Reading/Television Log (Since December 6th, 2017)

[flamebyrd]

Books
Welcome to Night Vale - Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor (audiobook read by Cecil Baldwin)*
The Obelisk Gate (Broken Earth #2) - N. K. Jemisin
Provenance - Ann Leckie

Next
Artemis - Andy Weir
The Stone Sky (Broken Earth #3) - N. K. Jemisin

*This took me about two years, but I finally finished it!


Television
Agatha Christie's Poirot - 3x05-4x02

Comments

[lannamichaels]

I'd be interested in knowing how the prose stacks up in Weir's next. I like the Watney first person POV stuff, but found his third person POV stuff very stilted. I've got Artemis on hold at the library, but there's a long queue. ;)

I skipped the night vale book to the last couple chapters. I really wish they'd stop doing so much dancing on arachnaphobia.

[flamebyrd]

I put it on ebook hold at the library and it came in within 2 weeks! I was amazed! Actually, all the books I've put on hold recently came through within a week or two, I've been really lucky.

Re: Night Vale: I'm not arachnophobic, thankfully, but in audiobook I was finding the more awkward scenes excruciating. (Also, spoilers: the tarantula gets dismembered offscreen at some point and I was genuinely sad about it.)

[flamebyrd]

And now that I've read Artemis: The prose works okay, it's in first person with only one vaguely third person section, very similar voice to Watney only without the conceit of being narrated to a recorder, so some of the science infodumps feel a bit out of place. But it's a fun little sciencey heist novel and I finished it very quickly once I started.

More critically (skip if you don't want to be reaction-spoiled), there were times where I was uncomfortably wondering if I was reading a book about Andy Weir's ideal woman.

[lannamichaels]

Thanks for the write-up, this is very good to know! Sadly, the ideal-woman-problem is one I am familiar with from wasting my childhood reading classic scifi :(

[nic]

...I remember when you got that book! (Nightvale.)

[flamebyrd]

I know, there was a really long break in the middle there between starting it and finishing it... /o\