Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

LEGO Jurassic World 5-Minute Stories Collection by assorted authors. I have no idea what I expected from this book. I love dinosaurs and Jurassic Park, but this was a book full of stories that could be read out loud in five minutes, so the stories were super simple. This may have also been the shortest book I've ever read (took me 40 minutes total). I had expected a book-length book full of short stories, not a super-short book full of a couple short stories.

I think young kids would love the stories though and parents would probably have fun reading them. Most stories had good humor (LEGO movie-type humor) and lots of sound effects for parents to act out.

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds. It's funny, in my last post I wrote "I almost never reread books. I have too many new ones I want to read" and then here I am with another that I had read already. For some reason it was still on my kindle (I probably missed deleting it after I had read it the first time), so here I am four years later reading it again.

In my original review I gushed over it, said I loved it, and "I loved the story, the characters, the tech. All of it was so very good.". Even though I remembered nothing at all about it this time, I can't say I liked it as much. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it.

Plot: Set in the distant future and in space, a war between planets was just ending. War criminals from both sides (and some innocent people who got scooped up, as well as the non-military crew of the ship), were all put onto a ship to be sent somewhere far out of the way. For technical reasons, during a jump in space, the ship ended up traveling thousands of years in the future as well -- beyond when humanity was killed off by aliens.

I did really, really like the idea of the aliens: Truly alien creatures. They looked like panes of glass, but larger than planets, and with physics the human mind just couldn't understand (looking at them or even thinking about them caused pain, the angles were wrong and the colors were ones humans just couldn't understand).

It wasn't a bad story at all, but I'm not sure what 2019 me had seen in it.

DNF #52: Alien Child by Pamela Sargent. A YA book originally published in 1988. Set in the distant future, all humans had killed themselves off through war. Aliens landed on Earth and found an AI-controlled building where some human embryos were stored. From them they created two human children, a girl and a boy, and raised them.

Seems like a really interesting plot, doesn't it? Unfortunately the book had one single message: Humans do awful things. It repeated that message endlessly, slammed the reader over the head with it.

Young readers might like the story, might think it's edgy? But as an adult reader, it was so redundant (did nothing but hammer in the awful things humans can do) and had no original message. It was joyless to read, so I DNFed it about a third of the way in.