Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Edit: UGH, the new LJ posting tool sucks. Trying to fix this post by hand... 

Edit 2: Wow, this sucks so much. Click for the cover images, I can't make this work.  

Beast Master's Circus by  Andre Norton and  Lyn McConchie Rating: Okay (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved) 

Cover:  https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515X8ESWCBL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg ;

This must have been some book in the middle of a series.  I think it's also the first book by Andre Norton that I've read.

In it a girl was owned by a bad guy. Some kind of war was happening (I assume the rest of the series focused on that, this felt more like a side-story), and the owner of the space ship (and owner of the girl) was part of the Thieves Guild.  Apparently the Thieves Guild, as the name implies, were bad guys.  

Having a Thieves Guild set in space/in the future was really jarring, it feels more like an old D&D idea than something that would exist in the time of space travel.

The writing (technical) was okay. Not bad, not good. I didn't really buy the characters as real people. But more damning, I didn't buy the cat as a real animal.  I gave up at that point (10%).

The Fog Diver by  Joel Ross   Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved) 

Cover: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51oYpoQUOGL.jpg

Though this book got good reviews, nothing about it worked for me. 

Set in the near-future, humans destroyed the world while trying to fix it. In an effort to fix smog, they created nanobots to clean the pollution. The nanobots decided that the humans were the pollution, so they covered 99% of the world with Fog -- white clouds deadly to humans.  The remaining humans lived on mountaintops where the Fog couldn't reach. (It really did not make much sense.)

The story centered around a group of kids, Fog Divers. They made short trips into the Fog to try to find stuff to sell.

The book's humor and setting was jarringly bad to me. Like all the kids knew things from the past, but mixed up. Like the great book Star Wars Trek, where the Borg and the Jedi were at war. And the constellations named Elvis Presley, Greta Garbo, etc...  I'm sure that was supposed to be amusing, but it completely didn't work for me.

Add into those issues that the main character was some kind of special snowflake that everyone would either want to own or kill (he had a "Fog eye" -- one of his eyes was made of Fog? Something like that), and I gave up on the book at the 8% point.

The Last Ship by  William Brinkley Rating: Hated (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved) 

Cover: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41MOKjyoxgL.jpg

Everyone told me this book would be bad, but I enjoyed the first couple seasons of the TV show based on it, so I wanted to give it a try.

Everyone was right.

If you've lost your specs or user guide for your Destroyer-class warship, this book might be useful to you. I only read the first few pages of it, but all of it was technical details of the ship and the arms on it.  Exact sizes of things, the range of the weapons, the details of how the weapons worked... No story, just dry facts. Who in the world would need to know the exact weight of a tomahawk missile to enjoy a fiction story? Ugh.  Abandoned at 1%.

Partial book credits: Point reached in these books: 10% + 8% + 1% = 19%Previous abandoned book total: 40%New total: 19% + 40% = 59% towards the next book