I read the previous book last year and had fun with it, but I have mixed feelings about this one, leaning more negative as the book goes on. There's still time for that to turn around, but...I really just wish Finlay were a little smarter? Being a mystery writer may not make you an expert on crime, but she's so bad at picking up on things I wonder how she could have written a convincing book. Or failed to learn from her recent experience.

I've read this book before in print, but it's been over a year and I liked it and it was available before my holds, so I'm listening to it. But. It's the same narrator as The Twisted Ones (which I also did this with) and I really do not like the way she reads. Weirdly snarky tone for almost every sentence, which I find offputting. I'm still listening for now because I don't have a backup. If my next hold comes before the end, though, I don't know.

Been spending a lot of time with audiobooks these past few months since I can listen to them at work now. This narrator is...not my favorite but I've had this book on hold for like a month and a half and now that I've started I want to finish it (and it's not *terrible* narration, just not to my taste), so I will accept 26 more hours of this narration 😅

So. It's been...a while! No promises about frequent posting or anything (maybe more frequent than every, uh, two years?) but I'm taking another stab at this place, I think. At least partly because I had a powerful urge to post some of this book's beautiful illustrations somewhere.

This is so strange for me to read, having grown up on the coast (albeit the opposite one), because I am so intimately familiar with the type of scenery she describes that I can smell it and I can't imagine thinking of it as "unpromising" or "sinister." I'm not picking a fight--the book describes the author's growing appreciation for this landscape--but I'm fascinated by how two people can see exactly the same thing and interpret it so differently.

I wasn't aware of Ted Chiang until last year, when he read the opening of "Omphalos", a story in this collection, at WisCon; I mention this because a lot of reviews of this book compare it to an earlier collection I know nothing about, so maybe my opinion is wrong, who knows. Anyway it took me forever to actually buy/read this because I'm trash but I really enjoyed all of the stories in it which, you may be aware, does not usually happen to me.

I think this might be the fastest I've ever bailed on a book. If there is a type of person whose writing advice I am least interested in, it is the type that says things like this.

Might be going a little overboard with the annotations on this one (I just have...so many bird thoughts. So many.)

I don't know about this one. I liked it, basically, but I felt a kind of disconnect the whole way through that kept me from really getting into it. (Also, it does that thing where A Character In The Story Was Telling The Story The Whole Time, Is Your Mind Blown, but while that annoys me a little it wouldn't be enough for this rating on its own.)

I feel like I would have liked it more if I read it at a different time in my life? I just don't know.

I bought these bird post-it flags for this book I'm using for a term paper and they amuse me endlessly because I am a child

While this is not, as I had hoped, the comprehensive snake book of my dreams, it is an accessible and informative rundown of various common snake myths, where they come from, and what the truth is. It's also full of beautiful pictures (unlike this one I took last year) if you are someone who likes pictures of snakes, which I am.

I think maybe this book was engineered in a lab specifically to appeal to me? It has detailed worldbuilding with a heavy focus on language and culture, jokes about naming conventions, excellent characters, poetic descriptions, excerpts from in-universe texts--did I dream this book?

If you like the very specific things I like, you will like this. It's hard for me to judge beyond that, considering, but I loved it.

I can't help but feel this book could have used more editing (as @ErinSBecker pointed out on my first post about it, but I was foolish and did not heed the warning). Rather a lot of it is travel logistics and characters having anxiety spirals for multiple pages, and occasionally events happening several times in the exact same words. The premise was interesting, but I don't think I'll be picking up All Clear.

Mike we have just established you've been reading the newspaper off and on for at least a week, there is no reason at all for you to suddenly think you don't know what year it is, the sequence of events preceding this implies that you are *holding a newspaper right now*

Sort of amused by how much of this book so far is people trying to figure out where to find other specific people

The indents on this ebook are driving me insane.

2009 was a very weird time, huh

I didn't realize "man tries to explain taxes to a fox" was an interaction I wanted to read but it's very good.

This book frustrates me. It spends several chapters talking about the value of innovation and experimentation with form and questioning assumptions (👍) and how all innovation is inherently good and art is dead (👎) in very flowery language that annoys me even when I agree with the ideas.

Then you get to the actual writing advice and it's just the same beginner advice you can get anywhere, but more pretentious. Not a good use of my time, I think.

The jacket copy for this book is sort of misleading and kept me from actually looking at this series for a long time because it makes it sound...not very interesting. In fact it is a book about eusocial humanoid shapeshifters, which is enough to get me on board already, and "Moon discovers what he really is" is where the book starts rather than the whole plot. There's something...unformed about some of the character interaction, but I enjoyed it.

I've taken this self-isolation as an opportunity to remind myself how much I like to cook, starting with a big pot of this potato and cheese soup, one of my favorite soups to make.

I had some trouble with the voice this is written in (the word "badass" appears in this book many times and I...hate it) and the author makes herself out to be a barely competent researcher when she recounts how she got her information. That said: I found the actual information in the book very interesting and I still think it was a worthwhile read, just maybe not the best of its kind.

rich_people.jpg

The function of a mystery story, most of the time, is what "Scorcher" (I can't take that nickname seriously) claims his function as a detective is in this book: to create an ordered world out of chaos. To reassure the audience that there are simple answers.

