The Hanging Tree, Ben Aaronovitch

I have this book because one of my bffs lives in London and shipped it to me in hardcover when it was released in the U.K. It'll be released in mid-January in the states. (Allegedly. They pushed this release back over a year, and it's been driving me nuts.)

I love this series! I really should have reread all the books before I sat down with this one, because it heavily references earlier books and characters. I don't want to talk about what happens, because it's a mystery series (and this one deals with the ongoing reveal of the Big Bad) so I'll just say it's a delight to spend another few hours reading about Peter Grant. Although, thematically the whole thing didn't come together at the end the way I expected. And now I need the next one, so PLEASE don't push it back another two years, Ben Aaronovitch.

Note: I haven't read a real hardcover book in a long time and I forgot how annoying it is compared to my kindle. I needed a way to mark my page, I couldn't carry it around from room to room nearly as easily, and when I went to bed I had to leave the lights on to read it. I love turning the lights on and using the backlight on my kindle to read until I fall asleep. Also, I found I skipped paragraphs more often while reading actual paper, and had to go back and make myself read more slowly. All around kind of a weird experience.

Grade: A
#86 in 2016

And Four to Go, Champagne for One, Plot it Yourself, by Rex Stout

Three Nero Wolfe books! They are my comfort food books.

And Four to Go has four holiday-themed stories. What do I remember... Uh, the Christmas one is hilarious nonsense -- zero percent chance Wolfe dresses up like Santa Claus. Be serious. The easter one is something about cameras that shoot poison darts. Okay, what I really remember is that one of these stories gives us actual Archie backstory -- that he tried college, dropped out after 2 weeks, became a guard on the docks, shot a guy, lost his job, and got hired by Wolfe. I would swear we didn't know that before. This is also about where Doll Bonner starts showing up -- an actual female private detective! The late 50s sure were something.

Champagne for One is about someone being poisoned at a party that Archie was invited to, and even though there's an obvious solution for the police (the poisonee was suicidal and poisoned herself) Archie was watching her and knows she didn't do it. It's great.

Plot It Yourself is about books and publishing. Authors with popular books are being sued for having ripped someone off, and they need a way to prove they haven't. The book is great (Archie spends the weekend with Lily Rowan, glad to hear they're still doing well) although the ending is a little silly. It's great when a murderer decides to make a full confession just for fun.

Grade(s): B
#83, 84, 85 in 2016

Just One Damned Thing After Another, Jodi Taylor

I wanted to like this SO MUCH. It has a great premise -- time traveling scientist historians! Unfortunately, the writing doesn't hold up to the idea. The whole thing is told instead of shown -- our narrator will declare, "No one liked him, because he was such a jerk. But then I decided to give him a chance," and there is no example of him being a jerk, nor of why she wants to give him a chance. Things are just declared. The same with the historical action adventure scenes. They are sort of generally described as after the fact events. The book has the tone of wanting to be the Eyre Affair, but without the wit. I read 25% and decided I had other things to spend my time on.

Just go read the Eyre Affair, honestly.

Grade: DNF
#82 in 2016

A Court of Mist and Fury, Sarah J Maas

"But you didn't like the first one! Why did you read this one!"
"To see if it got better."
"...and did it?"
"NO."

So in the first book Feyre meets Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring Court of the faeries, falls in love with him, and fights the evil Queen of the faeries to save him. She dies in the attempt and is resurrected as the strongest, most badass faery ever, but is understandably all fucked up from the terrible things she had to do.

Then suddenly in book 2, Tamlin is abusive and won't listen to her, has a secret dark past of evil running through his family, and is willing to collaborate with the evil faeries he tried to die to stop in book one. Luckily for our heroine, she had a dark and sexy maybe-evil guy in book one who loved her but whom she hated. And now he turns out to be all sad backstory and secret goodness inside, and ACTUALLY her true love after all.

Nonsense. Just hilarious nonsense.

I really like the idea of a YA novel where the heroine has a good and boring boyfriend and a sexy semi-evil boyfriend, and she chooses the semi-evil one. I was all about Elena and Damon on the Vampire Diaries. But the retconning this book attempts is hilarious. I actually liked Rhys okay, but he was a sexually harassing creep in book 1, which no amount of "but he's SAD inside!" could make me forget.

About 40% of the book is Feyre moping that she's twisted and broken inside, while trying on endless beautiful dresses. Another 40% is backstory of characters we've just met who weren't in book 1 but are now the heroes of the series which... is an interesting way to do things. The last 20% is plot, but just barely. A lot of the book is macguffin quests to do stuff that doesn't ultimately matter. The ending was particularly bizarre. It's been 1st person pov from one character for 2 books and then suddenly it isn't. There's also a switcheroo that doesn't particularly work.

