Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Inspired by 50bookchallenge, my goal is to read 50 books per year. Last year I made the goal, but this year I didn't thanks to a couple things:

1) Two very long books. The two Stormlight Archive books took me about the same amount of time reading four normal books would, so that's about eight short of where I might have been.
2) I lost six weeks in the beginning of the year and two weeks later in the year to being in the hospital (zero reading done).

I hit 41 books read for the year ("read" being "reached at least the 50% mark"). I had 8 books that I didn't reach the halfway point of.

I ranked them as to how much I liked them:
Loved: 13
Liked: 5
Okay: 5
Disliked: 14
Hated: 3
Uncounted: 1 (#2: graphic novels and unfinished)

The average was "okay" almost exactly on the nose. Last year the average was just over "liked". Each rank was assigned a number for easy averaging (loved/5, liked/4, etc).

( 41 books, a link to my review, and 1-2 sentences from the review. )

( 8 books I didn't finish, a link to my review, and 1-2 sentences from the review. )

Process-wise, I'm pretty happy with how this year went. I'm going to keep everything the same, except just use loved/liked/okay/disliked/hated as the ranking, drop the 5/4/3/2/1 number score that went with them. They're not necessary, I can just apply them when doing the year's average.

I didn't do a 'a year of books' summary post previous to 2013, but I want to add those stats to years going forward.

Total books read:
2014: 41 read, 8 unfinished, total average rating: okay.
2013: 53 read, ??? unfinished, total average rating: liked.

Thor by Wayne Smith
Rating: 3/okay (1-5/hated-loved)



One of my favorite kind of story is one told from an animal's point of view. That's a more challenging style than it might seem, because if the animal knows too much, the story becomes unbelievable, yet if the animal doesn't know enough, the story can be impossible to tell.

Based on only storytelling and believable of the dog protagonist, I'd say this was the best 'told from an animal's POV' book I ever read. However, that does not mean this was a good book.

Though published by major company, this book was full of errors and issues. On the very second page of the book, there was a major error (wrong pronoun used for a character). Peppered through the book were lots of other errors, mostly word switching, typos, and letters or words dropped (like 'do' instead of 'dog', and 'To' instead of 'Tom"). Add on top of that that, while the dog was a very believable dog, none of the human characters were realistic or believable. There were major plot holes? errors? as well (like the cop agreeing to "I'll tell you everything I know if you tell me everything you know", then the cop told him everything... then just left without getting a single bit of info from the other guy).

The plot of the book was interesting (a dog had to protect his family from a werewolf, the werewolf just happening to be the brother of the family's mother and living with the family). I enjoyed the first two-thirds of the book, but the end was really heavy-handed and contained errors related to earlier in the book, so I started skimming.

The writing was amusingly dated, even though it was published in 1992. There were multiple references to Richard Nixon. For example:

"So," Uncle Ted said, nervously tucking his shirt into his pants and sounding as innocent and nonchalant as Richard Nixon...

Would I recommend this book? Maybe. If you like stories told from animal POVs, it's entertaining enough. All in all though, probably not. It had just too many basic editing mistakes.

What a way to spend a day off from work. Was pretty sure I had an infection in my toe (I keep getting ingrown toenails), so went to the walk in clinic. He sent me off to the podiatry department. The same toe that had the nail reduced by 50% six months ago now has another big chunk gone. There's only like 25% left of it. Since I was going through all the pain of removal anyway, I kinda wish they had taken the whole thing.

It is, quite literally, a bloody mess at the moment. I'll resist going into details beyond that.

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Informatzia by Catherine Keegan (loupnoir)
Rating: 4/liked (1-5/hated-loved)



I've been waiting for this book for so long. :) How hard is it to not bug the author when they're right there on your LJ friends list? It was really great to see all the characters again!

In a way, you could say this book series was Harry Potter fanfic with the serial numbers filed off, but that's not really the case. The Durmstrang Chronicles (written by this author and what the Informatzia trilogy was based on) was always pretty stand-alone. It had no canon Harry Potter characters (Lupin had a walk-in role in one of the stories, but that's it). The whole world was so wonderfully dark and mature. So it's more like Informatzia is two steps removed from Harry Potter.

