Mike > Recent Status Updates

Okay, finally some interesting developments. For once, the tension has actually increased quite a bit. It took too long, but I guess now that it finally happened, that's a relatively minor complaint. Extraneous events are one of this book's persistent problems, but not so much that it ruins the book.

I'm reading too slowly to say very much more. But I'm still finding this good. I hope if I ever have kids, there's some updated version of this book available.

The twists remain kind of uninteresting. Stewart is refusing to actually increase the tension or stakes for more than a few scenes at a time.

This is a very lazy book. Most chapters rely heavily on overly-long bulleted lists of examples of a point they're trying to make - it probably takes up almost half of the total text. The result is that the authors establish the existence of problems to an absurd degree, but rarely put any effort into saying what causes them or what might be done to fix them, other than some nonsense about family values.

I like how the fact that the previous owner of this house committed suicide is treated as an urgent and immediate reason to leave the house, and nobody really questions this. This is one of the most baffling examples of characters being too genre-savvy I've ever seen.

Also, this portrayal of bipolar disorder is only moderately accurate, and all the information about it is delivered in infodumps. Blah.

I am mostly appreciating this. My only real complaint is that the authors don't go far enough into discussing solutions to kids with more extreme problems - everything they show seems to be fairly moderate, which might not always be useful. Still, I think that this would be helpful for many parents.

This is okay. I like that they emphasize that testing isn't enough, but I don't like that they uncritically suggest harsher penalties. It's also odd to me that they deconstruct the 'anything to win' mentality AFTER the section of the book that focuses on steroids, as if one doesn't directly cause the other. (It's also kind of weird that only the first half of this book focuses on steroids.)

These twists are kind of boring? It might be too early to say - we haven't gotten to the Big Reveal yet. But while I didn't predict these twists, they weren't all that surprising either. They just don't raise the stakes very much - they contribute little to the story.

Some problems:
- Terrible dialogue
- Borderline-ridiculous narrative voice
- Obvious foreshadowing
- Bad use of first-person present-tense narration
- Bland love interest

This book has a pretty interesting premise, but it's so badly written that I'm not sure if I can get through it.

This is pretty good. The authors seem to have a very good understanding of the difficult questions involved in children in sports, and I like that they give parents a way to evaluate themselves. They're very sympathetic to the fact that this isn't easy for parents, while still holding them accountable. My only complaint is that the authors consistently assume the reader has a two-parent nuclear family.

I feel like I should've predicted that an anti-drug book would be irritatingly oriented towards family values. That includes being explicitly pro-life, despite the fact that this book has nothing to do with abortion. I hate that this book talks about problems with divorced and single-parent families without ever trying to address why these families are like this, and why they cause problems for kids.

This is really confusing. The scenes don't transition at all, we just slam from location to location, often with an unfamiliar location or characters that don't get explained until the scene is almost over. There are no concessions made to the idea that the reader might not be familiar with X-Men - as someone with only a casual familiarity, I'm struggling to keep up.

This is a very cliched opening for an historical fiction novel. A woman's father dies, and she's forced into an arranged marriage. I barely even read historical fiction, but I feel like I've seen that a million times in historical fiction and fantasy novels. Maybe this is why I don't read the genre very much.

Even though I'm not really connecting to this book, it's still very good. Good characters, good writing, decent plot. I like this a lot better than Fever 1793.

I am consistently amazed at Isayama's ability to combine political commentary with expert storytelling. This kind of reminds me of a cross between Rogue One and Mockingjay, two of my very favorite pieces of media. This is simply fantastic.

Boy, this is not well-organized. It just jumps around his presidency however Summers sees fit - I'm not getting any sense of chronology at all from this.

Honestly, maybe this book is just seeming better to me because I've been reading nothing but shit lately. But I'm enjoying it a lot.

I don't have much to say about this, except that I appreciate it more than I really enjoy it. Like, I acknowledge that this is a well-written, important book, but I'm just not getting into it for some reason. Maybe it's that I don't find the plot that interesting.

Upon re-read, the thing I'm most surprised by about this book is how much emotional resonance it has. My biggest fear was that this book would be too ironic and soulless, but Violet and Klaus are actually more well-rendered than I remembered, and Snicket does a very good job of making us care about them. This book is a bit simpler than what would come later, and not as funny, but it's still excellent.

This is a lot more compelling than Fever 1793 because the plot, while still the weakest element, is a lot more cohesive and compelling. But mostly, I just like that Anderson presents aspects of history that teachers don't normally tell kids, like how neither the Americans nor the British actually cared about slaves. I wish I had read something like this when I Was a kid.

Still as weird and interesting as I remember it. This is a pretty simple book, especially compared to where the series goes later, but it's still noteworthy how many little, powerful moments there are that I didn't get when I was a kid. In what's shaping up to be a terrible reading year for me, this is easily the best thing I've read so far.

This isn't great, but it's good. It's certainly very well-written, and I like Isabel as a protagonist. The plot is perhaps a bit meandering, but it's a minor concern.

This is a good balance of historical accuracy and accessibility to kids. I think Fever 1793's story was a little too boring for most kids to get past the difficult language, and I don't think that applies here. So far, this is the better book of the two.

I disagree with the crux of this novel's themes. "Popularity is about being in the right place at the right time"... yeah fucking right. Lindsay is apologetically awful throughout this entire book - that's not something you get from random chance. I thought this was Sam's redemption arc - turns out, it's just about the nature of popularity without holding anyone accountable.

I feel like Sam should hate Lindsay a lot more than she does during these scenes. Like, she's directly seen the consequences of Lindsay's awful actions, and Oliver hasn't even tried to give her any sort of sympathetic backstory that would make it okay. Why does Sam still consider her a friend? I can't stand Lindsay at all.

This is definitely well-written. My fear, though, is that it's going to portray the American revolutionaries as these crusaders of abolitionism and show Isabel's fight for America as synonymous with her fight for personal freedom. Which... well, that's really not how history went. But that hasn't actually happened yet, that's just my fear.

I can't decide how I feel about this twist. It's a little too much of a coincidence, and I don't see any particular reason that it really had to be there. Maybe some reason will arise later, but if the only reason it was there was for the sake of a twist, I feel like it was a little too heavy-handed.

This is getting better, but it's still not good. Some of the emotional beats work, but some of them are just too on-the-nose. (The fact that Juliet's family literally displays picture frames with sample pictures of happy families because they don't have any of their own... jeez, that was ridiculous.) I'm at least starting to see why people like this so much, but it's not for me.

This is actually kind of improving. I really feel Sam's catharsis here, and I'm starting to see more connection between the events and the themes. That was also a very nice moment with Kent. Still not great, but better.

That said, another drinking game: take a shot every time Sam says something, and then says she didn't realize it was true until she said it out loud.

This is just a disjointed novel. Oliver knows where Point A and Point B are, but she doesn't know how to connect them. So there are just so many forced plot and thematic threads. I almost feel like this isn't the right story for the themes Oliver wanted to get across. Which is a shame, because they aren't bad themes, Oliver just isn't good at writing them.