Teel > Recent Status Updates

Someone (Diane) was supposed to remind me to read this when it came out. Saw it in a bookstore, borrowed it from the library, starting it now.

I keep being too busy with other things to get any reading done. Have about an hour for it, today.

Half a page of a fake high-fantasy epic is more than enough to continue to reassure me I ought to continue to stay away from the genre. Yech.

Love the use of socially-inept & Asperger's characters to excuse the inappropriate infodumps, which I think add depth & context that pop.fiction leaves out.

Wait, I was wrong, here's mention of a computer!

For a book set in 2024, it's odd that there's no technology (especially military tech) more advanced than what was used during the 1940's. Painfully, ridiculously odd. I swear, not a single person in this book has ever seen or used a computer.

Should be able to finish this morning.

The pacing is good and steady, but to me the book's quality does not justify its length. I am not bored by it, only tired of it. Perhaps it is because the tension was dispelled so completely by several characters' inexplicable visions of the future, which is worse than the bare predictability of the text because less-savvy readers would be able to overlook the latter.

In this chapter, we find references to Proust & Dostoyevsky, lest we forget the author is well-read.

"I WILL NOT MENTION MY NAME", he says, so one of the central coincidences of the book can remain intact awhile longer. And yes, he said it in all caps.

I hope some reasonable sort of explanation is given for these continued psychic visions whose only apparent purpose is to give a crutch to the author. If no explanation is given by the end of the book, surely another star removed from my rating.

The more I read, the more it has in common with The Immortals. Possibly they're both too-closely based on a particular historical reality.

Getting frustrated by how closely it's hewing to "rules" for writing, such as monomyth & formulaic character arcs & "twists", but those are author-gripes, not things that average readers would even notice - and that they apparently enjoy?

I wonder whether we'll get descriptions of "the Events" and "Civil War II"... Or if they're just there so this is all post-

The coincidence here is painful, though I know Drama (capital-D) requires it.

...sigh. Already explicitly comparing this dystopia's rulers to Nazis. Minus one star, right off the top.

I'm a procrastinator. Told the author, in November, I'd probably not get to this before mid-December. Finally starting. (Yes, I got a free review copy, FTC.)

Sitting at a laundromat, waiting.

What a disappointing, frustrating, uneven book - its ending doubly so.

This book is increasingly aggravating. The author's casual inconsistencies, lazy writing, and broad failures of imagination hamper what could have been a good book.

The book is good enough I want to keep reading, but I'm already an hour or two past my bedtime. I'll finish when I get up.

Just got sidetracked & read the Book of Revelation through, to refresh my memory. (No, nothing much in here related to that. My mind made a tangential connection, though.)

Requested this from the library some time before NaNoWriMo/November, it came in a week and a half ago.

Apparently overly-long vampire books universally make me sleepy. Drinking some caffeine & starting in again.

The illustrations of Tesla & his inventions have been excellent, and well-researched. Very nice.

Dr. Barlow has been significantly diminished, in my estimation, by *not* having realized Deryn's secret earlier; I had always thought she knew. Sigh.

...and Hearst? I suppose that's appropriate.

...hopefully the author is aware of Tesla's advanced age by the time this story is set?

There are a lot of anti-abortion-taken-to-extremes dystopias. I'm basically pro-abortion, and it's wearing on me. Yes, we know, those people are crazy. You don't actually have to take it to extremes, or exaggerate, they're really, already crazy. Write about that.