The main character of Informatzia is an animagus werewolf, but neither that nor magic were the focus of this story. It was more a tale of spies and the Russian culture.

While I love the main character, I found myself wishing to be able to see so much more of this world. The few glimpses of the "magic cops" (special members of the FBI) made them seem so interesting! And the few mentions of Rose Jones (main character of Durmstrang Chronicles) made me itch to have her show up in the story.

Not so totally unrelated, I named one of my Flight Rising dragons Rose Jones.


Ahem! Anyway, I quite enjoyed the book! I can't wait until the third one. :)

Currently reading: Survey Ship by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I've had it on my Kindle for a while, well before all the rape/abuse stuff around her and her husband came out. I feel a little icky reading it; I hadn't even originally realized it was by her (the covers on the Kindle are so small, all I can generally see is the title).

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson
Rating: 5/loved (1-5/hated-loved)


Guys, I don't know how to review books anymore. Book one of this series was so long that it took me a month to read. Book two was even longer and took me almost a full two months to read. (That's with a lot of reading per day, I didn't leave them sitting around for days on end!) So I've written one review in the last three months, and now I'm all rusty.

Words of Radiance was longer than anything GRRM has ever written. It's longer than anything Stephen King has written. Never once, for a single moment, did I think "Man, this book needed a good editor" -- there was no extra padding, no useless stuff, nothing I for even a moment wanted to skim over. Not a single word. I've many times thought that King's books had too much fluff, and GRRM's need of a good editor is nearly meme-level known.

The series is set on a fantasy world that has been built from the ground up by the author. It has a weather pattern that drives everything on the planet, and the path evolution took on the world is so wonderfully clear. Everything from plants to insects to animals exist as they currently are because of the weather. Interestingly (oh so so so so interestingly) there are a few things from our planet (like horses, though there's a native(???) species of them as well). And humans, of course. I'm dying to know how/why there are horses there. The human population treats them as alien creatures (they don't fit in with how the rest of the wildlife on the world evolved). They have to be a giant clue as to the reality of this world, but as of now there's just no way to know more.

Unlike the first book, this one was told mostly from the POV of two characters (with a few other chapter POV characters now and then). Unfortunately I didn't like one of the two much, but that did not lessen my enjoyment of the book one single bit.

Brandon Sanderson is such a good writer. He's written thousands of pages of notes about his world, setting, background, and characters, and all of that shows in the finished story. This is one of the most real fantasy worlds I've ever read about.

The first book of the series is about $5 on Amazon, this second one is $10. You could easily add a zero to both of those figures and still get your money's worth.

This series is planned as ten books long, but he seems to be a seriously fast writer, so hopefully it won't be too long until book #3.

Between these two books, my chances of hitting 50 books this year is pretty darned low, but it was worth it. If I had only been able to read two books this whole year, these would be the two I'd pick.

Zhukov's Dogs by Amanda Cyr (No link available.)
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Book received free for review from Curiosity Quills Press.

Not only can you not tell a book by its cover, you can't tell it by its title either.

Based on the title, Zhukov's Dogs seemed to be a good match for me: I enjoy it when troops/people are referred to as dogs, and I've taken a liking to books about Russian characters. The brief blurb both made it sound interesting and made me wary:

On the verge of promotion, Nik is dispatched to the underground city beneath the icy Seattle tundra. What should’ve been a simple bit of recon is complicated by the underground’s dark secrets. He soon finds himself treated as an equal and swept into battles alongside the misfit revolutionaries he was sent to spy on. Their gray-eyed leader isn’t fooled by his ruse, though, and as Nik worms his way into their lives, he unknowingly breaks the number one rule within his ranks. He allows himself to feel normal. It’s a mistake he pays for dearly when he learns The Council’s true intentions for Seattle.

"Icy Seattle tundra" caught my attention. Though the book was described as "new-adult, science-fiction, action-adventure romance" (way to cover all the bases), I figured it was another dystopia YA novel, and I was right.

I've mentioned before that special eye colors are a really bad sign in books, so I was worried at the gray-eyed bit. Turned out that both of the two main characters in the romance had special eye colors: One had grey eyes and the other heterochromia (brown and blue). Bad, bad sign.

