Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Fairy Tale by Stephen King.

I've read nearly all of Stephen King's books, and I don't think I've ever DNFed one of them. It made me really sad to drop this one.

The first third of the book was about a boy taking care of an old man who had broken his leg when he fell off a ladder. Nothing supernatural. Nothing horror. Just their day to day life. (And, as long as King's books are, a third of the book was as long as most other book's I've read.)

Even though nothing happened through the entire first third of the book, I kept reading because something had to happen eventually, right? Eventually we got to the "supernatural" part (the main character ended up in what was basically Fairy Tale Land, a place where all the elements from fairy tales were real), but that was actually more boring than the first third. Nothing at all felt new, we all know these fairy tales by heart.

About halfway through the book and gave up and looked at Goodreads to see what others thought.

"2 stars. I’m still King’s Constant Reader and devoted fan, but this mediocre book is easily forgettable."

"It’s just that [the story] left me not even as much bored as quite indifferent, and that’s a cardinal sin for a book."

"2 1/2 stars. This was... fine."

"[the main character] ends up on his own little fantasy adventure story, which is... pretty much like any fantasy adventure ever"

I wish I had given up on it sooner. I spent almost six hours reading it for no payoff. Oh well, on to the next book.

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C. A. Fletcher. It's not often a book makes me go "Oh my god, this book!", but this was one of them. It was so good, I carved out so much extra time to read. Hours yesterday and while I never take a lunch break (since I work from home), today I did so I could finish it. I hate to be done with the story, but I just had to see how it ended.

The plot sounds straightforward and simple: The world ended -- something happened, almost no one could have babies anymore, birthrate went down to a sliver of what it had been, the Earth became empty of humans, and the last few people were living in what remained.

The plot opened on an island where a small family lived with their two dogs. (Dog litters were uncommon and the pups were almost always male, so dogs were nearly as rare as people.) A trader sails to the island, and flees in the night with one of the dogs (the female one).

The whole story is about one young boy who was trying to hunt down the trader and get his other dog back. He loved his dogs so much, he raced off to save her without planning, taking supplies, or anything.

It seems like such a simple plot, but the story was being told by the main character in the future writing it all out in a book, talking to his future reader who likely would never exist. So not only did he write to "you" the reader a lot, but since the MC was writing about his story after it happened, there was so much foreshadowing and the tension was so high through the whole thing without it feeling artificial at all.

If I had to criticize something, it would be an element of the ending. The whole story was so realistic and believable, I didn't really buy that one element (a modern day religion) could still exist generations after civilization fell and with so few people left.

But all in all, this was such a good book. Best book I've read in a long time.

50) Red Wolf by Jennifer Dance. It's not you, book, it's me. I'm sure this was a fine book (it won awards), but it was a too realistic tale of native american boys who were being converted into "proper" white men. The opening scene was a wolf being shot, the next scene was a young boy tied to a pole and whipped until he was bloody. Just not what I was looking to read during my relaxing time.

51) Red Moon Rising by Peter Moore. A story about a half-"vampyre", half-"wulf" (half vampire, half werewolf) teenager in a supernatural high school. Even if I had enjoyed the story (which I very much did not), the special spelling of words in this story would have been enough to drive me up a wall.

52) Archipelago by Andrew Leon Hudson, Kurt Hunt, and Charlotte Ashley. These three authors each wrote their own book, then wove them together. Sounds like an interesting idea, right? At least one of the authors needed an editor badly, and the second one's writing put me to sleep (literally), so I didn't even bother continuing on to the third author's section.

Down from 400+ unread books on my Kindle to 279!

Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder. Set on a small island, nine children (always only nine) live together with no adults. Everything on the island is completely safe (even snakes are just colorful, never dangerous). All their food and needs are supplied.

Once a year, a rowboat shows up on shore with a very young kid in it. The kid gets out and joins the group, and the oldest one gets in and sails off, never to be seen again. (The oldest kid always feels the need to leave, like it's time.)

The book felt like there was no plot (which sounds like a bad thing, but it worked here). It was just the kids living on the island together, day to day life.

