boring as this
On paper, this book is the complete package for me: time travel, a mysterious epidemic, a spunky female protagonist, academia, Christmas. I should have loved it. But it was a little… um…. super duper incredibly boring. I’m really looking forward to the Book Club conversation about this, because it would be nice to put my finger on why I didn’t just totally love it. There’s plenty of action, but it’s very repetitive, and never feels like it’s going anywhere. No build, just introduction of characters, […]