David Woodger

I thought I'd tackle this well-loved book but I'm giving up 100 pages in. Supposedly it's the story of the Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo. There are about 37 people in this family, most of whom are either named José Arcadio, Aureliano, or Remedios. There's a family tree in the beginning but it's impossible to tell the characters apart (except for Ursula, the matriarch). After a few days of reading, I realized several things: 1) I have no idea what these characters are motivated by, 2) there doesn't seem to be a plot, 3) perhaps I'm missing something, 4) what the hell is with naming, like, seven characters the same name!? and 5) I'm bored. Also, I'm not the only one who feels this way about this book. So: wasn't enjoying it, so I quit. I can do that.

I got to page 172 before deciding against finishing this story. The author crams many different ideas into this steampunk-fantasy-mashup of a tale. The two main characters are orphans. Molly Templar gets placed by the orphanage into prostitution, but her very first john turns out to be an assassin. She escapes but we don't know much about who the assassin is, who he works for, or why Molly would be targeted. By page 172 I still don't know.

Then there's Oliver. When he was very young he and his parents crashed an aerostat (an airship) and he lived for 4 years within the “feymist.” The feymist has been known to alter people only after casual contact yet Oliver seems unaffected. Then his guardian uncle and household are murdered and Oliver is framed. Again we don't know why his uncle was targeted or what the motivations are of the killers. Ugh.

There's various fun things thrown into the mix: other races like the craynarbians (crab-like people), autonomous “steammen” (think robots) with their own culture, floating pieces of land (often the result of floatquakes), underground cities, etc. The problem is that all these new things keep on coming and keeping everything straight is a complicated chore. Place names are thrown about but no maps are provided. Various terms are sprinkled in, but their definitions are lacking (no glossary either). And so far Molly and Oliver are fairly one-dimensional. I don't feel like I know them. I should after 172 pages, no?

So, dang. I was looking forward to getting into this one but the hypercomplicated, incomprehensible plot along with the cardboard characters and indeterminate world has me scratching my head. There's too much other stuff to read before I continue plodding through this one hoping it'll get better. (Plus, this could be first in a series that may number seven books... and I've already committed to too many other series.) On to other venues.

The premise sounded promising and I gave this one a pretty good go, getting over 200 pages into it. But by that point I was completely bored. I didn't experience any real suspense. And when I got to the scene with all the rats, I thought things were looking up. But the denouement of that scene was anti-climactic and that sort of clinched my decision to abandon this book about 1/3 read. I realize this is a YA book, although it wasn't classified as such where I bought it. Even so, I'm no stranger to reading YA as an adult. But this obviously didn't grab me.

The relatively unknown Ibn Battutah (1304-1368) grew up in Tangier, Morocco. At the age of 21, he embarked on a journey throughout the Middle and Far East for almost 30 years. The author, a British man who has lived in Yemen for 17 years and is fluent in Arabic undertakes a journey that will be about a third of Ibn Battutah's.

I used to read a lot more travelogues and I've really enjoyed them. Not this one, though. In fact I'm surprised I got as far as I did with this one (more than half-way). The author's prose is dry, uncompelling, and rambling. Yeah, he knows a lot of history... but he doesn't convey it very well. He's just dull.

This story (translated from the Japanese) is like two stories mashed together. It begins in the real world with a young boy (age 11) named Wataru. There's some strange goings-on in a half-built house in his neighborhood (and it's pretty interesting). But then that bit gets overshadowed by Wataru's disintegrating family. Wataru wants to fix things and thinks he'll get a chance by fulfilling a mission into another world called Vision. Brave Story is fat, heavy, 800-page book and Wataru's entrance into Vision happens around page 220. Unfortunately, this is where things begin to bog down. I was non-plussed to realize that Vision was modeled after a Role Playing Game (RPG), something Wataru himself is crazy about. But I kept going. Somewhat interesting developments become less interesting. By page 380 I was completely bored with the story. I was bummed that I'd invested so much time into this story but after reading some of the less favorable comments from customers on Amazon, I now have Serious Doubts that persevering will pay off. So I'm not.

Got about 150 pages in and was non-plussed by the unclear sequence of events, the sameness of the plot, and the ramblingness. Not grabbing me. You can buy it from me cheap if you want.

Seemed so promising, seedy Victorian London setting, strange things in jars, an unconventional sleuth who sees and talks to a ghost who accompanies her, a strange child abducted. But it's all mood for too long. Not much has really happened by page 145 and I got bored. Boredom is the kiss of death.

It was a promising set-up: there's two cousins, they played imaginative games together as kids. Then one, Danny, played a cruel prank on the other, Howard, and soon after they lost touch. Now they're adults. Howard has changed, become exceedingly rich, and has bought a castle somewhere near Prague. He invites Danny over for some nebulous help in Howard's renovation of the castle. What are his motives?