I don't know. It's not TERRIBLE. I get the appeal of throwing out Tamlin and subbing in Rhys as the romantic lead. The problem is that I'm not convinced anything from book 1 supports that, and that I kind of don't like Feyre enough to care who she ends up with. She's always moping and shouting at people, and her adorable sass which wins everyone over, is mostly just not that sassy.

Will I read the 3rd book just to shout about it? Signs point to yes, as long as my library has it.

Grade: C
#81 in 2016

I read Game of Kings again. Yes, that's three times this year, more or less, but I desperately, desperately needed a break from election coverage and then election feelings. Plus, this time I basically read it page by page with friends, and I figured out the actual timeline of what the backstory was, which had always confused me. The key turns out to be that Margaret Douglas didn't marry Matthew Lennox until after Francis had escaped from the galleys, which is how he managed to be turned over the French by her, then rescued by him, in totally different years. Great things were accomplished, AND I managed not to lose my mind!

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

I've read a lot of Vonnegut, but not this one somehow, and now two of the writers from Cracked have started a Vonnegut book club podcast so I figured I'd catch up. I especially like that, although both of them are huge Vonnegut fans, they discuss not just the beautiful parts of the books, but also the parts that haven't aged well, or where he could have done better. (In this book, I was underwhelmed by Beatrice's character in general, and there's a bit in the jungles of Africa that really wasn't necessary.)

I had honestly forgotten that reading Vonnegut is just about equal parts "ahaha, OH THE SATIRE," and feeling like you've been kicked right in the chest. Ouch. Damn it, Kurt.

Recapping this book would be a nightmare, but it's very Vonnegut-y; there is an invasion from Mars, there is some stuff about joining the army and literally having your mind wiped away, there is some religious satire, there is Trafalmadore, and there is a lot of meditation on the meaningless of life -- just try your best to love the people (or aliens) around you. The book essentially comes down in the same place that Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does; there is no meaning of life, we are all a series of accidents, nothing is fair, humans are ridiculously short-sighted and self-centered, and probably aliens are controlling everything everywhere anyway. But it's a great story.

Vonnegut's writing style is so beautiful and raw and unique, and his use of language is so musical, and his imagery is so vivid. He just uses words so well. I am usually  not a fan of books where everyone is miserable or hateful, and everyone ends up badly, but Vonnegut makes it worth the struggle.

Grade: A
#80 in 2016

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach

I liked this book a lot. Super interesting history of NASA stuff, super interesting anecdotes about astronauts and how gross, boring, and insane their job actually is. There is some stuff about weightless sex and designing space toilets that was both hilarious and horrible, and will stick with me for a long, long time. It's hard to find an excuse to bring it up in a conversation, but I have been trying. I found the tone here a little less wry than in Gulp, and the footnotes less intrusively cutesy. Great, great book; I would recommend it to my students or my friends who just want some interesting and weird science writing.

Oh, and it reminded me how much I like the romance novel series set at not-really-NASA in the 60s. Check them out!

Grade: A
#79 in 2016

Three for the chair, Rex Stout

It's so hard to remember which short stories were in which collection. Hang on. ...okay, after reading a bunch of goodreads reviews I got it. There's one here about a guy who had pneumonia and managed to die under possibly mysterious circumstances -- Wolfe is hired to decide if it was murder or just illness. The second one here is about Wolfe making dinner for some diplomats and the state department. It features Archie saying angrily, "Well, this is a great way to serve your country. Not!" Which I was not expecting in a novel from 1957. And in the third one a whole lot of private detectives have been summoned to testify about illegal wire-tapping activities. They were all tricked into it by the same guy, and that guy has just wound up dead, which looks pretty incriminating. The third one is great, mostly because Wolfe basically sends Archie off to do useless errands the whole time, while letting everyone else help him, and Archie is in suuuuuch a bad mood because of it.

I need some kind of different rating scale for these books, because they are all basically the same thing, but that's the joy of the series. In a week when I really needed a way to turn my brain off and stop looking at twitter or the news, a nice reliable murder mystery with a nice reliable set of characters and a nice reliable plot was exactly what I needed.

Grade: B
#78 in 2016

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach

I love humorous science writing. This isn't quite on par, with, for example, Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, but it's super interesting and enjoyable. Even the gross parts -- and this book, which is all about food, where it comes from, how it gets into you, how it comes out of you, people who have died from interesting and strange food-related problems... It was weird to read the chapter about saliva while I was eating lunch, for example. But interesting! Definitely a book where you want to tell people all the interesting things you read. The book was sliiiightly more sassily commenting on the science and scientists than I wanted it to be -- I genuinely think anything can be cool and interesting, and I didn't need the slight ironic detachment, I guess?

The footnotes, while usually funny or interesting, are a little awkward on a kindle, jumping back and forth. It's a dumb little complaint, but it made the book about 3% more irritating than it should have been. Oh well.

Grade: B
#77 in 2016