Book List #3

What I read in March

Another month of reading, trying a few different things, and DNFing a few. I don’t believe in slogging through books that aren’t doing it for you. Obviously if you’re reading for professional or educational purposes you should probably finish a book. But if you are reading for entertainment and distraction and enjoyment, they why keep going with a book that isn’t doing that for you?

I’m trying to get more non fiction books into my life. Especially since I’m mostly cutting out social media and news because it’s all just too f*cking irritating, I feel like it’s maybe not totally good for me to be living completely in a fictional world. I do want to keep feeding my brain some knowledge about the real world. So I decided that moving forward my audiobooks will be non fiction, and my reading will be fiction. I started last month with Braiding Sweetgrass which was absolutely wonderful. It is turning out to be a harder challenge than I thought though, because while I do want to take in non-fiction and feed my brain some more intellectual stuff, I am not currently interested in anything that is going to cause me irritation and stress, and honestly a of non-fiction talks about some really unpleasant stuff. So I’m having to be a bit choosy.

On to the book list - what I read in March:

First off, books I didn’t finish:

The first two weren’t because they weren’t good. Altered Carbon and Slow Horses. Both were actually very good, but both were books that have been made into streaming series that I have watched. I often like to read something that inspired a show or movie that I enjoyed, because usually the book only inspired the show and the makers of the series took the story in their own creative direction, so it’s a bit like reading a new story with some familiar characters. This was the cased with Foundation, as I mentioned last month, and the Silo show and series that I talked about in January. But sometimes they make a series that is really true to the book. When that happens I find that reading the book isn’t very interesting to me, because none of the character development or action or events are any kind of surprise. I’m not as interested if I already know everything that is going to happen. So that’s what happened with both Altered Carbon and Slow Horses, I probably got about a quarter of the way in to both of them and they were both so much like the series that they just weren’t grabbing my attention, so I moved on. But if you haven’t watched the streaming series for either of those, I would still highly recommend the books.

I also started and didn’t finish Watermelon. I guess this fits in a romance category, which isn’t usually my thing, but it had good reviews. I liked it at first, the writing style was sort of irreverent and fun. But after a while it felt pretty repetitive, and it just seemed like a lot of whining and complaining and talking about too much trivial stuff without a whole lot of depth in the characters. So I moved on.

The fourth one I gave up on was Killers of the Flower Moon. Also not because it wasn’t a good compelling story, or that it wasn’t very well written (it definitely is well written). It is a true story that reads like a crime thriller and a lot of it really is stranger than fiction. And frankly if I had been reading it as fiction I probably would have finished it. But knowing that it was all true got a little too stressful for me - particularly the whole undercurrent of racism and the treatment of the native people in this story. It just all started to make me too mad, which violated my rule about sticking with books that are going to get me away from all of the stress of our current dumpster fire of a world. I would like to see the movie sometime, and/or finish the book, but I had to park it for now for my own mental health.

so now the ones I actually did finish:

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Wayfarers book 1): Very comfortably in my favorite genre of sci-fi. This one is an adventure story, with some action and unexpected twists. What was different about this from a lot of what I read is that a lot of the characters were not human, they were other sentient races in the universe. It was cool the way the other created these other cultures with their own traditions and history and languages, and some very unique biology. A fun one for sure.

Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (Earnest Cunningham Mystery book 2): Just as fun as the first, which I read last month with the same irreverent poking fun at mystery authors and breaking the 4th wall kind of dialogue. This one takes place on a train, and most of the suspects are mystery authors, it’s sort of irony on top of irony, with some fun twists and clues throughout like any good classic mystery.

The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy book 1): sort of an epic feeling story that takes place in the northern Russian wilderness, with a lot of hardship that comes with living in such a harsh environment. It weaves in a lot of Russian folklore and a bit of magic. Good for reading with a warm fire raging in your fireplace, because it will leaving you feeling the chill of winter. The main character is a very strong girl who overcomes a lot, and I love those kind of strong female characters. It’s apparently the first of a trilogy and I will definitely read the next sometime to see where our girl ends up.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O: This was an audiobook that I’d had for a while and finally managed to finish. I very much enjoyed the story - science, time travel, witches, history. It was a very different twist on some familiar themes, combining fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction, and very fun. The only caveat is that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the audiobook version, just because of the way the story is told, in the form of back and forth emails and reports and such, and with an audiobook all of the header and address details for those communications are read aloud, which makes it seem like the book is just really, really long, when in reality I think a lot of that stuff would just be skimmed over in your head if you were actually reading. There is a second book in this series that I do want to read, but I’ll do that one as an ebook instead of an audiobook.

Women in White Coats: This was my non fiction audiobook this month. I actually didn’t quite finish it because my library loan ran out and I couldn’t renew it, but I’m still counting it because I got most of the way there. This is the story of the first women doctors and everything they had to do to overcome all the prejudice against women in the medical field at this time. I really enjoyed it.

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers book 2): The next in the sci fi series. The cool thing about this series is that the second book isn’t the continuation of the story of the characters from the first book. It’s set in the same universe and time, and tells the story of a character we only briefly met towards the end of the first book. So it was kinda the second book in a series, but more just another story set in the same universe. I liked that, it was another whole new story with new characters, but you get to know more of the world you were first introduced to in the first book.

Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers book 3): as above, another new story with new characters, set in another place in the same universe and time as the first two, with only minimal connection to the characters from before. There is a fourth book in this world that I would like to read at some point.

Sunrise on the Reaping: possibly needs no introduction. If you are a Hunger Games fan, you probably already know of this one. It fits right in with the rest, in her gripping and engaging writing style with some known and some new characters. I thought was a bit predictable, which I guess is to be expected with a prequel - we obviously already know how it ends - but very entertaining and fun anyway.

That’s it for March.

Several DNFs, and not nearly as many books as February, but these books were all longer.