The good points of the book: Based on the summary, it seemed just another teenage romance book. Turned out it was m/m romance. It's very rare for that to happen without "warning" on the cover or in the summary, so I was quite happily surprised by that. And, for almost the first half of the book, I enjoyed the romance part of it.

The bad: I don't even know where to start. Every other character except the two in the romance were one-dimensional. The bad guys were nothing but evil -- I expected the female villain to sprout a mustache just so she could twirl it. None of the characters were believable as people other than the two in the romance.

The logic was so badly off as well. Big elements: On one page, it was mentioned that Seattle was the second biggest producer of recycled metal. A couple pages later, the Council (new government) said they were going to destroy Seattle because it wasn't producing enough recycled metal. I had to stop reading and laugh -- was I suddenly reading Game of Thrones? "You win or you die"? Be the very best at producing or be destroyed?

A couple pages later I encountered GoT again, but didn't laugh. "Grey was the last name given to bastard children fathered by the Grey Men..." Is that a common thing? Naming all bastards of one group the same last name? The only place I've seen that done is in GoT. On top of that, there's an even bigger logic issue from this: The Grey Men are geneteched, not very human anymore. Their blood is poisonous, they're really hard to kill. What in the world are they doing interbreeding with humans? If the government produced them (and it's never explained how, when most of the country is in ruin), why in the world would they be left able to reproduce with people?

More odd things:
- "His smile was far too genuine to belong to a hardened criminal.". Buh? Criminals can't smile? They're never really happy? Nothing is able to get a genuine smile out of them?
- The main character, who has been trained in military/spy stuff since he was five or so years old, was sitting in a holding cell, put there by the Council. For lord knows what reason, he starts talking out loud to himself about what he was done... then is shocked that the cell had a mic in it and his captors heard everything he said.
- The "Dogs" (normal trained people, not geneteched) could heal from a gunshot wound in one day. How? "Dogs are given daily boosts of amino acids, protein, and a half dozen vitamins". Oh, it's that easy, huh?
- One of the two teens in the romance was a pack+ a day smoker. When the nonsmoker kissed him: "his nicotine-sweet lips". Um. NO.

The first half of the book at least had the romance going for it, but by the second it turned into more of an action movie. And I mean movie. Rarely a book is written as if it were intended to be a movie instead -- the characters don't act like people, they act like movie characters. For example, in this scene Dog Teen is trying to save his Rebel boyfriend from a Grey Man. The Grey Men are programmed to obey officers. (It's been announced on TV by the government that Dog Teen is no longer part of their army, the Grey Men are combing Seattle to find and kill him.)

I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. "My name is Nikolas Zhukov," I said. "Lieutenant Colonel of the Y.I.D. and commanding field officer of Battalions Alpha, Tau, Delta, and Zeta... And you're crushing my boyfriend.

Why, when the Grey Men are hunting Dog Teen down to kill him, would they obey him? Wouldn't the people who sent the Grey Men out tell them not to listen to him? And why in the world would Dog Teen order something other than "Stop!", "Drop him!", or some other impossible-to-misinterpret command? "And you're crushing my boyfriend" only implies that they should stop. The Grey Men are described as stupid, so do you really want them to have to take the time to think that through while they're crushing your boyfriend?

I only made it through 80% of the book. There were just too many plot holes, unbelievable characters, and unexplained things (what happened to the country? Why was most of it buried in snow? why was the government gone and replaced by a council? how in the world did a nation in that state get to the level of gene technology that would allow them to produce Grey Men?). I wasn't enjoying the book at all.

It's only been 11 days since my last review, but it feels like I spent months trying to get through this book.

Mutegi's Sweet One by Charlie Richards
Rating: 1/hated (1-5/hated-loved)



He became rock hard after just that brief kiss, and his warthog really wanted to claim the man.



I didn't expect this book to be good, but even I couldn't guess just how awful this thing was.

Quoting lines:

Ben's back and ass with his own shuddered, twice more, pleasure Ben stepped back and his brow creased.

Ben noted the other Slipping from the followed.

"But you're not," different," He glanced Ben denied.

There are some things you just have to accept, gaining his thoughts. He about.

There are more than twenty "sentences" like that. In a 72 page book that the author charges $5 for. Forget about a beta reader or a friend looking it over, I don't believe the author herself reread this damned thing before putting it up for sale.

