Book 16 of 2024: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) | DNF: Between Light and Night, People of the Wolf

[thistlechaser]

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse 1) by Dennis E. Taylor.

Quick synopsis: An engineer sells his company to a tech giant and becomes rich overnight. He signs up with one of those Cryonics companies. That same weekend he's killed, so the company freezes his head, and 100 years later he wakes up in a very unexpected future.

Plot: Bob Johansson's life was going to be good, but unfortunately he got hit by a car the same weekend he sold his tech company for a fortune. Luckily it's the same weekend he signed up to be frozen after death.

100 years later he's awakened. America is gone, replaced by a theocracy. Instead of getting a body back, his brain is now the property of the government. They're going to stick it in a space probe and send it into space.

Bob, being an engineer and a "nerd", is actually okay with this plan.

Once in space, Bob learns how to replicate himself (since his brain is nothing more than computer code). Soon there are dozens of Bobs and they spread out through the universe to do all sorts of things.

Some Bobs go back to Earth to move surviving humans to another planet (a nuclear war just happened to start right as Bob was leaving the planet the first time). Some Bobs explore space and find intelligent life. Some Bobs go to war against the "Bobs" launched by other countries.

Writing/editing: Technically it was fine.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Ever meet someone who thinks he's hilarious? Who tells endless jokes, makes nonstop "clever" comments, but none of them are even slightly funny and are the opposite of clever? That was the main character of this book.

Though he was an adult, an engineer with a long career behind him, he felt like a 15 year old boy. For example, all the Bobs couldn't all be named Bob. The names they came up with for themselves included:

Commander Riker
Homer (from the Simpsons)
Bill D. Cat
Kyle (South Park)
Goku (Dragonball Z)
Calvin (and later a Hobbes)
Garfield
Bart (Simpsons)

All the "humor" was so juvenile; by a quarter into the book, I could not stand spending more time with the main character(s).

The story was so original and interesting, it's a shame the main character ruined it for me. (This book is a case where I feel strongly like it was not written for me.)

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: 1. 1! 1 in bold. I would have DNFed it, but other reviews said it got more interesting 70% in. It did not.


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DNF #8: People of the Wolf: A Novel of North America's Forgotten Past by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear. I read another book by this couple and loved it, but something about this one just didn't work for me. Every time I picked it up, my brain went NO NO NO. I think it might have been the writing style? I DNFed it early on.

DNF #9: Between Light and Night by Rebecca Barto. This is the first book I ever won on Goodreads! I wish I could say something better about it... The writing was okay (not good, not awful). The story had a lot of details I didn't believe. I would have DNFed it early on, but I pushed myself to the 10% point before finally giving up. Sorry, author, but thanks for the free copy?