Watch Reading in March/April

[Michelle, Overrun By Pets]

I'm approaching the halfway point of Bag of Bones and my interest in Mike Noonan is waning, to say the least. I found his backstory compelling and enjoyed learning about how the sudden loss of his wife had affected his literary craft. I enjoyed the struggle and internal conflict that came with deciding to return to the family vacation home since it reminded him so intensely of her. I found it problematic that meeting an attractive twenty-something and taking her on as a pet project seemed to immediately cure him of his creative ailments. I am now quite tired of hearing about his libido as a secondary character in this story and my progress through this book has ground to a halt. The story has deteriorated into a complicated saga designed to convince the reader that Mike is making a wise choice in selecting a much-too-young trophy wife to replace his lost loved one. If I don't get to a point where the horror/supernatural elements are turned up and the drama is turned down I may never finish this story.

[Andrew, Wound Up]

I really loved This Is How You Lose the Time War and have recommended it multiple times. A story about adversaries who develop a relationship with a fantastically bombastic background of an inter-dimensional time war. This is a book to be savored for its poetic language, tantalizing set pieces, and complete disregard for wonky technical explanation.

I'm halfway through The Glass Hotel and the story has just taken a sharp turn. I loved the author's previous novel Station Eleven and went into this story blind. I feel like I'm still blind to where the story is going at this halfway point. More thoughts to come.

I finished The Last Wish and you can find my thoughts in the book club discussions. I will say that I was overly harsh in my early discussions about the book. It definitely grew on me as I got further in.

I've loaded up our next book club book Bubblegum and am hyped to dig in. I also barely started The Gone World after mistakenly thinking my shelf was bare (The Glass Hotel is making that much of an impact on me). Of course I'm not including the five or so books gathering dust on my bedstand.

I'm hoping to burn through many pages in June, maybe even laze out in the hammock on a warm night, IF my Kindle can stay alive.

[Andrew, Wound Up]

I finished Glass Hotel and wrote a review. Feel free to review my review here. Please let The Gone World be better.

[Michelle, Overrun By Pets]

I finished Welcome to Night Vale and the zany ride continued to the very end. I found delight in some of the story lines, particularly how the Troy plot wrapped up. All in all, there was a LOT to process with so many nutty characters and uncanny situations mixed together in a wild, weird jumble. There were a ton of fun words and ideas and hilarious and insightful quotes, but I'm not convinced it formed a cohesive story. I'm totally undecided if I would jump back into this universe again, but I do have the hard cover version of It Devours! and it has hypnotic purple pages that are beckoning to me like a siren's call from my book shelf.

I started The Last Wish and am finding it much more detailed and interesting than the Netflix series. The book is a compilation of short stories about Geralt and many of them remind me of wonderful Grimm's Fairy Tales.