leannbolesch

[leannbolesch]

I really want to be an indie book supporter, but it's kinda...

I don't know if Michael Sullivan counts in the same way, since he has some trad deals and his original series got a trad re-release that saw some level of editing, and he's definitely at the success level where he can pay for all the editing and ancillary services to compete with trad in terms of professionalism. But like... his stuff was pretty polished.

Thr last indie I otherwise read had, among other glaring issues, inconsistent name spellings mid-page in the first chapter. Now this one's got a sentence with words missing. I've seen glaring typos slip into trad books too and even loved a book that retconned a major character's name, but those all at least got at least half a book in, if not a few installments, before mixing a spot of polish.

At least this one otherwise seems like it'll do better character writing than the last one I tried out. Well report back later with final thoughts.

[leannbolesch]

Me whenever the main duo go their separate ways at the end of the series, having grown from their time together so that their critical character flaws no longer hold them back from the different life goals they'd both expressed a desire for back in book one.

I understand that it works but I want them to stay together darn it!

this is possibly my favorite doesthedogdie dot com screenshot of all time. no it had a happy ending it just sucked ass. the characters were happy but I was not

[leannbolesch]

I mostly find hairs. Nail clippings feel more deliberate.

Seriously, you never know what you're gonna find in a library book.

[leannbolesch]

Ignored the obvious signalling of the cover and tried reading a romance the other day that someone had pitched to me like a romcom, but paused 3 chapters in to flip ahead and confirm that, yep, I'm actually reading a bodice ripper. Not for me, sorry.

Anyway, it got me thinking about how common it seemed to be in romance for the female lead to go "I'm so plain. No man would take interest in me." Only for the love interest(s) to be like "Oh my god! How is she this hot!?" I count romance as 'reading outside my genre' and even romantacy as 'deciding to put up with romance for the sake of the interesting fantasy concept' so it's not like I'm wide-read in this space and I might keep seeing some non-ubiquitous thing by chance, but for as often as I see it, I feel like it's statistically unlikely that it's not at least fairly prevalent.

It probably serves some fantasy where a low self-esteem female reader likes to imagine that, despite deeming herself plain, men would disagree with her. But tbh I'd like to see a Plain Jane lead one of these times where, when you get the guy's POV, he's like, "Yeah. She's not hot, but she's also not ugly. Like, she's average-cute. I'll take average-cute over a smoking hot psycho."

[leannbolesch]

Welp. Brandon Sanderson is officially the biggest contributor so far this year to lowering my average book rating score.

Out of curiosity, where do people usually rank Frugal Wizard amongst his books? I didn't hate it, but it was pretty underwhelming, and that's the second time I've given him a shot and not been particularly invested in his cast.

[leannbolesch]

Currently experiencing a frustration in which I know that I think the book I'm reading is good, I'm invested in the events, arms I intend to read the sequel... but I'm so eager to be done with this and not in a "I need to know how it ends" kind of way. I just want it over with.

I think we started off on the wrong foot. I was midway through a high fantasy with elves and dwarves and had to pause that because the library won't let me renew this one. Even though I'm genuinely interested now, that sense of needing to just get through it has lingered.

[leannbolesch]

It happened again

Succumbed to the temptation to see what people's opinions of a particular character were in the book I'm reading despite the risk of spoilers. Learned the series I picked up is actually a prequel and I was curious about a future main villain. (I kinda figured he was being built up as the ultimate villain of this series, but I guess that's still on the table, since I avoided spoilers on that end.)

It beats accidentally reading a sequel series first, but darn it! I like reading in publication order.

[leannbolesch]

I somehow have Libby convinced that I can read any book in under 3 minutes as Nook thinks I need about an hour to get through 9 pages.

[leannbolesch]

is that piece of media actually bad, or is it just not following the blueprint you projected onto it? is that work actually not good, or are you just demanding something from it that is absolutely antithetical to its themes, genre, tone, and narrative goal? is that story actually poorly written, or do you just dislike that it is not the specific things you wanted from it that it never set out to be, never was, and never is going to become? is it actually bad, or is it actually well-executed and you just dislike the story it chose to be because it isn't catering to your specific desires and expectations?

