Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So, this is the second book of a trilogy, and then there’s another trilogy, and then some other books, and when you’ve tallied it all up, you have something like 27 books in the series. And I’ve read the first two, but unless I get pneumonia and my reading time suddenly quadruples, I’m probably done, and I feel strange about it, because when all is said and done, I don’t hate these books.

The setting is imaginative. The stories move along at a good pace. The stories are interesting. If that was all their was to a book, this would be a pretty decent read.

But it isn’t.

The characters are garbage. They’re cardboard. The heroes never make any mistakes, but they also never do anything interesting. If anything they do is surprising, it isn’t genuinely surprising, it just wasn’t foreshadowed.

The writing, the style? Also largely nonsense. When I got to the end of the book, and I found myself wondering what happened in the next one, I had a flash of inspiration: I would much rather read the plot summary than the actual plot.

What I like about this series is the hierarchy, the relationships between people, the structure of the world, and how the events in the story impact that society. But since I don’t like or care about any of the individual people, it’s more than enough to just read what happened next, in bullet points or on a timeline.

So fuck it.



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Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Surprisingly solid. I had pretty low expectations going into this, because I wasn’t a huge fan of the revisionist history return to the Ender’s Game timeline, but I just read it from cover to cover, or, since I’ve been doing a lot of reading on kindle for my iPhone, I tapped the right side of the screen until the book was done. There’s just something I like about post-war Ender, and this covers a really critical part of that story. So: good! Read!

(In an effort to post more often, I’ve decided to automatically repost my reviews from goodreads here. At the moment there aren’t a lot of reviews there, since all I’ve really done is rate books and mark that I’ve read them, but if this works out, you may eventually want to pick me up there, as well.)

my currently-reading shelf: