Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

78) Back to Earth by Danilo Clementoni. A self-published and translated book. I didn't get more than a couple pages into it, because radically wrong words were being used. What a waste.

79) The Earth Wire by Joel Lane. Described as "British urban weird fiction". What in the world was I thinking?

80) Alternate Presidents by assorted authors. A collection of stories about what would happen if whichever president won had actually lost. First story: 50 or so pages, all in italics. I couldn't read it. Second story: About Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (sir). It was the funniest experience attempting to read it. It was (of course) so different than the Hamilton musical, but apparently that Hamilton and Burr are forever in my head as the "right" characterization, so I couldn't read the story at all, because it was so "wrong". Sorry, author, my bad.

81) Everything Asian by Sung J Woo. I'm so tired of saying "I have no idea how this got on my Kindle". Contemporary fiction is about the last genre I read. This was just a stream of consciousness thing about a Korean woman going back to the neighborhood she grew up in. Maybe this was one of those free books Amazon used to give away?

--

This is, by far, the most books I've DNFed in one year since I started book blogging. In 2015, I had 18. In 2014 I had 8. It's good not to force yourself to finish books you're not enjoying, but 80+ is so many.

I think at some point (2019-ish) I just put any book that looked even a little interested on my Kindle, so I'm weeding them out now. I'm a lot more picky nowadays.

73) The Cat Who Pawed the Cultist by Robert Hazelton. Years ago, someone told me I HAD TO get this book because I'd love it. I replied that it didn't seem to be the kind of book I'd like, but whoever that was told me said no, I had to get it, that I'd love it. It sat on my Kindle for many years before I finally tried it.

Turns out I had been right, for multiple reasons. It's self published, and so it's editing-challenged. The lack of commas and other issues kept making me stumble as I read. More than that though, it's just not my kind of story (urban fantasy). I'm glad whoever had recommended it to me enjoyed it, but it just wasn't a match for me.

74) Dinotopia: Windchaser by Scott Ciencin. I may not mention it much here, but I love dinosaurs. Somehow I've never read the Dinotopia books. (So why do I have Windchaser on my Kindle and not the first book? No idea.)

Okay, doing some research, this doesn't seem to be an official Dinotopia book, it's written by someone else. That's good, since I really didn't enjoy Windchaser at all. It felt like it was written in the 30s or so, really dated, and I couldn't connect with either of the characters. One day I'll give the first Dinotopia book a try.

75) Death's Academy by Michael Bast. From the book's summary: "Becoming a Grim Reaper has never been more hilarious!" Goodreads reviews mentioned the "scatological humor". This book was so very much not for me. If it had been handled seriously, the plot (how beings become Grim Reapers) could have been really interesting. But the humor was a major miss for me, and it was full of slang that didn't work at all for me (Grim Reapers were called "hoodies", for example).

76) Canyon Winter by Walt Morey. First published in 1972, this book shows its age. In it a "soft" boy from the city is "toughened up" when a plane crash leaves him lost in the wilderness. Those descriptions of him were repeated so many times. Because the boy never hunted, never killed animals, never had reason to do hard physical work, he was considered "soft" by all the adult males in the book.

After his plane crashed, he found an old man who had been living alone in the woods. That man repeated all the "soft" crap and more. If the boy was upset, he was soft. If he was scared (REASONABLY scared, like when a bear pawed at the cabin door), he was called soft. I know times were different then and this sort of thing was the norm, but I wasn't at all enjoying reading it, so I DNFed it.

A Wolf Called Wander by Rosanne Parry. The issue with "talking animal" books is usually that the animals aren't animal-ish enough, that they're too human. I never would have guessed that the opposite could be a problem, too.

The wolves in this book really weren't "talking animals", they were mostly just plain wolves. They could talk to each other with very simple language (most of the time they said only things like "Mine!"), though now and then their conversations and thoughts oddly got more complex. The problem with that is it's hard to have much of a plot with only real animals in the real world.

Based on a true story/real wolf, this book told the tale of a wolf whose pack got driven out (or killed) by a larger pack. As the probably sole surviving wolf, Swift (later renamed to Wander) traveled across the land until he found a new home. That's it. That's the whole story.

Some things happened on his trip (he met a raven, he got hurt by an elk, there was a fire), but it really wasn't plot-y at all.

This wasn't a bad book, it was just kind of... there. It was extremely short (even shorter than it seemed, lots of art* and blank pages). After the nonstop excitement of my last book (Stormrise), A Wolf Called Wander just seemed so slow and uneventful. Again, not bad, just maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had read some other book before it.

* Other reviews say the artwork was wonderful, but on my Kindle I really couldn't see much of it.

When I had said I'd be offline for a while because I was moving, I had expected it to be for moving-related reasons. Unpacking and such. But instead, because Comcast sucks and lies, I had no internet for a week. This was especially an issue since I work from home.

The Space Elevator by John Sylvain. This story was set in the early days of humanity's shift to living in space. As part of that effort, humans had built a space elevator (so we wouldn't have to deal with escaping the atmosphere with every launch).

This book very much felt like part one of a longer series. In it, a young (pre-teen) boy's family were moving to a space station for reasons they didn't tell him. If the story had stuck with him as the POV character, it would have had a bigger emotional impact. Instead it rotated through at least five different POV characters.

It was very unclear who this book was intended for. It was extremely short (it took me less than two hours to read) and the main character was a pre-teen, so this should have been a middle grade book. But all the other POV characters were adults, which I think isn't done in MG books.

As much as I like stories about space elevators, this one was not a good one. It had all the typical self-published issues. The only reason I finished it at all was that it was so short.

Oh wow, the author uses a quote from an (apparent) review "It's like Star Wars meets Harry Potter". No. No it is not. It is nothing like either of those in story or in quality.

Fear the Wolf by S.J. Sparrows (or Andrew Butcher, I guess. My ebook has Sparrows on the cover, but the linked one has Butcher.)

Spoilers for the plot in this review.

I loved this book so much. I spent most of it trying to figure out what kind of story it even was, and in the end I was still left guessing.

Set in either another world or our world way way in the future, most of humanity seemed to be gone. The main character lived in a dystopian-ish little village where everyone had a role and life's biggest rule was "Fear the wolf" (which basically meant "know your place", never do or want more than you're assigned).

The main character wanted more. She could draw (but that was against the rules), she could read (but reading for pleasure was against the rules). Her mother seemed to hate her because she never knew her place, and she just never fit in.

Through the first part of the story I couldn't figure out if Wolf was just an idea to control people with or a literal wolf. Then Wolf attacked and killed most of the village, and the reader learned it was a giant, god-like wolf.

A good two-thirds of the story was the main character traveling through the woods with the only other survivor of the attack (an autistic(?) man). I would have said that spending so much time traveling, especially when one of the two characters can't communicate, would be boring, but nope, it was great.

As the story continued, the pair met other people in the forest (good and bad), and eventually arrived at the other village in this land. The MC decided she was going to kill Wolf.

Through the story there was a relationship/love plot too, and some really interesting (and almost unique in stores I've read -- she was "both natured", she was born with both sets of sexual organs) facts came out about the MC. But the main focus was her intent to kill Wolf.

As good as the whole story was, the end got even better. In Wolf's lair, the MC discovered the whole scripture the villages' lived their life by ("Fear the Wolf") was a mistake. The scrolls the information was on were so damaged by time and water, most words were missing.

It wasn't "Fear the Wolf" it was "Fear, the Wolf" -- Fear was the wolf's name, and there were 11 other named animals as well. Like Patience, the Heron. This made me think the story was set in what would have been Asia in our time.

So, by the very end of the book, my guess was that this was about religion, how we-current-humans misunderstand and twist around really old religions to hurt and control each other now. It wasn't at all heavy-handed about it though, I love that I'm not even sure that's the intended message or not.

The Kobold's Tale: Whelp's Awakening by Milly McAdams and JH Woods. I'm really getting tired of saying "I don't know why this book was on my Kindle, I don't know why I got it". Step it up, past me! Make better decisions!

Look at the cover. Look at the quality of it. That will tell you the quality of the story within it.

Anyway, the story was set in an MMO (an online video game). One of the NPCs (what would be a bit of code, a "character" that exists only to be killed by players) became sentient. That was interesting enough for me to keep reading.

This book did what too many bad self published books do: They hired an editor just for the beginning of the book, hoping to hook the reader to keep going even once the writing became bad. To this book's credit, usually authors who do this hire an editor for just the first chapter or two; the first third of this book was edited. So once I got a third in, it went from a couple errors per chapter to a couple errors per page. Really obvious ones that a human would catch, like "eld" instead of "elf".

Once the writing went downhill fast, I really lost interest in the story. I tried to stick through it, but by the final third I had no interest left and just skimmed the rest.

