Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

This is a well-written memoir that I am utterly failing to care about.

Look, I get that we were all teenagers once, but maybe when you're in your 60s and writing your memoirs you don't need to go into detail about all the girls you lusted after back in high school. Just a thought.

This book just keeps improving on the one before, which I already liked quite a bit. And this latest part literally gave me chills.

"But you ought to understand, too, that there's an attrition that takes place inside, one in which options and choices and even desires are ground ever smaller until finally their existence can no longer be confirmed by observation or weight or displacement but only by faith. Until desire is a ghost."

Just went back and added 1-star ratings to my DNFs... sorry if that generated a bunch of status updates in your feed!

This is like a comic book spy version of Die Hard, and I'm really pleased that I'm reading it right after A Burglar's Guide to the City.

"Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together."

My library hold came through again.

Martians haven't got no sense of embarrassment.

Did we really need a perspective shift in so short a story? This white cop Malone is nowhere near as interesting a character as Black Tom himself.

I may or may not finish this audiobook before it's due back to the library. Still 12 hours left on double-speed.

I'm really enjoying this one, and the fact that the heroine is Jewish is an added bonus.

This three-years-later jump is just cruel.

It's tough to write realistically stubborn teenagers without losing reader sympathy, but Ella Lyons is managing it nicely.

Vampires AND a psychic kid? This is definitely vintage Stephen King stuff right here.

This book is a lot better than I thought it would be. It has a real early Stephen King feel to it.

Despite my hopes, it seems this book is good enough to put up with 18+ hours of Scott Brick's awful audiobook narration.

"For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional. Passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity."

My library loan expired, so I guess I'll pick back up with this in a couple weeks.

Claire North wins a prize for being the first author I've seen include Boaty McBoatface in a published novel.

I'm enjoying this, but it's definitely more of a character piece and less of a detective story than I had thought it would be.