Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Getting close to the end of my goal of reading all of the books on my Kindle with 'dragon' in the title or dragon-like things on the cover!

DNF #19: The Eden Wormhole by Paul Eslinger and LeRoy Clary. Sometimes I get a bad feeling about a book. In this one, a manly man male main character was very manly and man-like, quite the masculine man. I got a strong feeling that this book wouldn't have very realistic female characters, so I dropped it.

While writing this post, I went to Amazon to get the image URL, and glanced at the summary:

A heavy equipment operator discovers an artificial cave while cutting blocks from a limestone quarry. He plans to investigate alone, but an archaeology student bullies him into letting her join his underground foray.

Yeah, I guess the feeling I got was right.

DNF #20: The Bone Ships by RJ Barker. This was a long, long book. YA books take me about 4 hours to read, adult books 8 hours. This one was about 14 hours long.

Set in a fantasy world, the story opens with a ship's captain(? the story's world used odd terms for different things) losing command of his ship to some other character. That sounds like it should be exciting, but it was so flat and uninteresting, I went to Goodreads to check reviews and to see if I wanted to continue.

The first review (the most upvoted one), said the first half of the story is slow and boring, but that you should push through because the second half was great.

I had to laugh at that. Push through basically a full book's worth of boring reading to get to the part where it improves? Nah, thanks, I'd rather just move on to the next book.

DNF #21: The City of Sand by Tianxia Bachang. Translated from Chinese, this was probably one of the best translated books I've read. The writing felt natural, as if it had been written in English instead of translated. That being said, another review called it "super dry" and "lacking any sense of pacing", and I agree with that.

DNF #22: All's Well in Asgard by E.J. Lowell. This might have been the worst written/edited self-published book I've ever read, and that's saying something. By the time I got to the second page, I found myself actually diagramming the sentences in my head instead of reading. And doing that was more entertaining than the story.

DNF #23: The Blazewrath Games by Amparo Ortiz. This was the oddest book. Though there were dragons, witches, etc in the world, this felt like more of a a contemporary fiction story than fantasy. Kids in high schools, cell phones, and way way way too much teenager slang. It just totally did not work for me.