Paladin's Grace (The Saint of Steel Book 1) by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)
Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel Book 2) by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

Paladin's Grace
This would have been the best book I read in a long time if I hadn't read Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine right before it. The problem is the author used a lot of the same narrative beats in both stories. For example:

In Clockwork Boys/Wonder Engine, the female main character was described repeatedly as a "brown wren", plain, easily overlooked.

In Paladin's Grace, the female main character was described repeatedly as a "grey mouse", plain, easily overlooked.

In Clockwork Boys/Wonder Engine, the male main character was a paladin full of guilt. Beautiful to look at, a perfect body, but crippled by guilt because his god had turned His back on him.

In Paladin's Grace, the male main character was a paladin full of guilt. More muscular than almost any other man, a perfect body, but crippled by sorrow because his god had died... and guilt because as characters repeatedly say through all these books, paladins are always full of guilt. It's their main defining trait in this world (because they try to be perfect all the time).

Both had the same in-story barriers to the romance (in both stories, the paladin said "stupid" (awkward) things that hurt the woman by mistake).

If I hadn't read Paladin's Grace immediately after Clockwork Boys/Wonder Engine, I think I would have enjoyed the romance part a heck of a lot more. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the story or the romance, I read the book in three days (and it's nearly double the length either Clockwork Boys or Wonder Engine were, I read each of those in two days).

Like those two other books, this book had plenty of plot, though in this case it took more of a backseat to the romance. Lots of things happened, but the focus seemed to be more on the romance.

Interesting. An amazon review said:

"The couple in Paladin's Grace and the couple in Swordheart [a third book by this author set in the same world] felt, for a while, like they were exactly the same couple under different names"

So I guess it's not just me, it's something the author does (probably unknowingly).

Issues aside, I really, really enjoyed this book. Between this one and the two previous ones, I've been taking so many extra hours out of my day to read. I had to go shopping today, and all I could do was thinking about getting back home so I could read more.

Paladin's Strength
Take everything I said about Paladin's Grace and repeat it here, only worse.

I wonder if the author realizes that she all of her relationships are the same from book to book? Or as a Goodreads review described them, "samey".

Two characters meet, fall in love. Then they spend most of the book both saying "I love him/her, but we can't be together because of X" where X is always a stupid misunderstanding. The. Whole. Book. Clockwork Boys/Wonder Engine both did it. Paladin's Grace did it. And Paladin's Strength did it.

I was happy to see comments about it on Goodreads, so I know it's not just me.

Paladin's Strength was even worse than the first book, because somehow the female main character/love interest was boring. How could a 6+ foot tall werebear be boring? And the male main character/love interest was even worse. In book 1 he had been funny, but the few jokes he told in this book weren't funny at all.

I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy this one, and basically forced myself not to DNF it. By the halfway point I was just skimming over all the angsting (which was most of the book). What plot there was around the romance didn't interest me, since I didn't care about any of the characters involved.

I have the third book, Paladin's Hope, on my Kindle already, and another book by the same author and set in this same world (Swordheart) as well, but I'm going to move on to something else instead. I can't take more of this same relationship. Maybe by the time I get back to these books I will have forgotten how the romance goes in all these books.

The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi (Author), Cathy Hirano (Translator).

Translated from Japanese (all through the book I thought it had been translated from Chinese), apparently this story is based on an anime. The Beast Player contained the first two books of the series.

The beginning of the story was wonderful and I just couldn't put the book down. Set in what was basically ancient China with two mythical animals added, the main character's (Elin's) mother was a trainer of Toda (giant snake-like "Chinese" dragons I think, they were never described). The mother was wrongfully killed by her society, and her last act before death was to put Elin onto the back of a Toda so she'd be carried to safety.

Some days later, near death, the Toda drops the 10 year old Elin off on a foreign shore. There a "hermit" beekeeper found her and took her in. He raised her like a daughter, taught her all about life and bees and so much. I really loved this part of the story best. Slow and descriptive, and I really liked their relationship.

A few years later, the beekeeper needed to return to life in a city, and he knew Elin would just never fit in there (girls are usually sold into marriage and kept barefoot, pregnant, and silent). Because Elin was so smart and skilled with animals, he decided to get her into a school for "Royal Beast doctors". While (again) the Royal Beasts were never described, I pictured them like gryphons. After I finished the book, I googled, found the anime, and saw they're basically giant winged wolves.

At the school, Elin raises a Beast cub with kindness instead of the state-approved rules that train the "doctors" to abuse the animals and keep them drugged their whole lives. Because she treated it with kindness, she and the Beast bonded. This part of the story was really good, too.

