So this week I’m reading Suicide Forest, a horror novel (possibly involving ghosts) by Jeremy Bates, in which a group of hikers, whose plan to scale Mount Fuji has been thwarted by weather, decide to go camp in Japan’s Aokigahara forest.
So this week I’m reading Schooled, by Christa Charter, a humorous mystery involving a murder that takes place on what is, apparently, a thinly-veiled version of the Microsoft Xbox campus, where the author used to work in the same capacity that the novel’s heroine, Lexy Cooper, works at the fictitious Xenon corporation. The only reason I know any of this is that people on Goodreads said so Such background information is not required for reading the book, but does give the author a certain amount of inside baseball credibility for writing about the video game industry.
“I’m not a pirate schoolgirl manga, but I play one on Goodreads.”
So this week I’m reading No Sleep Till BrooklynNo Hope For Gomez! by Graham Parke. This is the humorous story of one Gomez Porter, a subject in an experimental drug trial who begins to have strange experiences that he documents on his blog. Hmm, strange experiences documented on a blog? That sounds familiar …
Unisex bathroom. Check shoes, sombreros, and automobiles at the door.
So recently I’ve been motoring through my pile list of unread books on the Kindle, not because I suddenly have more time to read, but because about a year ago — that’s how far behind I am — I evidently picked up a number of stinkers from BookBub and/or Pixel of Ink. This surprises no one who has seen my Netflix streaming queue. (In case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen a series of one-star ratings from me on Goodreads, it’s because I have a sort of policy about not rating books unless I get a good way into them, say, 10-15%, before I quit. Ah, the digital age, when we measure our reading progress in percentages rather than pages. But I digress.) But fortunately, I just arrived at The Uncanny Valley.
So I did ultimately end up binning the book from last week’s Teaser Tuesday, and a couple of subsequent books as well that were pretty ho-hum from the start, but we finally have a winner: The Line (Witching Savannah #1), by J.D. Horn.
So at the moment I’m sort of between books — I’ve started and tossed three or four free books I got from BookBub that I didn’t care for. I just started one now called All Saints’ Secrets, by Nichole Loughan. I’m still not far enough into it to know if I’m going to continue reading (my Kindle says 4%, which is not very many pages in on a 145-page book), and I got it so long ago that I don’t even remember what it’s about, but I do know I like the cover:
So over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, with a little extra time off from the job that actually pays the bills (Lord knows writing doesn’t), I finally wrapped up the last pass of editing on the conclusion of Shards — or, as I am now calling it, The “Strings” Duology:
So this week I’m reading–or rather, re-reading–a book, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout, that’s printed on actual paper. Aged, yellowing paper, even! This is the 50th anniversary edition, published in 1984, which means that if it were published now it would be the 80th anniversary edition. Does anybody else feel old?
“If I kill all the golfers, they’re gonna lock me up and throw away the key.”