Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica George
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



A retelling of some fairy tale, I believe the same one Beauty and the Beast was based off of. A poor girl is stolen away by a talking polar bear, taken to a castle to live in for a year, but because women are weak willed and cannot help themselves, she doomed a prince to a horrible life.

I loved this book in the beginning, but the longer I read it, the less I enjoyed it. The turning point was this:

Trapped in the castle, every night a strange man got into the girl's bed. Unsurprisingly, she had issues with this. She tried to avoid sleeping in the bed, but he kept carrying her back. There were no lights, so she couldn't see who it was. Because she could not just accept that fact, because she was all sneaky and snuck a light in to see who it was, the stranger (polar bear in human form, a cursed prince) was doomed to marry a horribly ugly troll woman.

If she had only just accepted a stranger in her bed for a whole year, everything would have ended well!!!!!

The lesson of this book pisses me off to much. All the problems in the book were caused by her being unable to accept a stranger climbing into her bed every night. (I know fairy tales are old, I know the lessons in it are dated, but the author chose to write this book based on it.)

If I were rating just the latter half of the book, I'd rate it hated, but I did enjoy the first fifth or so of it, so going with disliked instead.

Space Is Just a Starry Night by Tanith Lee
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



It always feels odd when a famous author's books don't work for me. I think this is the first thing I've read by Lee, but I just didn't enjoy it at all. Wiki said critics described her writing as "use of rich poetic prose" which really also sums up why I didn't like it. It was so wordy, I would have described it as nearly purple, I just wanted her to get to the point of her sentences.

Stopped reading at 11%.

The Beginning (Dark Paladin Book #1) by Vasily Mahanenko
Traditional or self-published: Self-published
Rating: Dislike (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



LitRPG still makes me so sad. It should be a completely perfect match for my tastes (people trapped in a video game), but almost without exception, they're nothing but poorly written, poorly edited, macho male fantasies. And so, a year or so back, I culled all the LitRPG off my Kindle. Or so I thought. Now and then I discover one I missed, like this one.

I really should have just deleted it, but instead I gave it a chance. In the 2% I read it actually had no typos/editing issues (wonder of wonders!), but it was still not a match for my tastes and I stopped reading.

Amusingly, like so much LitRPG, this one was translated from Russian. (Why is the lion's share of LitRPG by Russian authors?) In the middle of a conversation (in English), the main character said to himself something like "It's amazing how descriptive the Russian language is". Gave me quite a laugh.


Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 11% + 2%
Previous abandoned book total: 552%
New total: 565% (5 books)

Welcome to the look back on my 6th year of reviewing books! As I will be neither finishing nor abandoning the book I'm currently reading in time to include it in this count, I can post this a little ahead of time.

Trends for the year 2018:

1) Someone please free me from phone games! For the second year in a row, I lost way too much reading time to phone games. I know exactly how they hook you, I know the tricks they use to keep you playing daily, but that doesn't make those tricks any less effective. I was disappointed in myself to see I had mentioned this last year, too.
2) Because of point #1, the only reason I made my 50 book goal is because of the Animorphs books. They take only 2-3 hours to read, so they padded my numbers.

Next year will be better!

Total books read each year, goal of 50 per year.

I made 50 by the skin of my teeth...

Of the 51 book count, 37 of them were completed books. I had credit for 14 books worth of abandoned books. Whenever I abandoned a book, I added up the percent of it I had finished, then in the end divided by 100. Not a perfect system, but no other way of doing it.

Partial book credits for the year: 1,471% (14 books!)

Total books abandoned each year.

Surprising how close the last three years were.

How much I liked this year's collection of books.
( Charts back here, they're a little big )

Happy reading to everyone in 2019!

Pet Noir by Pati Nagle
Traditional or self-published: Self-published? (From the "publisher's" website: "Evennight Books is a small publisher specializing in fiction by New Mexico writers. Formed in 2010 to bring P. G. Nagle’s backlist back into print...")
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



A collection of mystery-ish stories told from the POV of Leon, a cat geneteched to have opposable thumbs, human-level intelligence, and the ability to speak. In a somewhat logic-stretching move, a "small town" space station's security department bought one of these very very expensive cats to help them solve a case. Each of the other five stories in the book involve Leon and his human cop/partner solving other cases.

The first story (Leon as a kitten, just arriving on the space station, everything new to him) was the best by far. I would have rated the book higher, if it were only that story.

One of the reasons this book sat in my To Read pile so long was the title. To be honest, I had picked up this book expecting it to be so bad that it might be amusing. It wasn't bad at all -- it was exactly what it billed itself to be. I'm not a mystery book reader though, and the whole 'noir' genre doesn't work for me, so through my own fault, the book wasn't a good match for me. As the stories went along, Leon's voice changed, and it was more and more sounding like noir, so eventually I bailed. I stopped reading at the 63% point, in the middle of the third story.

The Man-Kzin Wars by Larry Niven
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



What a confusing book. The ebook version I have has the cover of Book 4 of this series, yet the stories inside belonged to Book 1. Anyway! There were three stories in this book. The first, by Niven, was so amusingly dated. Published in 1966, though written long before that, astronauts on a spaceship smoked. The story's whole view of the future was so... cute? That humans would be so detached from violence that they couldn't even make themselves use words like 'war' anymore, they physically got sick and had to go into therapy if they did. I finished the whole story, but it did nothing at all for me.

The second story, by Poul Anderson, completely didn't work for me. Too hard science fiction-y, too dry, I skipped much of it. The third story, by Dean Ing, was more interesting (a human was captured by the cat-like Kzin and left as a prisoner on an empty planet), but still didn't hold my attention well enough to continue. Gave up on the book at the 74% mark.

Partial book credits:
Point reached in these books: 63% + 74%
Previous abandoned book total: 571%
New total: 708%

Currently reading: Shards of Honour by Lois McMaster Bujold. Edit: Hrm. Even though this is book #1, it's recommended as the second book to read? Oh well, it's the one I have, so sticking with it.

Saber Tooth (Dawn of Mammals Book 1) by Lou Cadle
Rating: Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



What a completely fun and entertaining book this was! Well-written, believable, exciting, and with a really fun idea.

The story started in current times, the real world. In it an advance science class of high school students is on a field trip to a national park, and during it they find a time rift. This was the only part of the book you had to just go along with: the fact that a time rift existed and that they all willingly went through it. But, if you can accept that, the rest of the story is outstanding.

The author is both a scientist and an expert on survival, and that comes through in this story. The kids and three adults are stuck in prehistoric times with only what's in their pockets. Little water, next to no food, no weapons, nothing to help them survive other than their brains. And, because this was an advanced science class and not a typical group of high school kids, I enjoyed spending time with all the characters.

As much fun as the story itself was, it was just as much fun reading about the world. His version of prehistoric times, from plants to animals to even changes in the stars, was completely believable -- I could tell he was an expert on this material.

This was book #1 of a series. There are four out now, and I have the next two on my Kindle already. I've started the next one, Terror Crane, already.