Book #80 of 2023: Slow Time Between Stars | DNF: Bite Risk, Drifters, The Jaguar Princess

I usually have about a 2:1 ratio of DNF books to finished ones, but because I'm reading so much more this year, the DNF pile is really getting big. After so many DNF books, it feels like either I've lost my love of reading or there's no good book out there for me... I know that's not true, but it's depressing to keep DNFing books.

Slow Time Between Stars by John Scalzi. I can't remember if I always love Scalzi's books or if they're hit and miss for me. This story was somewhere in between. Not bad enough to DNF, not great enough for me to love.

Set in the distant future, humans know they'll never get off this planet (we're too biologically weak for long space travel and our lives are too short), so the humans make an intelligent ship. They stock it with all of human knowledge and the genetic material to remake humans and all Earth animals, then they send it out to find a planet to seed.

Unsurprisingly, the intelligent ship has other ideas and goes off to do its own thing.

The story follows millions and millions of years (most of which are skimmed over since nothing happens). It was sort of an interesting look at the galaxy and universe, but I'm glad the story wasn't longer than it is.

[Slow Time Between Stars is a novella, but I have no way to track those outside of "book read" or "DNF". Since I only read one or two a year, I'm going to just count it as a book even though it was only an hour or so to read.]

DNF #157: Bite Risk by S.J. Wills. This one had an interesting idea. A new virus spread through humanity, one that turned nearly every person over 18 into a werewolf. So all the kids younger than 18 had to lock the adults up the night of a full moon and then let them out the next morning.

Unfortunately the characters were flatter than flat, so I checked Goodreads to see what others thought. In the space of two chapters, a handful of teenagers take down a mega-corporation and save the world. Pass.

DNF #158: Drifters by Kevin Emerson. I read two other books by him, one I loved and one I hated, so I gave this one more of a chance than usual.

Set in the modern world (Portland), a nuclear power plant had a meltdown (...) but a bunch of families were too poor to move off the land (...). People kept going missing, but nearly everyone else forgot those missing people ever existed.

I really tried to stick with the story, but I actually fell asleep while reading it. It didn't hold my interest at all plus it really stretched believability.

DNF #159: The Jaguar Princess by Clare Bell. Clare Bell is one of my favorite authors and writes the best "talking animal" books. I really, really wanted Jaguar Princess to work for me. It was published in the early 90s and I (tried to?) read it back then, too. I think I might have DNFed it then, I remember it not working for me.

Set in the Aztec Empire, a young girl from a jungle village is taken as a slave and brought to the main city in the area. Apparently she becomes a were-jaguar, but I didn't read far enough to get to that part.

I think my issue with the book was that I have less than zero interest in Aztec stuff, and this book was jampacked with it. Bell did her research and there were a ton of details about life then and it seemed realistic, it just didn't work for me at all. Eventually I got too bored and sadly DNFed it.