Then one day the rowboat comes and the oldest kid leaves, leaving the main character (young teen) as the new "elder". The book goes for another year of day to day life. Then it's her turn to leave, but unlike every other elder in the history of the island, she doesn't want to go.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH. While this book has been on my Kindle for 5-6 years, I somehow remembered reading a review of someone saying the island was an afterlife -- a holding area before the dead kids stay before (whatever) happens next. I read the story through that view of it, and it really fit. So I was very surprised when I went to read reviews on Goodreads when I was done and most people said the island represented childhood, and when kids got old enough, they left the island (grew up). That fit as well.

Be warned there are no answers at the end of the book. Not a single question is answered, no information about what happened is given. I think that's great, it makes you think about the story, but some reviewers raged about it.

Wolfsbane and Mistletoe by Charlaine Harris (Editor). An anthology, all the stories in it had to involve werewolves and Christmas. I can see why I got this book many years ago -- that seems like an interesting combo of themes.

Every time I read an anthology book, I get less and less happy with them. This book has 15 stories in it, so 15 chances to find a new author I like, right? But instead it was miss after miss after miss. And unlike a non-anthology book, with an anthology you can't just give up on the book when you're not enjoying it, you have to try every single story in it...

The first story, and a couple others, were set in an author's preexisting book series. I HATE those. It feels cheap on the author's part -- write something original for this anthology! Not a short story you can later just package with your series.

A couple stories had major editing issues (grammar issues). How they made it through as-is into the book is beyond me.

A couple stories barely had anything to do with werewolves at all (usually focusing on vampires instead).

Most stories I just didn't enjoy and didn't finish.

Of the 15 stories, I finished a grand total of three, and those three were only good enough to finish, I didn't enjoy any of them at all.

DNF

45) Journey Beyond the Burrow by Rina Heisel. This was one of those sad "talking animal" books where the animals might as well just be human. They talked like humans, mostly acted like humans, and the story just didn't keep my attention.

46) The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley. Bad author, no biscuit. A roughly million page book, a doorstop of a book, where every woman's chest was described in great detail. Anyone overweight was an evil character. A story in great need of both an editor and a less misogynic author.

47) The Beginner's Guide to Curses (Spellchasers Book 1) by Lari Don. I read a lot of MG/YA books. Good ones are great reading for adults as well, but this one wasn't one of them. Plot was about a girl who got cursed (because she yelled at a man (a witch) because he threw dog poop on her...), and how she had to go to a school to learn how to break curses.

48) The Evolution of Claire (Jurassic World) by Tess Sharpe. I was so excited about this one! A book filling in the backstory of a Jurassic Park movie character? Sign me up! ...but turns out it was the woman who ran from a T-Rex in high heels. The story never hooked me, and as soon as I realized who Claire was in the movies, I lost all interest. Reading other reviews, it wouldn't have been a story I liked anyway (unbelievable romance, completely predictable plot). Oh well.

49) Warcross by Marie Lu. Very rarely, I somehow get a duplicate of a book on my Kindle. This is only the second time in my memory that it happened. As I was reading this one, I was certain I had read it before. Turns out I had, and I hadn't liked it much the first time either.

Old Cat and the Kitten by Mary E. Little. If I believed in burning or banning books, this one would be the first (and only) one on my list. I'm not sure what the point of the story is, other than showing anyone who cares about cats what not to do. And yet in bold on the Amazon page is:

Animal and pet lovers everywhere will delight in “special story” of patience and love between a boy and a stray cat that is “beautifully told”

Published in the 70s and set maybe ten years earlier (the dialogue was so dated), a young boy befriended a stray tomcat. His mother (an awful woman, though I'm sure was just supposed to be a woman of her times and not meant to be abusive) discouraged him at every turn. His siblings were awful, too (to the point that the family all called them "the fiends"). Midway through the story, the tomcat brings a kitten to the boy (the whole tom/kitten 'relationship' was completely unbelievable).

Eventually the family has to move and couldn't take the cats. The mother mocked the boy and scolded him for "wasting his time" caring about the fate of the cats. Eventually he found a new home for the kitten, but couldn't for the cat. So he took him to the vet and had him put him to sleep.

Amazon has rankings for this book listed for:
1) Children's Social Skills
2) Children's Pet Books (Books)
3) Children's Cat Books (Books)

Children's. Social. Skills.
Pet books.
Cat books.

The Amazon description says "As it compassionately addresses a sensitive topic". That is complete and utter BS. There was no addressing or discussing anything. The boy visits an old lady (the one who is taking the kitten) and she tells him how she had to put her beloved cat down when he was too old and sick to enjoy life anymore. Which is not at all the same as the boy's situation.