But let's back up a step, to the plot. The author has written thirty or so "books", half of them about these shifters. One of the biggest thing that annoys me about this book is that the idea had potential, but I'd be surprised if Charlie Richards could write a check, let alone write a coherent story, so that potential is lost.

The book is set in our world, other than that there are a very few "shifters" (were-animals). The series focuses on a motorcycle gang made up of gay shifters -- they don't have a pack of their own in their species, so they came together to form this mixed-species biker gang/pack. And they're all gay. All of them being gay is a stretch, but that idea as a whole in the right hands could have work.

Charlie Richards's hands are not the right hands.

Many bigots thought it was impossible for shifters to be gay, but everyone in the gang was gay, all thirteen of them.

Why? What does the kind of sex you enjoy have anything to do with someone being a were-animal? Not to mention, no one knows shifters exist other than them and their human mates, so who are these bigots?

So the gang is riding down the road and encounter a broken down truck. Because they're kindhearted gay biker shifters, they stop to help. Would you believe that the guy in the truck is the mate of one of them?! What are the chances!!



Every shifter has a mate out there in the world somewhere, like a soulmate.

Blah blah, the two have sex because of course the human (Ben) has the hots for the warthog shifter (Mutegi) at first sight.



There's a seriously stupid subplot about a group of human bigots who want to take Ben's sister's baby away because Ben is gay. These bigots have broken the law multiple times and are trying to beat/kill them, but the law doesn't care. Because Ben is gay.

The shifter gang and the gang of bigots get into a fight. Explain this to me:

A tusk went through the man's heart and gave him a quick death.

How can a warthog (one shaped like a real warthog, not running around on two legs like a werewolf might) possibly get its tusk through a man's chest and into his heart? Wouldn't the dome of his head get in the way?



The dialogue was stupid and unrealistic. Most characters were just stereotypes. The sex was barely okay. The only thing I liked in the whole book was Mutegi's nickname for Ben (Sweet One), until we got to things like this:

He noted the three scoops of sugar Ben put in [his coffee]. Well, that explains why he tastes so sweet!

Um. I don't think that's all it takes to change the flavor of... everything ...about a man...



The writer was so bad that the only description we had of Mutegi (the main character!) for the first 95% of the book was that he was big and African. Big in all ways. It wasn't until the 96% point that we found out anything else - that he had dreads. The next page the story ended.

To sum it up, this book is everything that's wrong with the self-publishing industry. Crap quality (sorry for insulting you, crap), a $5 price tag!, and writing worse than most any fanfic. This person wrote dozens of books; apparently they're selling because she keeps writing more. You can get these same tropes and much better sex/writing from hundreds of different fanfics or original stories around on the net for free.

1) This video is making its rounds both through my group at work and my LJ friends list. I think it's the first time that sort of overlap has happened! (We're tech writers, so it makes sense that my work group liked it.)



It's really catchy, and I love that LJ is used as the example of blog sites!

2) Today I finally get my hands on my copy of the FFXIV catalog! Straight from Japan, it'll be on my doorstep today, just two days after its release in Japan. It's in Japanese unfortunately, but it's packed full of pictures of every item in the game, so that'll be interesting to see.

I still have (and love) my Japanese books about FFXI, so I have high hopes for this one as well.

3) The book I'm currently reading, Quarantine, is better than I expected it to be. I thought I'd be knocking another bad self-published book out of my To Read pile, like I had with Ruin. Turns out it's neither self-published nor bad. In the first chapter or two, I thought Quarantine would be another fantastic read, but it's gone a little downhill. Still good, but not OH MY GOD good.

I think I might read that were-warthog romance one next...

Ice by Sarah Beth Durst
Rating: 5/loved (1-5/hated-loved)

( I dislike the cover and it's big, so click here to see it. )

When Cassie was a little girl, her grandmother told her a fairy tale about her mother, who made a deal with the Polar Bear King and was swept away to the ends of the Earth. Now that Cassie is older, she knows the story was a nice way of saying that her mother had died.

This book. Man, this book. Flawless.

Cassie lived her whole life in an Alaskan research station, where her father was the director. Her whole world was about science, she wanted to study polar bears for a living when she grew up, and was well on the way to that goal when she met a talking one.