Unfortunately the two-thirds of the book after that wasn't enjoyable at all to me, and I only skimmed the last 10%. Instead of focusing on Elin or the Beasts, POV chapters kept switching through other characters and the plot turned to politics and potential war between the two nations.

58: Fusion World by Joseph Lewis Tamone. Imagine a guy who hasn't read his entire adult life, that the last book he read was something he was forced to read in high school. Now imagine that guy saying "writing a book is easy, anyone could do it!". I have no idea who Joseph Lewis Tamone is, but based on the writing level of this book, that's exactly how I picture him.

This book wasn't even spellchecked. There was a basic spelling mistake on page two of chapter one that any spellcheck would have caught.

Even just reading a couple pages (prologue and two pages of chapter one), the characters were so poorly written. The whole thing was just so badly written. This is the kind of book that makes me hate self publishing.

Of seven reviews on Amazon, five are five-star reviews. The other two are four stars. Someone has been paying for reviews, I see.

59: Alice's Farm by Maryrose Wood. I read and reviewed this one about a year ago. Somehow I either got a second copy of it or I missed deleting it from my Kindle. DNF a year ago, DNF today once I realized I had read it already.

60: Rise of the Dragons by Angie Sage. I cannot believe this book was traditionally published (from Scholastic Press). This was a MG book, so the plots are generally not complex. Usually. In the first 10% of this book, there were eight POV characters. Even if each character had a chapter that would be a lot, but sometimes in the same paragraph there were three different POVs. It was just so muddied and impossible to follow, eventually I just gave up trying.

61: Arrow by Samantha M. Clark. I started off this story confused (the POV character is a tree), but once I figured that out, it should have made for an interesting story. Lone white boy living in the middle of the Amazon jungle with a magical tree, plane crashes and boy saves pilot, thus learning other people exist. But the whole thing felt unoriginal, flat, and heavy handed. It got good reviews on Goodreads though, so maybe it was just me.

62: The Dream of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic by Robert Kroese. In this one, apparently time traveling space aliens went back to live with the Vikings, so modern day archaeologists were finding space alien stuff in Viking ruins. Characters were flat and plot was slow, slow, slow. DNFed it early on.

Homebound (The Icarus Chronicles) by John David Anderson.

I read and reviewed Stowaway, the first book only seven months ago, so luckily it was still fresh in my mind.

I had really loved Stowaway, but this second one (the conclusion of the series) didn't work so well for me.

The main character is Leo, a 12 year old boy. His father is one of the most important scientists on Earth. Aliens arrive and invite Earth into the "Coalition" of good guy planets. But through Stowaway and this one, we learn things aren't so black and white. The family gets separated, and most of this book was about Leo (traveling with space pirates) trying to find his father and brother.

In this book, the author did something that often works for me but this time didn't: Half of this second story took place in the past, before the first book started. Sections alternated between the past scenes and the plot moving forward. For me, it really slowed down the story's momentum and eventually I just started skipping the sections set in the past.

I liked the first book so much, I wish this second one hadn't been such a slog for me. I considered DNFing it multiple times, but instead just pushed through hoping it would improve. Sadly it never did.

This author is so hit-and-miss for me. I loved Stowaway and another book (The Dungeoneers) from this author so much, but others by him just didn't work at all for me.

Alpha (Ghost Mountain Wolf Shifters Book 1) by Audrey Faye.

I love werewolf books.
I dislike shifter books.

Shifter books take werewolves (or werecats or were-whatevers) and makes them into a romance novel. Soulmates are the norm in these books. They have alpha wolves (or cats or whatever) which aren't even really a thing in wolf (or cat) groups.

This is a sad time for werewolf fans, since shifter books are really, really popular. If you like love at first sight stuff, shifter books are for you.

Anyway, I picked up this one knowing it was a shifter one, but it seemed maybe not like other shifter books. Luckily there were no soulmates, but there sure was love at first sight (sigh).

These shifter books make werewolves so... soft? There's no angst or pain. The moon controls nothing, shifters can shift whenever they like. It's just magic. Poof! Wolf. Poof! Person again.

Also, every shifter is sexy and they all walk around naked half the time.

All that being said, I didn't hate this book. It was, for a shifter book, not bad at all. I liked the characters and the plot, just not the setting or any of the world building (since it was all shifter stuff).

I'm not unhappy I read this book, I even got lost in the story at times, but I don't have plans to continue with the next eight books in the series.