The moral of this book is that when an animal is no longer convenient, you should just kill it!

I wouldn't let a child get near this book, other than maybe an older one so you could teach them what NOT to do. I wouldn't give this book to a cat or pet lover unless you hated them.

DNF:

38) Ordinary Magic by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway. In a world where everyone is born with magic, very rarely someone is born without any. At age 12, all kids are judged to see what magic level they have. When she turned 12, the main character was found to be an "ord" (short for ordinary) -- she had no magic.

That could make for a really interesting story, other than the worldbuilding really made no sense. Ords become non-people. No rights. Not even permitted to speak. Their parents usually sell them to a circus or some other group that can make use of them. (What parent would do that! Raise a child for 12 years and then just in the blink of an eye hate them and be willing to sell them into worse than slavery?)

There were other plot holes and things that made no sense, so I just gave up on this one.

39) Orphans of the Tide by Struan Murray. This was one of the few books where a technical issue made me stop reading. For some reason, the font size changed radically between each (short) chapter, so I kept having to adjust the it. The story didn't hook me enough to put up with that longer than a couple chapters.

After my longest run of DNF and books I didn't enjoy in the history of my reviewing, finally some really good books!



Owen and the Soldier by Lisa Thompson. I frequently say that you can tell a book by the cover. Usually I mean that in a bad way: Awful, usually self-published books have awful, unprofessional covers. However in this case, the cover of this book also tells you everything you need to know about the story... in a good way.

The art on it is so simple, no? Almost childish? The story was as well, but in a wonderful way. The main character (Owen) was a 100% believable kid. The story set in the real world, his father was killed in a war overseas. His mother couldn't cope with the loss and fell into depression so deep she couldn't even take care of Owen anymore. Owen slowly made friends with a mostly forgotten statue of a soldier in the park.

The statue was just a statue, nothing magical or mythical. It didn't talk. It was made of stone, but old enough that it was crumbling in places.

Owen was such a good kid in such a rough situation (his mother wasn't a bad mother at all, she was just so depressed that she couldn't even feed him or herself). Owen's pain and loss actually made me cry at one point, the fact that a child would connect with a statue instead of being able to connect to the people around him.

The one and only issue I have with this book was that it's so short. It took me maybe an hour to read. While I wish it had taken me a lot longer, it was the perfect length the story needed to be, so I really can't complain.

Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1) by Matthew S. Cox. This book surprised me so much, I expected it to be just another awful self-published book (dystopian world, teenage girl living on the street, different classifications of citizens), but it turned out to be SO good!

Story was set in the future on Earth. At the age of 12, the main character, Sima, was sexually assaulted by her absent and abusive mother's boyfriend, so she ran away from home and spent the next four years living on the streets. The first third of the book was about her rough life trying to survive.

Earth was collapsing (all the problems we have now, just a couple generations in the future). Humans had starting colonizing other planets. For this new planet they were going to, the government decided to collect up all the street kids and orphans they could find to send (childless adults going would take care of them). Sima was scooped up into that project.

The spaceship she was on had an accident, and she and a couple other kids' escape pods crash landed on an alien planet. She, a now-16 year old, had to take care of three kids ages 6-12. On an alien planet full of plants and animals that sometimes wanted to eat them. They had no supplies, not even clothing (they had been put into stasis for the trip in their underwear).

I really enjoyed reading about how the four of them had to survive (especially with the youngest girl having a chronic illness).

[It was at this point where I bought the second book in the series, even though I'm trying very hard not to buy more books until I catch up on the older ones I already have.]

The last of the story ended up wrapping up the first two parts so well, that for the first time ever I kind of almost didn't want to read the next book in a series I loved. The first book was just such a perfectly complete story, I had no idea what book two could do to improve it.

DNF

36) Pendulum Heroes by James Beamon. This was actually not a bad book at all. It was written well enough, and if I hadn't read the same plot countless times already, I would have enjoyed it this time. In it a bunch of kids were playing a D&D-knockoff game and somehow got pulled into the game world. I've read that story so so so so many times, I just wasn't at all interested in reading it again.

I've decided to just start at the very end of my Kindle library, my oldest books, and work forward. Amazon has decided to stop supporting .mobi book formats, its own format, and I have 300 of them on my Kindle, so newer ones have to wait.