Turned out the "fairy tale" her grandmother had told her was real.

When I say this book was flawless, I mean it. I fully believed each and every character as a real person. Cassie going from a world where science was her religion to a world full of spirits and "magic" would have been a journey on its own, but that was only the very start of things. We got to experience her growing relationship with a "talking bear" (a munaqsri, a spirit who is a caretaker for one of the species on Earth, they gather souls from the dying and deliver them to newborns). There was not one thing I disagreed with, disliked, or didn't believe in this book. Not one typo or rough wording. ...okay, I didn't like the cover art, but that doesn't really count.

I loved the book's setting to death. The whole way the spirits worked. The munaqsri as "people" (believable characters). Every step of her journey alone and on foot through the arctic and Alaska.

There was another journey in the book that was just as interesting, but it's a spoiler. Please do yourself a favor and don't click here! Read the book yourself! ( Spoiler for a more personal journey Cassie took. )

This was one of those rare books that, as soon as I finished it, I wanted to start at the beginning again.

On top of everything else, this was one of those (sadly) rare books that is self-contained -- it doesn't end on a cliffhanger and make you wait for the rest of the trilogy. There is no more after Ice. *sniffle*

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irreparable posted an amusing video today: The Wiggles: The Last Suárez Supper. The Wiggles are a musical group for children, which makes this all the funnier. Suárez is the World Cup soccer player who bite the other player (Chiellini) on the shoulder.



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Diet: I was worried about going back to work, but today was a really good day. In fact, my calorie count was so low (300 breakfast, 300 lunch) that I had to eat a "normal" dinner (I don't want to eat so few calories that my body goes into starvation mode). It was really interesting because I was barely hungry at all. Only because I was late in getting lunch (had to go grocery shopping again) did I have any hunger pains at all today.

Two days until my "official" weekly weigh-in, but I lost another pound and a half. So that puts me at 8.5 pounds in five days. I'm near the point of laughing at myself over worry at needing to lose 10-15 pounds in two months.

I want to keep losing even after I hit the goal. I haven't had any "last meals" yet, and I have two (or three or four) planned, so I want the extra weight loss to cover it. In order of MUST DO:
1) Chinese buffet. I don't go there often, but I love it so, and I'll never go again after the surgery.
2) Sweet and sour (chicken/pork/whatever). The buffet I go to doesn't have that, and it's my favorite Chinese food. It's unlikely I'll ever be able to have this again post-surgery (too sweet).
3) A beef dish from the local Hawaiian place. (Something I may or may not ever have later, some people don't like/tolerate beef after it.)
4) Fried chicken from Popeye's. (Possible to have after.)

Tomorrow will be exactly two months before surgery. (Nervous!) I bought my mother's airline tickets tonight, she'll be staying with me for two weeks to help out.

Salvation by James Wymore
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)
Book received free for review from Curiosity Quills Press.



I recommend clicking here for a larger image of the cover, because unfortunately the cover was the best thing about Salvation. It's striking, and even after having read the book, it still draws me in.

I wish the book had lived up to its cover. Set in a fantasy world, the humans were at war with intelligent creatures that lived in the sea. Days after a great battle on a riverbank, scavenging villagers found a lone survivor of the battle. They nursed the man back to health, and as he had lost all memory of his life before, settled down to live out his days with them. Unfortunately the undersea creatures had other ideas about that. As the story continued, he regained his memories, and thus his life took on a whole different turn.

That plot seems like it should work, but the problem is that the author's writing skills weren't up to the job. Technically, his writing was very very basic. This sort of thing (not a quote):

Elwood was cold. He got his jacket. He put his jacket on. He was thirsty. He walked to the stream. He dipped a cup in. He drank the water. The water was very cold. It felt good to drink it.

Also, there were multiple spelling issues (things a spellchecker wouldn't catch -- "the goat heard" was used multiple times), and semicolons used incorrectly.

There were a number of unbelievable things happening, like two goats pulled a sled full of four adults for an entire day without falling over, and a couple of goats pulled a sled with two grown men while being chased by the fast undersea creatures and they successfully got away. Also, while I wasn't surprised at what the main character with amnesia turned out to be, I would have liked the story a whole lot more if he hadn't been something so special and unique.

