progress

I have been doing a very poor job of keeping track of what I've been doing.  Allow me to scroll back through my GoodReads (and my Netfix) to refresh my memory...

Ah.  Yes.

Don't let the pigeon stay up late! by Mo Wilems; read by Jon Scieszka.  I checked this out on hoopla! to download and test on several different devices before a presentation to a parent group.  Since it's only about 4 minutes long, I listened to it multiple times, so I'm counting it.

I'm not entirely sure how creators of this type of audiobook (less than 10 minutes in length) imagine people using them.  Without the pictures, it's kinda boring.  The narrator did a fine job, but isn't the definition of a *picture* book the fact that the illustrations add substantially to the story and the reading experience?  While a read-along book (auto-turning pages plus narration; go, OverDrive!) is a really cool multimedia reading tool for kids, I'm just not sure about this.

Mufaro's beautiful daughters: An African tale by John Steptoe.  This was read aloud at a program I attended.  I was in the back so couldn't see terribly well, but the illustrations reminded me of King Bidgood's in the bathtub.  (Don't ask me why.)

The story is simple enough to follow, but long-- most appropriate for kids first grade or older.  I particularly liked that the story features (as you might guess from the subtitle) girls from a(n unspecified) African location, but never overtly points that out.  When I was looking for a Coretta Scott King Award winner to read, it seemed like every book was *about* *being* Black/African American.  Where are the good books that just happen to feature Black characters without it being the entire point of the book?  I later saw this list from Scott Woods that helpfully collects just that type of book.

The Librarians, season 4, with Rebecca Romijn.  OK, I am officially tired of these.  Too campy, too obvious, not enough mystery.  Anyone who has picks up more than a book a year must know all the myths and magic-origin stories.

But Stone...

Person of interest, seasons 1-3, with Jim Caviezel.  I was home sick over a whole 4-day weekend with a sinus infection a few weeks ago.  Propped up in bed I opened Netflix to watch Burn notice but it was gone.  The rate at which Netflix is making this disappear makes me cross.  This was suggested instead.

This is fair, although if I hadn't've been sick, I probably wouldn't have watched past the first five or six episodes-- the balance isn't very good in the whole first season.  There isn't enough backstory given, so it's hard to care about and connect with the characters.  Fortunately for Netflix, I was half-comatose.  Once they start incorporating backstory, the series gets pretty good.  There is now a continuum of using-evil-skills-for-good shows:  White collar (very light) -- Burn notice (a bit darker, some bad guys get hurt) -- Person of interest (purposefully shooting bad guys all over the place).

The gone world by Tom Sweterlitsch.  This was super weird.  Not recommended.  I don't normally have trouble with time-travel changing-the-timeline stories, but I think where this story was anchored messed it up.  The "real time" parts are in the (late 80s? early 90s?  sometime when I was young but old enough to remember) but it was a kind of alternate past that had technology way past what actually existed.  Characters used that technology to, among other things, jump into the future/the current time for the reader.  This was outside my zone of believability, it turns out, so I couldn't follow, or much care about, anything else.

Aru Shah and the end of time by Roshani Chokshi.  I was really excited about this, coming out of the new Rick Riordan imprint.  But it's not great.  I can give it good marks for being an easy-to-follow young-reader adventure story with female main characters who save themselves, characters of nationalities not typically starring in U.S. authors' books, and using a mythology and history that's new to many readers.  That makes it sound great!  It had some rendering problems, though: there's too much focus on the action, not enough on the characters, making them less real.  Readers will enjoy the story, but they won't care deeply about the characters.  The mythology is also kind of thin; gods, demons, places, and animals are there, but the author doesn't take the time to explain their significance.  Readers will like that it's a new and exotic world, but they won't be able to remember much of the mythology in depth.  Most public libraries should buy a copy, but this is definitely not the next Percy Jackson.

The librarian and the spy and A cover affair by Susan Mann.  Another disappointment; I will not be reading the third series installment.

There are two main problems: first, this isn't so much a story as the author's excuse to show off how much research she did.  It's most blatant in the first book, when there are sentences and even whole paragraphs of Intro to Librarianship concepts.  The average reader does not need to know how the character conducted a Boolean search.  Exposition just slows down the plot.  In the second book, it was a lot of history info-dumping, sometimes in the oft-loved format of one character lecturing another on a topic.

The second problem is, these are not romance novels.  At all.  Despite the covers-- and the titles-- these are light thriller/suspense.  Working under the idea that in a romance story "the Relationship" is the major character, that the tension would come primarily from the two main (people) characters getting to know each other, or that (lets be honest) there would be steamy scenes, this book fails to meet any of those.  This isn't a story about a couple falling in love; it's about a young woman who goes on adventures.

Although Quinn is a fun character, there's very little likeable about the books.  In every scene, every tiny detail is there on the page-- each step in getting dressed, washing dishes, whatever mundane task is at hand.  I notice this in romances-- maybe it's a suggested tool to try to make the reader feel "in the momen"?  It always comes off as repetitive, with the author obviously reaching for the thesaurus in an effort to not say the same noun for the fifth time in as many sentences.  The dishes got washed; does it really matter how?

The spy/boyfriend character is horrid.  He jumps all over the place, doing the overly-dramatic giant alpha-male romance novel schtick when a run-of-the-mill creep hits on his girlfriend at a bar, but waltzes on with the mission when she's in actual danger from gun-toting terrorists.  The "playful banter" is bland but is the only kind of non-work communication between the two characters so there's far too much of it.  Do yourself a favor and give it a pass.

How to stop time by Matt Haig.  I read this very quickly, because I wanted to find out what happened, and all the while I was sad because I very much wanted to read it slowly, because it's beautiful-- both the historical detail in the historical scenes and the emotional realism in the contemporary scenes.  I will read it again in a few years; it will make a wonderful rereading book.

The author used short sentences followed by longer sentences that repeated key words from the preceding short one.  I noticed the style because it was unique, and because I've seen it used poorly, but this author had a really good handle on it.

I'm afraid many readers will dismiss this as "sci-fi" when it's more like The time-traveler's wife; it's not even magical realism.  It's a world exactly like ours except there are characters who have a medical condition we don't recognize.  It's not time travel in any sense of the word beyond that we've all managed to time travel from yesterday to today.

Us against you by Fredrik Backman.  This is a different sort of book.  The events aren't exactly linear; we don't follow the town and the characters day by day.  It's almost more like a collection of linked short stories.  The reader has to keep in mind what's going on with everyone and overlay each new character's actions and experiences.

Reading Beartown first will definitely add to the experience, but probably isn't required.

Quackery: A brief histor of the worst ways to cure everything, by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen.  This was kind of fun, definitely gross, generally ok.  I often wished there was more information on a topic, or additional topics included in a chapter (under use of animals in medicine, we cover leeches and animal horn but not maggots?).  Overall I found the tone a little too flippant.  Yeah, I'm all down to make fun of snake oil salesmen knowingly defrauding sick people, but it seems like many of the doctors mentioned were legitimately trying to help people; it's not nice to make fun of them just because we know more now.

Star trek: Enterprise, seasons 2 and 3, with Scott Bakula.  I'm annoyed.  Why time travel everywhere?  They have the whole Alpha Quadrant to introduce us to; the Klingong first-contact episode was good; the Ferengi first-contact episode was fantastic.  But they're inventing new species left and right; there's no way there would be that many new species that close to earth that didn't appear in TOS or TNG.  And all this back-and-forth-through-time business feels a lot like the evil-twin universe in DS9 when the whole Gamma Quadrant was right there.