Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

I need to pick up the pace if I’m gonna finish this before book club on Tuesday.

This book is getting clumsier by the chapter.

Slowly but surely working through this beast.

This is actually better-written and less gossipy than I expected it to be. Pretty clarifying, too.

I’ve been reading this book sporadically (meaning, in the bathroom and when I remember it) for over two years now. Time to switch to the audiobook and burn through the rest.

Oh, gross. I forgot all about this sex scene and how they're both drugged, drunk, and concussed for it. Totally unnecessary.

Ugh, Malta. I know she gets better and these early chapters are an important part of her character arc, but it's still a rough read.

With the caveat that I haven't read Fool's Quest or Assassin's Fate, it bugs me that the Chalced States are always presented as some sort of evil empire in these books. I would love to see Hobb shade in some complexity with a novel set there.

I also wish that the character with realistic depressive bouts -- a rarity in the high fantasy genre -- wasn't the villain. Definitely playing into myths about mental illness there.

This book is both better and worse than I remember. The worldbuilding is outstanding, especially for fleshing out an area that was on the edges of the map for the earlier Farseer books. But there's some really creaky exposition where one character bluntly tells another something they obviously already know, solely for the reader's benefit.

16-y/o Leia is really hurt that her parents are ignoring her for what readers know is their secret involvement in the Rebel Alliance. It's a good character beat and a clever inversion of the usual YA trope where the teen has to hide their heroics from an oblivious parent.

I’m enjoying the narrator’s character voice, but there has been approximately zero plot to this book so far.

This book is pretty weird, and I'm not sure yet whether that's a pro or a con for me.

Unless there are some serious red herrings going on here, I feel like I've already figured out one or two major twists.

Well, I made it through half the audiobook before it was due back to the library. Hopefully that means I’ll only need to check it out once more to finish.

Oh my god, Pattern needs to be less hilarious. I can't keep bursting out laughing from this audiobook when I'm at work.

He's off the island and there's still a tenth of this book left. Good lord.

It's always interesting to finally read a classic and see how it matches up against the pop culture conception. In this case: I'm halfway through Robinson Crusoe and he's only now about to meet Friday.

This book had been cruising for a solid 3-star rating, but now that the author is using google to diagnose her husband as a sociopath I can feel that rating plummet.

Oh Leigh Bardugo, I love you... but people can't just eat olives straight off the tree. Unless these are some sort of magic olive, they're gonna be SUPER bitter.

This is really too far into the book to only now spring the twist described in its summary.