Saturday, September 30, 2017

titleless

The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton.  I read one really great review of this title.  I read a few chapters and I could sort of see where the story was going, although there wasn't enough information early enough.  It seems many authors have a difficult time striking the right balance between hinting that there's more to the world but not flooding the reader with backstory.  I would have given the author a few more chapters to sort it out, but there were serious problems with the prepub file that made it impossible to read.   The punctuation was sprinkled sparingly around, mostly missing, and nearly all the quotation marks were MIA.  I spent far more time trying to parse sentences than trying to figure out the world.

The West Wing, season 3, with Martin Sheen.  A couple annoying things at the end of two and into three:  1) I'm beginning to notice a number of side characters have just disappeared.  No explanation in the story; they just got dropped.  I like reasons.  2) Someone became infatuated with telling a dual-timeline story.  The first one was interesting and unique, but they're kind of beating it to death.  Fortunately, use of this tapers off again during season three.  And 3) they are constanty changing the hairstyle of the first lady, none of which have flattered her at all.  She has so little screen time that half the time I don't recognize her with her latest 'do.

Caesar's last breath: Decoding the secrets of the air around us by Sam Kean.  I personally enjoy how this author uses little stories to call out a particular point in the history of a topic.  Air molecules are so small and there are so many of them that, at the beginning of each chapter when he gives a diagram of a gas and says how many septillion of them we inhale with each breath, these figures don't mean anything to me.  I can't really conceive of the scale of that.  But scientists experimenting on themselves and getting high and things exploding; these are things I can understand.

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