The author did an odd thing: He used "wagged his head" repeatedly instead of "shook his head". I never heard 'wag' used that way, and while a quick googling said it wasn't wrong, it was still very odd. Thinking it might be British English that I hadn't encountered before, I googled him. His About Me page didn't give me an answer on the wag thing, but it did perhaps explain the quality of writing in the book and also made me frown.

1) He said he's published three books and six short stories in a year. Perhaps if he had concentrated more on one book, the quality would have been higher. (It's possible he wrote the books over previous years and only this year published them, but that's not how the About Me page read.)

2) He has a pet wolf (named Kilgore). Wolves are not just dogs for more macho pet owners. They're wild animals, they should not be kept as pets. Hm, I wonder if he even has it legally? Colorado law says:

"Pure wolves require commercial licensing and appropriate carnivore facilities. #1101 (A).
No person shall possess, sell, acquire, purchase, broker, trade, barter or attempt to sell,
acquire, purchase, broker, trade or barter live wildlife unless he first obtains a proper license
as provided in this chapter. All species of wildlife listed on the license must be approved by the
Division; such approval shall not be granted if the proposed wildlife is deemed to be
detrimental to wild native wildlife. The Colorado Division of Wildlife does not regulate
ownership of Wolf Hybrids as they are considered domestic animals."

Anyway, wolf ownership is off the track of this review. I'm afraid I can't recommend Salvation, other than for its spiffy cover.

Edit: Ah, he's also a fan of Orson Scott Card.

Following the "three things make a post" rule:

- I slept five hours last night. While that's just a drop in the bucket after not sleeping the previous two nights, at least I'm only tired today and not 'oh my god, kill me now' level exhausted. I still hate the machine, it makes me feel like I'm being smothered. Nothing like the feeling of being smothered to help you fall asleep, huh?

It's way too early to know if this is just chance or if it's a Thing, but usually I remember at least one dream a night, and I haven't the past three nights. The first two can be explained by the lack of sleep, but I wonder about last night. To remember a dream, you need to wake up within (some number of minutes, I forget how many) of having it. If the machine makes me sleep sounder/wake up less, I guess I'll stop remembering them. That would be a really big negative side effect; I love remembering my dreams, I often spend much time the next day thinking about them. I guess we'll see.

- Still loving FFXIV. A side effect of that is how much schadenfreude I get from reading WoW news. I had been unhappy there for so long, and I wasn't looking forward to anything about the coming expansion, and I hated the graphics and so much else about the game, now I can sit here and read the news and snicker to myself that I don't have to put up with it anymore. I sure do wish I had quit sooner!

I'm so happy to be getting so much RP on FFXIV. I'm still getting it almost daily (the days I don't RP it's by my choice, not for lack of options). A new fellow just joined our FC ("guild"), and he writes long posts, like me. It's so nice to be able to flex my writing muscles and not feel like I'm making people wait for me.

- It's such a wonderful thing to read a book by a great writer after such a string of bad books. I just started reading BZRK, by Michael Grant (the same fellow who wrote the Gone series that I loved, and wrote all the Animorph books with his wife, along with tons of other YA books from that time). It's not just that his stories are great (they are), or his characters are realistic (so realistic), or he has a GRRMesque willingness to kill off his characters (*cackle*), but his skills at crafting a sentence and describing the world just blow me out of the water. I had to go back and reread this section a number of times (then continued reading the book only to keep flipping back to it).

Even though he was just seventeen, he wasn't really for girls. He was for women.

Women would look at him and let their eyes slide over his face and those shoulders, because you know, women don't stare the way men do. They just need a glance. And then, having memorized him with a glance, they would...

It wasn't until I read that that I remembered there have been studies that confirm just that -- women decide in something like two? three? seconds if they're attracted to another person, much faster than men do. Something about their general body shape (silhouette), the width of their shoulders, that sort of thing.

Unfortunately I accepted a book for review (Salvation, by James Wymore) from a publisher. Bad timing, I'm going to have to read it next instead of continuing on with the BZRK series. Oh well, hopefully Salvation will be good. It has good reviews on Amazon, for what that's worth...

Wow, this turned out to be an actual post! I worried it wouldn't be more than three sentences long. Heh.