Chris McGrath > Recent Status Updates

OK, there are owlbears and bugbears, so this is confirmed to be a D&D-based novel. Not a bad thing necessarily, but I think it's funny that the author isn't afraid to use monsters that were invented by Gary Gygax.

Decent enough story so far, but the narrator of the audiobook is quite bad.

This is not at all my kind of book, but I'm far enough along and still semi-interested that I'll finish it off.

Aaand that's it for now, the second grader asked if we can move on to something else. He says he wants to come back to it sometime, but if I know my son, we never will. We'll see, but for now I'm glad to be done with it since we have so many other books to try.

The prose in this stinks too, or maybe it's the punctuation, because reading it aloud is difficult. It's often hard to determine what the heck is being said as it rambles on.

Well I'm reading this to my 7-year-old, in hopes that reading it "through his eyes" will help me understand or like it better than I did the first time. But so far, nope, still think it's a terrible book chock full of Deus Ex Machina and not particularly interesting or enjoyable in any other regard. My son also seems bored of it--he turned off the light in the middle of story time last night.

Liking What You See: A Documentary - 4 stars - This was a pretty cool story about the nature of physical attraction, really got me thinking and explores the idea from many sides.

Hell is the Absence of God - 2 stars - Had an interesting premise but I didn't like where it went.

Seventy-Two Letters - 3 stars

The Evolution of Human Science - 1 star - Doesn't even really count as a story, less than 6 minutes in the audiobook.

Story of Your Life - 5 stars - I think this story would have confused the heck out of me if I had not seen Arrival first. It's an incredible work, but contains much less definite information in it than the film does, and therefore might have left me completely baffled and unsatisfied. That makes me wonder if I am missing something huge in the other stories in this collection as well. They may all bear re-reading.

Division by Zero - 3 stars

Understand - 4 stars - Pretty awesome story of a superior intelligence. As soon as I heard the term "data nets" I had to check what year it was written--sure enough, 1991.