I got a hundred pages in and then... Nope. I'm not finishing this. First of all, Danny is too much of a weird loser to be interested in as the main character. What kind of supposedly straight 30-something guy wears brown lipstick, anyway? And then there's the shifting viewpoints with unexplained other characters. Got kinda meta, kinda fast. And, finally, the whole bit about having people conversing but not including quotation marks in the text... I find that style highly annoying. Not for me.

I was all fired-up to dive into some good old SF but about 200-odd pages in I gave up on this one. On the plus side, the dog-like medieval denizens of Tines World were very interesting. They had group-minds and acted as one in groups of four to six individuals. Definitely some clever stuff there. I was getting interested in the plight of two human children stuck on Tines World. But the other half of the story concerned the galactic “Blight” and focused on a human character named Ravna along with a couple other interesting aliens. But the motives and world-building in this section were too obtuse for me to get a handle on. I think the techno-babble did me in the most. But also Ravna's character wasn't very interesting. Reading this became more of a chore than fun so I made the decision to cut my losses. I'm in the minority with this viewpoint, but not alone.

Read the first book in this compendium of 3 tales. Mmm... meh.

Update: I'm actually glad I brought this book to Sweden with me. My 10-year-old son (another voracious reader) is currently reading it and enjoying it. He's currently two-thirds done with it.

Update #2: My son just finished reading this. Thought it was great. (After I read the first book in this 3-in-1, I thought it might be suited better for a younger audience.)

Kajsa (age 7) asked me what this book was about when I was more than 200 pages in and I couldn't really come up with a satisfying answer for her. I got 264 pages into this huge book before giving up. That was far too many pages than it deserved. Not much of anything happened in that first quarter of the book.

Then I started checking out what some GoodReads members said of the book. It's rated greater than 4 of 5 stars by the 12,000+ readers who have read/attempted it. Lots of Stephenson fans out there. I, too, am a big fan of Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon even more so. This book is not like those books. And, since I had decided to abandon this, I checked out some reviews with spoilers. None of those did much to make the book any sexier, either.

In Anathem we have a far-future Earth-like planet called Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians live like monks, closed off from the rest of the secular world. One such monk, 19-year-old Erasmus, narrates the story but “story” is a bit of a stretch. First of all, there's a maddening glossary of terms that you constantly have to check to figure out what the hell a character is talking about. Second of all, there's just lots of talking about arcane bits of science, math, etc, all of which does nothing to move the story toward any direction that is evident at this point. There's more than that but, who cares? It's really terribly dull. So screw that.

This series of books is tough to ignore. There's the sheer size of it (14 books); the passing of the torch when the original author died with the series unfinished; and the best-seller numbers whenever another book in the series is released. The Wheel of Time is in your face. I'd ignored it for years because of the size and the cheesy cover art. But then curiousity got the better of me and I thought, well, just check out the first one to make sure you're not missing something. Short story: I'm not missing anything.

Longer story: I read just past the 200-page mark and then I put the book aside. It's slow-going. It already telegraphs the fact that the main character is not a simple farm boy. Oh, did I say “simple farm boy”? There's huge cliché number one. It would be too tedious to list the rest. What this story lacked in suspense, it gained in tedious description. And, “trollocs”, really? I'm dodging this bullet. Too many other good things to read out there anyway.

A linked story collection shot through with a theme of keys, this one sounded promising. I read the first story in its entirety and enjoyed it. But I kept thinking I was missing something. Then into the second story I persevered for at least a dozen pages before skimming to the end because I had no idea what was going on. Tried the third story but quickly lost patience. Nope.

I gave this a good shot; read half of it. It was an interesting start. The title character is a Nigerian demi-god based in Lagos. An event known as the Falling has resulted in an infestation of gods wreaking havoc over the populace. And David Mogo, as a Godhunter, has the skills to deal with them. The pacing flags in several areas and there's several instances when local slang or patois is written in and I have no idea what people are talking about, or I can't understand what they're saying even given the context. That was annoying. It appears as though the book is also three consecutive novellas, though they're obviously linked. After the first ended, I was left thinking, okay, what's going on? In short, I decided to move on.

I abandoned this a little past halfway through. Just couldn't do it. It was way too boring and the characters were basically 50-something, drug-running, Irish thugs. They sitting around a Spanish ferry terminal hoping to run into the daughter of one of them. To say that not much happens is to be understating the fact. Their waiting around bemoaning their lot in life and being unpleasant is interspersed with flashbacks to them doing drugs, getting laid, and being unpleasant. I found it pointless.

I was taken in by all the positive blurbs on this one. And I've read this author before (Angelmaker) and enjoyed the book. But I maybe should have paid attention to what 2-star reviewers were saying about this book. Ten-dollar vocabulary words don't faze me, but the long stream-of-consciousness type chapters where you don't really know how they tie in to the story are a slog. Apparently that type of thing is a big part of the book. This is a science fiction near future kind of thing with an emphasis on a surveillance state and a way to get into peoples heads (almost quite literally). But oof! What a slog. I gave up on page 166 (of 660).