Where the Plains Merge with the Sky by Patty Jansen. While this wasn't an awful story, I only finished it because it was so short. Set on another planet, a girl was born a farmer, but she had a gift for music and chafed at farm life. The only interesting (and way way too briefly explained) part was that every farmer bonds with a "subhuman" -- a race made from crossing humans with some native alien animal. I wish the whole story had been about them instead of about the girl, the whole subhuman thing was described in one short sentence.

DNF

30) Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold. I love her writing and I know I liked the series this novella was from, but I last read it in 2016. I had no idea who the characters were anymore, setting, or anything else. Sadly the story was wasted on me.

31) Other Worlds: Beast World by George Ivanoff. This is one of the worst books I've read in a long time. A MG book, so aimed at young readers, it did that awful thing where adults just stopped existing in the middle of scenes. For example, the kids found a magic doorway. Teacher (standing next to them) said not to touch it. The kids went on to have a long conversation about going through, one went towards it, the other followed. They talked more about going through, one reached to touch it and went through and after a moment the other followed. But all that time, the teacher (after saying the one line telling them not to go through) just stopped existing. It had a bunch of other problems as well. The book would only have taken an hour to read, but I still only got through a third of it before dropping it.

32) Notes from the Internet Apocalypse by Wayne Gladstone. Not an awful story, but set in the real world and kind of dull. In it, the Internet vanished. Poof. No more email, websites, nothing online. How does a man maintain a social life in that kind of situation? The bar visits and small talk were just too boring to keep reading about.

33) Not Even Bones by Rebecca Schaeffer. Ugh. I've said before "I have no idea how this book got onto my Kindle", but in this case I mean that in bold text and underlined. This book was opposite of what I enjoy. Set in the real world (but supernatural creatures exist... except they all look human), a mother and daughter team capture, cut up, and sell those "creatures" (people). It was really graphic. Once they captured a small boy and started cutting pieces off him to sell (again, graphic descriptions), I just deleted the whole book. Ugh.

Seven DNF books in no special order:

23: SNAFU: Future Warfare by assorted authors. I picked this one up because one of the episodes of Love, Death, and Robots was based on a story in this book. Turns out the show changed enough things to make the story a lot more palatable.

The story I was interested in was about human farmers terraforming another planet when aliens suddenly attacked. That much held true between the episode and the story, but turns out the episode changed genders enough that it was no longer manly men fighting the aliens while all the women just stay in the background and support them. Plus the editing was really, really bad, too. I didn't even finish the one story I had been interested in, let alone the other five in the book.

24: Now We Are Ten by assorted authors. This had been the oldest book on my Kindle. Sometimes I just go way to the back and pick one of the oldest ones, otherwise I'll never get to them.

Turns out some scifi convention had a bad first year, so they published a book to pay off their debts. The "publisher" of that book (one guy) said "Hey, this isn't so hard!" and kept on publishing more. That "publishing company" turned ten at the time this book was published (2016), so he put out this anthology.

The stories in it were so odd. They seemed good... but all had the worst endings. Endings so bad they ruined the rest of the story. I never encountered something like it before. I only read a few of the 17 stories in it before giving up out of frustration.

25: The Quest for the Thunder Stone by Craig Halloran. Once I deleted Now We Are Ten, this one became the new oldest book on my Kindle, so I tried it next.

The whole "book", which was somehow "Sword and Sorcery Epic Fantasy Sample Fantasy Bundle Pack - 4 Books in 1 Book 2", would have taken about 20 minutes to read. Even that short, I had only gotten 10% through it. The writing was just that bad. I was more curious about "4 Books in 1 Book 2" than any part of the plot. How many books was it supposed to be? Why make a sample of "4 Books in 1 Book 2"? We'll never know.

26: A Song in the Rain by Lydia Deyes. While I can't find a review I wrote of this one, I had tried to read it before (and DNFed it then) for sure. As soon as I recognized it, I stopped reading it. It was supposed to be a talking animal story, but it was just basically people in animal shapes, and not well written at all.

27: A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis. I almost thought I'd finish this one. It started out interesting: Set in a fantasy world, a young girl was living on a ship and being raised as a thief/pirate. About 15 minutes into the story, she seemed to de-age about ten years and became a moody, snotty, little brat. Just a horrible little kid who I had no interest in reading about.

