What Have I Been Reading? (2019 batch #5)
Jun. 3rd, 2019 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroDigital Domains: A Decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Ellen Datlow - A number of the authors seem to enjoy using the short story format to avoid having to write resolutions or contemplate implications of the stories—it’s like, you clearly had a whole novella in mind, but only wrote this one chapter, and are calling it art to let me imagine the rest. There wasn’t anything particularly bad in this collection, but also nothing that made me want to hunt down other things by those authors.
Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern - He’s clearly trying to present his father as a jerk with a heart of gold; it’s got a bit of a balance issue where the “heart of gold” part doesn’t always come through. I’m rather impressed someone thought they could make a network sitcom out of this, as the constant use of profanity in situations where that’s generally considered inappropriate for one’s children is a lot of the humor.
The Fold by Peter Clines - I figured out the halfway-point twists very early on, though the last quarter’s monsters didn’t quite feel right to me. Given the start, this felt like a book that needed a more intellectual ending, rather than blood, death and explosions. (I would have opted for the threat in the last quarter to involve fewer monsters and more “quantum duplicates,” but that’s a matter of taste.) That said, it’s a solid sci-fi story. I blazed through this in a day, and added a few of the author’s other books to my wishlist.
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson - A collection of the tragicomedy fantasy webcomic by the Lumberjanes co-creator and She-Ra showrunner. She clearly has tropes she enjoys, including unrequited pining between archenemies and brilliant, amazing engineers who can’t recognize everyday objects. It’s a lot of fun and rolls up into a complete story (despite getting darker as it goes on), and I recommend it.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire - The second of the Wayward Children books, and honestly, it’s more of a companion/side-story to Every Heart a Doorway, presenting the full backstory of Jack and Jill and fleshing out how they got to where they were. (You might briefly be lulled into forgetting that it’s a horror series. Don’t be. After all, if you’ve read the first book—and you should—then the ending to this is a foregone conclusion.)
Sexual Intelligence by Marty Klein, PhD – A rather unhelpful self-help book. Among the issues is that this book is padded out with a lot of examples of problems, but very few examples of how they were actually solved. “You need to communicate, and you can’t communicate if you are worried about X, Y or Z.” ...then full stop. Okay, so if I am worried about those things, I’m just fucked? The big takeaway is that apparently anxiety is ruining your sex life (among other things), so you need to get over that via “sexual intelligence”. But given the general lack of explanation of his big buzzword, “sexual intelligence” might as well be a candy bar. “You’re not yourself when you’re hangry. Grab a Sexual Intelligence!”
Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern - He’s clearly trying to present his father as a jerk with a heart of gold; it’s got a bit of a balance issue where the “heart of gold” part doesn’t always come through. I’m rather impressed someone thought they could make a network sitcom out of this, as the constant use of profanity in situations where that’s generally considered inappropriate for one’s children is a lot of the humor.
The Fold by Peter Clines - I figured out the halfway-point twists very early on, though the last quarter’s monsters didn’t quite feel right to me. Given the start, this felt like a book that needed a more intellectual ending, rather than blood, death and explosions. (I would have opted for the threat in the last quarter to involve fewer monsters and more “quantum duplicates,” but that’s a matter of taste.) That said, it’s a solid sci-fi story. I blazed through this in a day, and added a few of the author’s other books to my wishlist.
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson - A collection of the tragicomedy fantasy webcomic by the Lumberjanes co-creator and She-Ra showrunner. She clearly has tropes she enjoys, including unrequited pining between archenemies and brilliant, amazing engineers who can’t recognize everyday objects. It’s a lot of fun and rolls up into a complete story (despite getting darker as it goes on), and I recommend it.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire - The second of the Wayward Children books, and honestly, it’s more of a companion/side-story to Every Heart a Doorway, presenting the full backstory of Jack and Jill and fleshing out how they got to where they were. (You might briefly be lulled into forgetting that it’s a horror series. Don’t be. After all, if you’ve read the first book—and you should—then the ending to this is a foregone conclusion.)
Sexual Intelligence by Marty Klein, PhD – A rather unhelpful self-help book. Among the issues is that this book is padded out with a lot of examples of problems, but very few examples of how they were actually solved. “You need to communicate, and you can’t communicate if you are worried about X, Y or Z.” ...then full stop. Okay, so if I am worried about those things, I’m just fucked? The big takeaway is that apparently anxiety is ruining your sex life (among other things), so you need to get over that via “sexual intelligence”. But given the general lack of explanation of his big buzzword, “sexual intelligence” might as well be a candy bar. “You’re not yourself when you’re hangry. Grab a Sexual Intelligence!”
