P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

Lessions 56 and 57 are fun.

Why not? It was free.

Actually making loads of progress, but since I'm bouncing between three method books and a book of solos, often going back several pages, forward motion is much slower.

Lessons 53 and 54, more second position work.

I'm a guitar weirdo: I don't care for strumming chords (a guitar staple), but really love finger picking those chords in arpeggio form.

This has narrative choices--character archetypes, plotting--that I often dislike, but so far, it's still entertaining. Maybe the fact that there hasn't been the faintest whiff of romance is positively offsetting any of the tropes.

Flipping through this, it looks like I'll breeze through the first 35-40 lessons, but this should be a good complement to the Mel Bay classical guitar method. Plus, Sagreras' exercises seem more melodic and there are videos demonstrating many online.

I expected to hate this because I have not idea how it ended up on my Kindle. Except...so far it's totally my jam.

I prefer the way chords are introduce, in conjunction with a particular key, in this book, rather than the kind of random way they popped up in the Duncan book.

Despite playing music nearly all my life, I never knew the difference between natural, harmonic, and melodic minor keys. Now I do. Cool.

This has thus far been sorta...uh...cute? Could have been so much better if the characters had any dimension. Clever dialogue is clever, but...I'm underwhelmed. The last three chapters are just padding, more a writing exercise than story.

Same kind of mildly adolescent male humor as Old Man's War, but...in dark times, a silly book hits the spot, ya know?

Curiously, though the fingerboard is wider, my stupid pinkie isn't as much of a problem on the guitar as it is on the violin.

Wow! Tor ebook freebies are often awful, but in a "pretentious shit that makes the SF literati's slobber" kind of way. This...this is like the unholy offspring between really bad smut and every UF trope in existence. (Apparently, quality standards at Tor are subterranean.) And the characters are duller than a butter knife that been rusting in a landfill for a few decades.

Hero and heroine are both likable and they're marriage of convenience is moving nicely into love, But this feels like it's at least 100 pages too long.

The heroine shoots the hero in the first chapter. Even if this goes downhill from here, it gets at least a couple of stars for a hilarious beginning.

This is super cute, but...Ben and Arthur's voices are not very distinct.

We're on the road to NoWhere.

Ugh. Annoying protagonist is still getting pissy over stupid shit when she's the cause of pretty much everything that's gone wrong in her life. Also, the world building still doesn't make much sense if you do any thinking about it.

The protagonist is still dumber than bag of hammers, but I'm hanging on grimly refusing to DNF.

First book of the 2020 and it's an overrated dud. 'Nother "award" winner that is stunningly mediocre. The protagonist is a spoiled winy brat, the plot tepid, the world building original but poorly developed and illogical. I'm sooooo bored. Zzzzzzzzz.

Basically, a hot mess. And probably a DNF.

Putting aside the fact that the protagonists are entirely too wise for their age, this is cute so far.

"Hand me that brandy," said Zoya. "I can't tolerate this degree of stupidity on a clear head."

<3

Zoya and the rest of Nikolai's party [...] endured the singing of a children's choir....
"You should poison the choir master for inflicting that atrocity on us," Zoya grumbled.

I hear ya, girl! Unless it's your very own urchin singing, the unmusical warbling of young children is something appalling.

Zoya's eyes were hard as gems. "I'm not here to debate theology with a mop handle."

LOL. It's official. I have a girl crush on Zoya.