Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

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.