[leannbolesch]

bingewatching will never come close to bingereading. there is nothing like blocking out the entire Earth for ten hours to read a book in one sitting no food no water no shower no bra and emerging at the end with no idea what time it is or where you are, a dried-up prune that's sensitive to light and loud noises because you've been in your room in the dark reading by the glow of a single LED. it's like coming back after a three-month vacation in another dimension and now you have to go downstairs and make dinner. absolutely transcendental

[leannbolesch]

I re-read the first 10 Legend of Drizzt books as an adult and then stopped there for fear that the books would get bad. (I dropped the series back in middle school during the next set of books and don't fully recall why.)

I'm very tempted to restart today for reasons I can't discern, but B&N is out of stock for the paperbacks I was collecting and apparently WotC got new (less visually striking) covers. If the restocked books don't match the covers I've already got, I'll take it as a Sign From God that my picking the series back up wasn't meant to be.

[leannbolesch]

Oh no. I complained in a recent review about a book using diary format and I feel so called out.

(Like, it made decent use of diary format and I think I'd have so given it as many stars as I did based on plot and character of it used another format, but I did very much complain that the diary format book was diary format.)

Fandom Problem #6287:

I don't know why people insist on going out of their way to review something when they clearly just don't like the entire genre. "This romance book is bad" and their whole review just makes it clear they dislike every single romance trope. "This action movie is dumb because I just don't like action movies." "I picked up a novel called Sexiest Smoldering Smut Sextravaganza by Madame Erotica, and I cannot BELIEVE how much sex is in it?? This is too much sex and also the sex scenes are poorly written because I don't like reading sex scenes"

[leannbolesch]

I have restarted Shadow of the Conqueror (got about 7 chalets in?) and will say that while there are still things about the writing style that irk me, it's not as bad as I first thought. Like, there's still scene and sentence level passing, clunky sentences, etc. But also I think I was so quick to lose faith in it that I was outright uncharitable. Some of the moments I thought were downright nonsense are actually just slightly off phrasing that I stumbled on and then didn't reread because I expected nonsense. A couple times, I think I might have missed something because I stopped to take notes and it broke up the flow of a paragraph.

Still a book that could have used another draft and a freelance editor, but all in all a better prose than I first gave it credit for.

[leannbolesch]

Still reading Shadow of the Conqueror.

Deleted the first post. On read-back it seemed meaner than I intended it to be.

I want to know what the budget was for this project. AFAIK there's a comic adaptation of it that the author commissioned. Was that part of the original budget, or paid for with sales of this book?

Or more specifically, like... Did he sell enough copies initially to justify spending money on some of the subsequent stuff he did with this book, or did he budget for some of that from the outset and just not bother with an editor. Its admirable quality for what I assume is an early draft based on exposition placement, but it also very obviously needed more drafts and line editing.

[leannbolesch]

Just finished a rom-com, which was very much a "I need to read more outside my genre" kind of book. Realizing as I go through and apply all the relevant tags to it on my Storygraphs account that roughly half my tags are designed for high action and speculative fiction stories. Even some of the ones that aren't specifically for those stories are intended more for noting when stories presented as such instead focus more on other things, or happen to have prominent non-speculative elements that would just be a given in a non-SFF book. Like taking place on Earth.

[leannbolesch]

'Bout to start the library book they bought at my request. (Stuff I put on hold months ago came in at the same time and I had to read the non-renewables first.) I'm pretty ardent about not cracking the spines on paperbacks. They're pretty, and I hate to mar them with ugly white streaks. But I'm contemplating doing so for this book just so people can look at it on the library shelf and know that at least one other person read it.

[leannbolesch]

Libby does not take people who don't like to be online constantly into account, and only counts for reading time while you are connected to wi-fi. It thinks I read 300 pages in 1 minute.