[edit: Ah ha. While reading the Goodreads reviews on this one, I discovered there's a name for what I was trying to describe. These shifter books are called "paranormal romance", which perfectly fits what I was trying to say.]

Less than two years ago, I had 460+ unread books on my Kindle and worried I'd never be able to read them all before I died of old age. Now I have just over 200, and I'm starting to think I will run out.

I've been focusing on the oldest books (some have been on my Kindle seven years!), and that's why there are so many Did Not Finished ones lately -- I used to be way too lax on looking into self published ones before getting them.

DNF

55) G.I. Joe Classified by Kelley Skovron. G.I. Joe was one of the first fandoms I've been really involved in. I loved the cartoon as a kid, and there's enough room in that universe for all sorts of stories.

Almost ten years ago, I read and reviewed G.I. Joe: Tales From The Cobra Wars and loved it so much. So, as soon as I saw G.I. Joe Classified, I grabbed it hoping it would be similar -- a collection of short stories and novellas for adult readers.

WRONG. It was a YA book (which I would usually have no issues with), but it was a *lazy* YA book. G.I. Joe is about adult soldiers and bad guys. For this book, the author aged most of them down to teenagers and put them in high school (UGH), and yet some of them stayed adults and filled roles like the principal. How would that even work? Why would their personalities be the same as teens? Why would they fill the same roles in groups? Ugh.

56) Raiders of the Dawn by M. Benjamin Woodall. Typical self-published dreck. Poorly written, characters not acting in a reasonable way. Story set in the real world. A man's office broken into, do you A) Call the police, or B) Go to the guy's house, and when you find that too is broken into, investigate yourself? If you picked B, this book might be for you.

57) Riverkeep by Martin Stewart. Seemed like an interesting enough idea for a story: Boy's family is charged with tending a river, which includes fishing up thousands of dead bodies from it (over 3,000 as the story opens). The writing was dull and I had no interest in the main character, and the Goodread reviews are full of DNF reviews, so I abandoned it as well.

58) When the Villain Comes Home by assorted authors. Another anthology (sigh). Usually I try at least all the stories in one, but in this one I just couldn't. I read two stories (one was meh, the other I HATED) and DNF a bunch of them, and since there were no good ones in the first quarter of the book, I just gave up.

The one I HATED was so so so bad. It was so bad it made me angry. Set in the future, a pair of twins (brother and sister) had some kind of competition/sexual tension (in the worst way) thing going on. They drugged and raped each other. Then the brother went off to war, and since this was the future, there was some kind of tech where one person could get into another person's mind. This too was like rape, and the brother was his army's biggest expert on it -- he did it to a ton of enemy soldiers, he enjoyed doing it. Then once the brother came home, he and his sister did more of the sexual aggression stuff, then one killed the other. I had only stuck with the story because I was hoping for some payoff on the use of the mind tech, but nope, just more sibling rape.

59) 30,000 B.C. Chronicles: Bordeaux by Matthew Thayer. A team of scientists and military men go back in time. The characters were flat and the plot was (somehow) boring, so I checked Goodreads to see if I should stick with it. I learned that it did that unacceptable thing of just cutting the story off and saying "continued in book 2", so I dropped it.

60) A Forest World (Bambi's Classic Animal Tales) by Felix Salten. The summary of this one sounded so perfect for me:

When the groups [of animals], tame and wild, begin to interact, each begins to question how life would be different on the other side. Manni the donkey ventures into the forest for an adventure, while a doe and her two fawns seek the safety of the barn when poachers threaten them in the woods. Will the animals choose to stay in their new lives? Or will the call of home be too great?

It really sounded like the perfect book for me, but it was written in 1942, and you could tell. I'm not sure if it was Salten's style or the style of the time, but there were a lot of missing commas that kept tripping me up. The language was amusingly dated, too: The boy kept "fondling" the animals, and all the animals were "gay".

More than that though, the animals were anthropomorphized in a really odd way: For example, birds sang because they were so happy about life. (It's funny, but I thought the animals seemed Bambi-ish even before putting together who wrote the book.)

61) A New Dawn by Jae Vogel. This must have been one of those books Amazon gave out for free, because wow I can't imagine having picked this out myself. In it a poor teenage girl works for one of the top name fashion designers... and the designer turns out to have been a fairy who was protecting the Super Special Teenage Girl. Also featured: An alpha werewolf who simply must have her as his mate! I dropped it early on, but the Goodreads reviews were amusing.

Currently reading: Dinosaur: 65 million which is likely going to be the worst book ever that I actually finish.