Interlude - Buh-Bye Buddies and THE END

AND THEN IT WAS OVER. All. Over.

And it ends with failure - 73 books out of a goal of 10. Not terrible, but most definitely not 100 (and with some shady dealings for the last 15 or so books...)

I'm not much for big emotion wrap-ups, and while I have supremely enjoyed the last year of reading, what I'm most excited about is diving into the next year of books. So enjoy the last two abandoned causes of 2018, and lets get on with 2019!

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

WHO in their right mind published this tragic piece of utter shit? And who okayed not one, not two, but THREE MORE BOOKS in the same horrendous vein??

Good lord.

I feel like I'm reading a junior high kid's first stab at a story. Prompt: remake a fairy tale. Some of the concepts are cool; the tin man has the potential to be scary, and so does the freaky Frankenstein Scarecrow, grafting human ears onto crows. But besides that? The characters are shells of anything real, with flimsy and utterly confusing motivations; the dialogue is stilted and cliche; and the plot is pretty much funded by the protag "having a feeling that" and "getting the sense that". I wish a writer with some actual skill would give this story a chance and rewrite the damn thing with some actual talent. Holeeee fuck. 

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

I tried with this book. I so did not want to abandon an SF book, but I just got so - damn - bored. At first, I was into it - the sociological and psychological details are fascinating, and when tensions bloom among characters, I thought ohh boy, here we GO, this is going to get good!

Buuut then the narrator changes (yep, it's one of those books) to one of the more sciency characters, and I just could not slog through one more goddamn description of terrain and dirt and dust and land. I applaud the breadth and depth of Robinson's research and description, but enough is enough.

I can't believe I'm saying this but: make the movie, and I'll watch it. Describing the magnitude of being the first settlers on Mars in mediocre vocabulary stuffed into run-on sentences just doesn't have the same umph as a soaring cinematicized version of the same scene.