I can get on board with that sometimes, but I think what I like about French's books is that they don't do it. They're mysteries with complicated, messy endings, not always the one you want.

Not exactly what I was expecting to learn from this book but very interesting (I was familiar with the term but not the details)!

A (mostly) fascinating read. Even allowing for the inherent subjectivity of such things, I'm not sure some of the things in here should be described as "secret", and there were a few essays that I wished were more in-depth, but at least they gave me new things to research *eyes giant TBR stack nervously* when I get a chance. There's also some really beautiful art in here.

I really love this cover.

I imagine I'll be taking a lot of pictures at this angle in this chair over the next few weeks.

I didn't like this one quite as much as The Likeness, but I think that's just because I don't like Rob as much as Cassie; this book is equally well-composed and Tana French is excellent at making her first-person narrators distinct (although of course I had to read multiple books to appreciate that).

Oh I really like this description

I think I've previously mentioned how much I enjoy finding residual notes in secondhand or library books. I may spend the rest of my life wondering what that question mark is supposed to indicate.

This is a very strange formatting choice.

A Eurocentric, capitalist take on grassland ecology and conservation with occasional outbursts of gender essentialism and no clear thesis or coherent narrative. Lots of meandering stories about the author's youth with varying degrees of connection to the rest of the book's content. Sometimes it almost draws a reasonable conclusion about something and then shies away. The prose isn't even engaging. Thinking about this book makes me tired.

I suppose the advantage of ending the second book on a cliffhanger is that it propelled me to read the third one all in one sitting. If advantage is the word.

It can be nerve-wracking to get to the end of a series you're enjoying, and I know opinions may vary, but this book managed to give me, like...everything I wanted and then some. I should probably have chosen to get enough sleep instead of finishing it last night but whatever, worth it.

Exactly the kind of heading guaranteed to get my attention

I will say this: I don't like when a book ends on a cliffhanger. Even within a series, I prefer a book that can stand on its own to some extent. But! I will forgive this book, because it carried through everything I liked about the first one and introduced some excellent characters, and I do already have the third one anyway so my suffering is minimal.

This book was already starting to lean uncomfortably into evopsych territory but this is the paragraph that would have prompted me to throw it in the lake if I didn't have to finish it for this assignment.

Even better than the first one. Grace's character arc was well-executed and while the events of the latter half of the book kept me on my toes, they did so in a way that was well foreshadowed (also true of Witchmark, but moreso here).

I saw a few middling Goodreads reviews with variations of "I wanted more Miles and Tristan" and I would like to ask those people what book they read because Miles and Tristan are very present in this story.

I try to do a little bit of analysis in these reviews but look, man, this book is so fucking good, I can't even tell you. It contains many things I love--examinations of gods and mortality and vengeance and also the 1920s--but a mere list of elements does not do it justice. It is absolutely the best book I've read so far this year. I love it so much.

I have a soft spot for this kind of nature journal, especially as someone who is inclined to be poetic about a marsh myself. This one has a good balance of ecology and memoir and a writing style I largely enjoyed, although the author's insistence on referring to "birds" and "animals" as distinct categories is...puzzling.

Help

Not sure I have anything in particular to say about this except that I am loving every second of this book

My main worry with this book, not having heard of this organization before, was that the author's conservation efforts would be similar to some of those sketchy sanctuaries that post videos of untrained people handling big cats, but fortunately that wasn't the case.

It's not one of the best written books I've read, and it's too light on scientific detail for my taste, but still an entertaining account for an audience other than me.

I really wanted to love this book, but it just never quite grabbed me, and it felt a little too noncommittal in its handling of the political situation it depicted. Alas.

The advice in this book, when it is advice, isn't bad, and in many ways aligns with my own philosophy of writing, but I find the authorial voice so grating and unpleasant that I can't finish it. It's like being accosted by an angry stranger on the bus. I'm sure it is a style that works for some people, but I am not one.

I don't yet have an opinion on the book itself, but this is a very charming map.

A serviceable little anthology, but not one of my favorites. Most of the stories felt constrained by their abbreviated length rather than making good use of it. I might retry a couple of these authors in slightly longer form if I get the opportunity.

On some level I really want to make a joke about this and the fact that Seven Blades in Black is what prompted me to reread this book but I think the joke might just be "haha names the same" which is not a good joke or even really a joke at all.

There was a time in my life when I had more appropriate dinosaurs lying around, but alas, that time is over.

I have some stylistic gripes with this book--too many chapters ending on a one-liner, present tense makes me a little dizzy after a while--and I found some of the character motivations more simplistic than I think they were meant to be, but it was a fun read with interesting underlying concepts and I am more picky than average, so.

It feels unfair to mark this as Bail because there's nothing actually wrong with it as far as I read, but I won't be finishing this book.

I have this problem: I have been writing fiction since I could form words with a pencil, and with an eye specifically to improving for over 10 years. I like to read books about writing! But many of the ones that exist are kind of entry level for me? I always hope, but the title should have warned me here.

This is an old picture but, in my defense, it is February.

I loved this book. Thorough worldbuilding seamlessly blended with narrative! Characters with uncomfortably relatable emotional problems! People who communicate instead of having contrived misunderstandings! Also it made me laugh a lot. This is exactly the kind of story I hope to write and want to read, and I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy (but I must, due to my TBR policies).