Book #74 of 2023: The Weigher | Book #75: Guy In Real Life | DNF: War Dogs

Continuing my trend of rereading books. I think these two are the last ones on my Kindle, back to new ones next.

The Weigher by Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin. One of my first favorite books/novellas ever. I read the novella in the 80s, then the authors made it into a book in the 90s. I've reread it a few times since then. The last time was in 2017. Since I feel the same now as I did then, I'll copy part of the review here:

Set on an alien planet, the natives were sentient big cats. Like the big cats of Earth, they were strongly independent and barely social at all -- to live together, they needed individuals who acted as Weighters (judges/peacemakers/accountants all rolled into one).

The story followed one Weighter as humans arrived on her world and changed everything in good ways and bad.

My "problem" with this story was only that I knew it too well. Though it's been many years since I last read it, I felt like I knew it word for word. Not only did I know the entire plot turn for turn, I felt like I even knew the phrasing and wording choice. While not fair to this story, I rated it a liked instead of a loved because it was just too familiar with it. As much as I enjoyed it, I was bored because I knew the whole thing already.

---

It's been five years since that read, but sadly I had the same problem. I knew the story too well. I felt like I knew every single word of the dialogue. I wish I could have enjoyed reading it this time, because I do love the story, but I just know it too well.

Guy In Real Life by Steve Brezenoff. I originally read (and loved) this one in 2015. Original review here.

I reviewed it back when I was still doing the "loved-liked-okay-disliked-hated" rating system, and I rated it a LOVED in all caps (something I had only done once before). I also had said "This is not just the best book I've read this year, but one of the best books I've read in all the years I've been reviewing them." That makes me feel really odd to say that I barely liked the story this time.

Plot tl;dr: Boy and girl meet by chance. He's a metalhead rocker, she's a tabletop gaming geek. He falls in love with her to the point he names his World of Warcraft character her RL first name.

What worked for me? The way the author wrote the in game scenes. They were such a wonderful mix of "living in the game" but with RL player stuff. Example:

Svvetlana imagines an undead rogue is riding on wolf-back beside them right now, watching them, laughing to himself, juggling his enchanted daggers, ready to kill them both in one fell swoop. He'll have the hunter bloody and dead in an instant, and his cat with him, and then he'll kneel on Svvetlana's chest, with his dirty blade against her long, white throat, and he'll say, "Lol. Fag."

But unfortunately the game scenes were maybe 15% of the book, the rest was teenage romance and high school life. Which really, really does not work for me.

To be fair, last time I had written:

Guy in Real Life should not have worked for me. I can count on two fingers the number of times romance has worked for me in a YA book, and Guy in Real Life was all about a relationship. First person POV, let alone alternating first person POV between two (or more, technically) characters should have sent me running screaming. Fiction set in the real world very rarely works for me, too. Nothing about this book should have worked for me...

And all those things were my issue this time.

DNF #148: War Dogs by Greg Bear. I think I must have read something by Bear and liked it, thus I picked up this book. Hard, military sci-fi. I sometimes read hard sci-fi, but I almost never read military sci-fi (I've only ever enjoyed one military sci-fi book). I can't imagine what made me pick up a hard, military sci-fi book.

All that being said, it wasn't the science info dumps or the military-ness that made me drop this, it's that the story was really, really boring. The war seemed boring, the main character was paper-thin.

The plot was simple enough: A war between planets was going on and Earth got pulled in. Main Character was just getting back from combat on Mars. He wandered the city and ate some fruit.

For a big name writer, this book got surprisingly poor reviews on Goodreads, so I guess it wasn't just me.