The book was meant for ages 8-12, so the kid character would probably work a lot better for young readers. Big thumbs down from adult reader me though.

28: The Returning by Christine Hinwood. Based on reviews on Goodreads, apparently you needed to take your time with this book. Read one page, then take the rest of the day to think about it. To me, that would have made it even more boring. Supposedly this was a book about the results of war, the impact war has on people. But in the part I read, nothing happened, and it was so slow I just lost all interest.

29: Mammoth Boy by John Hart. I wanted to like this one so much, it should have been a good match for me. It was set back in the time when both Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals both walked the Earth at the same time. "Tribes" were loose things, the dominant males and their women stuck together, but any boys likely wandered off on their own.

The main character, a Cro-Magnon boy, wandered off and met a Neanderthal man. The two became friends.

The story was interesting enough, and clearly the author was an expert on the subject, but the issue was that the (British) author was using so much archaic British language. I feel like I have a good vocabulary, but in one single sentence I had to look up four words (the four words were different parts of a river, like "mouth" and such). It was just so hard to get into the story when I was having to stop so often and look a word up.

This is a very rare case where I'm going to leave the book on my Kindle and give it another try after finishing my current book. I'd like to read more of the story, it's just so frustrating to get through the language to reach it.

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) by Seanan McGuire. In Every Heart a Doorway, book #1 of the Wayward Children series, there's a series of murders. The first person to get murdered was a character I didn't like, so I thought that was really a rather convenient twist. Unfortunately this book was all about bringing her back to life.

The worlds the magic doorways open to all fall at points on a compass. Each direction is a classification of worlds: Logic and Nonsense are opposites, Wicked and Virtuous are opposites, and Rhyme and Reason are also opposites. This book was our first look at a Nonsense world, and it didn't work at all for me.

Being opposite of Logic, Nonsense throws out anything that makes sense. For example, you could walk anywhere in the entire world in a day of walking. The whole world was made of candy and cookies. I'd be a Logic or Reason door sort of person; even just spending a couple hours reading about a Nonsense world was too much for me.

Add onto that that I really didn't believe in the main character as a person. See, the theme of this series is "there's no one right way to be a girl", and each book has a different sort of girl as a main character. Intersex, damaged twin sister, missing a limb... The main character of this book was fat. The author only ever used "fat", never overweight, heavy, or any other word. The author also repeatedly said how in shape she was, despite being fat. How being fat wasn't her fault at all, she ate healthier than most other people. She was stronger than any of her friends, more in shape, more athletic, and being "fat" was a product of her genes and nothing else... Doesn't that rob the meaning of making the main character "fat"? Why couldn't she have been heavy because she likes pizza and cookies more than other people? Why did she have to have an excuse that it wasn't her "fault"? It just really struck me the wrong way.

This was the first book I didn't enjoy at all. I would have DNF'ed it, but it was so short and I had hoped it would get better.

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4) by Seanan McGuire. While I didn't have any of the issues with #4 that I had had with #3, I still didn't enjoy it much.

It started out so slowly. We spent the first 20% of the book with the main character (a bookworm girl) in the real world. Snooze.

When she found her door and got to her new world (Goblin Market), it was... fine. For me, the world (and the story) had none of the magic of the other books.

I guess I believed the main character as a person (though a boring person). So much of the story was time-jumped past though, it was hard to connect with the world or any of the other characters.

---

I loved books 1, 2, and 6 of this series so much, I was very surprised to see how much 3 and 4 didn't work for me.

Looks like I have two left of the series to go: Come Tumbling Down and Where the Drowned Girls Go.

The Door to the Lost - by Jaleigh Johnson. This could have been an interesting story, but the characters were all paper-thin with no more characterization than their names.

Set in a fantast world, all the magic suddenly dies. For unimportant plot reasons, only some children are left with magic, and so they become outcasts and are hunted down and locked away. Two girls with magic are living together on the street.

The two girls, Rook and Drift, had no characterization other than one was braver than the other. I wanted to like this book, the plot could have made for a fun story, but without characters to connect to, it was a slog to get through.

Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. It's odd, I thought I had read Bear before and loved her, but I seem to have no record of having read anything by her...

The book started out so good. Set in a light steampunk version of the old west, the main character worked in a high class whorehouse. I LOVED the world. I enjoyed so much learning about how the business was run, the other girls, the customers, the town, all that.

Then it took a turn into left field. An Evil Politician was the enemy of the madam who ran the whorehouse. Karen and the other girls go on all sorts of adventures and plots to fight him. It was just so out there and unbelievable... I wish the whole book had been like the first third.

In Our Own Worlds #2: LGBTQ+ Tor.com by assorted authors. This book contained four novellas:
- Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett. A retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I couldn't get into it at all and stopped trying a few pages in.
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. This one was AMAZING. Set in our world, now and then doorways into other worlds open for certain children. Sometimes the doorways later open again and they are returned. There are secret schools for those kids, since they're now so different and can no longer fit in to our world. So so so so good. I can't wait to read the rest of the books in the series.
- Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather. This was such a strange story, but I really enjoyed it. Set in the distant future, nuns set out on living space ships to tend to groups of people around the universe. I don't generally enjoy stories about real world religions, but this one was so interesting. The living ship was a fascinating "character" as well.
- Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. I'm not sure how this even got onto a "best" list. It really needed an editor (author used semicolons so often and every time wrong). Story didn't hook me at all (seemed to be set in the past, but the characters all used very modern, urban slang), so I dropped it.

DNF

21: Slave Stories - Slave State by Chris Kelso. Summary of this book was: "The Slave State is a place located in the 4th dimension, a place where humans are forced to work extracting inessential minerals from mining enclaves until the end of their lives...". It was so badly written, I wanted to toss my Kindle across the room. It was one of the oldest books I had, I must have gotten it for free or something. Blech.

Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection by various authors. I've long since given up on anthologies, so I wasn't sure how this one got onto my Kindle. Turns out one of the middle stories was by an author I used to love (Karin Lowachee), so that explains it.

Like most anthologies, they put the best ones first and last. The first story (by big name scifi author Alastair Reynolds) was fine. The second one was okay. Then the rest were a waste of time, until the last one.

All of the stories were set in the distant future, when mankind had spread across the galaxy. A disaster (the Maelstrom) happened, which ended all travel between worlds. Each story was set in the approach of the Maelstrom.

The story by Karin Lowachee? Didn't work for me at all. The first book she wrote was one of my favorite books ever, but I read the next four she put out and many short stories, and I haven't enjoyed any of them. I'm at the point of writing off the first one as a fluke.

Did Not Finish

So many DNF... Not listed here in order I read them.

14) Lion in the Wind by Steven Lake. The most immature writing in any book I've read in years. The summary sounds so good "Born of an idea ahead of its time, a cybernetic lion named Tgegani is thrown into a world on the verge of all out war. Tasked with protecting the Yigzan people, he and his pride must fight against the forces of darkness and save his people from both an ancient evil, and a madman bent on world domination.", but the writing was so so so bad.

15) A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham. So slow. Nothing had happened plot-wise after three nights of reading, so I checked Goodreads. Apparently nothing happens plot-wise in the entire book, so I gave it up.

16) Pax by Sara Pennypacker. I wanted to like this one (talking animal story!), but the writing was so odd and impossible for me to get into. I have no idea when it was set (maybe WW1?), and I didn't really like how the speech for the foxes was handled. I checked what Jeane over at Dog Ear Diary had thought (same things I had), then gave it up a third of the way through it.

17) No Less Days by Amanda G Stevens. This was probably the first time ever I almost abandoned a book without reading a single word of the story. I always read the front matter. This was put out by a Christian publisher. The stated goal was "Our mission is to inspire the world with the life-changing message of the Bible". Plus it had EIGHT PAGES of "praise for this book" quotes. And the author went on and on about God in the forward. But I decided to give it a try anyway. The story wasn't good, and quickly I grew bored, so I checked Goodreads. Apparently it got really, really religious quickly, so I gave up on it.

18) Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy Book 1). A Cthulhu story. I have zero interest in Cthulhu stories, so why did I get this book? It was the oldest one on my Kindle, so I had to have picked it up years ago. If you're into Cthulhu stuff, maybe it would have been interesting, but it lost me pretty quickly.

19) The Last Empath of Doctsland by Leah Putz. It's been almost three weeks since I read this one, and I can't remember why I DNFed it. Oddly I have good memories of it... I made it to the 20% point, so it must not have been awful...

Looks like I'm down to 315 books on my Kindle, woo!