I am really not that busy...
...so why is it that I always seem to be scrambling to get things done? *sigh* I really thought that by now I'd have a little routine down. Get up, check the news, check the job sites, apply for stuff, HAVE ALL THE FUNS DOING WHATEVER I WANT, sleep. Not so much. I need structure. Tomorrow I have to go to library and shopping, Sunday is Sunday, and Monday I have plans with friends and then family. So... Tuesday? Yes. Tuesday is Structure Day.
Meanwhile, . These ones were not as successful as the previous two.
03. Hell Divers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Two hundred and fifty years after a nuclear holocaust, the last remnants of humankind live on two airships and rely on futuristic paratroopers to scavenge the blasted landscape for supplies.
After what seemed to be an EMP destroyed the way of regular warfare, humanity retreated to fifty airships. Now 250 years later, there are only two airships remaining and hell divers - paratroopers in short-term radiation-proof suits - keep them fueled with nuclear cells and supplies by parachuting to the surface of the radiated planet to search for whatever is needed.
There is an interesting idea here. The divers shoot out from tubes that were originally used for bombs, reminding them and us that the airships were not rescue ships for civilians but were actually used to destroy the planet. Unfortunately, most of the details like that get lost in the macho man style prose. I pictured this being written in the 1940's by a guy hunched over a manual typewriter with a cigar stuck between his teeth. The characters are well-worn tropes: the hardened (anti)hero who lost someone; the stalwart Captain struggling to hold things together; the old flame; the interchangeable support-divers. There's even a plucky genius kid who saves the day when all seems lost.
I am a big fan of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, and in my opinion writing the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust is the 'hardest' to pull off successfully. If you are writing about almost any other apocalyptic event you can pretty much make it up as you go… but we all know what devastation nuclear bombs would bring. We know about nuclear winter. We know about radiation.
So even if you discount the cardboard cutout characters, the centre just does not hold. There is a radiation plagued lower level and the cancer ridden residents, and I get the opinion we're supposed to think that the Captain increasing their rations - a family of three gets two wrinkled potatoes, three tomatoes and three helpings of spinach for two days - while the divers and those in authority eat fresh fruit and meat is more than fair. There are mutants who live on radiation but also, somehow, want to eat humans because… that makes as much sense as anything else. And wouldn't every piece of salvage they bring back also be teeming with radiation thus making everyone sick? If they could somehow rid those items of the radiation to make them safe why then couldn't they do the same with the shielding for the lower levels? How are they continually able to make new weapons and radiation proof suits? Couldn't they give some of those damn suits to the people on the lower levels?
Ay yi yi.
2/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 01 - title without A, T or Y
Popsugar Challenge 28 - meant to read in 2019
356 pages
04. Thirst by Benjamin Warner
When all of the fresh water suddenly disappears, some people will do anything to quench their thirst.
Eddie is stuck in a colossal traffic jam and the police are nonexistent. Panicked about his wife Laura, he runs home. Along the way he notices that the local stream has turned to ash, and when he arrives home he sees that there is no water in the taps. So begins Thirst, a book that wants to be a dreamy stream of consciousness rap but is bogged down in overly florid language and a shaky foundation. Eddie is an unreliable narrator, but in order for this to work the writer first has to set a solid ground from which he strays. Eddie is unreliable from the start - long before paranoia and dehydration set in - so as a reader I never felt connected to anything that happened because I never knew if it was real or not.
Another interesting but frustrating aspect of the story is that Eddie is clearly abusive to Laura. He has isolated her from her family and they as a couple have no friends. Eddie repeatedly refuses to let Laura leave the house - to check on a neighbour, to search for a missing child, to go to the stream, to get to her family. I wanted her to smack him and take off.
Run, Laura. Run far far away.
1/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 22 - survival theme
Popsugar Challenge 34 - picked up because the title caught my eye
286 pages
05. Boy Erased by Garrard Conley
A memoir of the author's experiences at "Love in Action", a gay conversion therapy centre.
Garrard was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church in the southern USA by a father who was called late in life to be a preacher. Prior to this, his father ran a car dealership where every day he led his employees in bible study. When he is 19, Garrard goes away to university and there discovers that there is life outside what he's been taught religiously, though he constantly struggles with feelings of guilt and shame. When he is outed to his parents, he voluntarily goes into the Love in Action program as an outpatient for two weeks.
This should have been a heartbreaking yet ultimately moving and triumphant story. Garrard broke free! He refused to let Love in Action or the prejudices of his family/friends/religion stop him from being his true self!
And yet. What we have here is meandering and overwritten. Conley takes the narrative back and forth between his high school years and his time in the LIA program, yet never seems to hit on the heart of the matter. It almost seems like he decided to write this memoir but then still wanted to keep things purposefully vague. And probably the saddest thing is that he still doesn't seem healed from the experience.
2/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 23 - LGBTQ author
Popsugar Challenge 40 - from a past Popsugar Challenge (debut novel)
340 pages
06. Year One by Nora Roberts
A plague wipes out most of the world's population and also brings forth new powers to some of those left alive.
I love a good apocalypse. And a plague is a great way to start one off. Wipe out most of the people, and the remainder are going to be split between good guys and bad guys. Now the good guys have gotta get to safety, find food, protect their people. Confront some harsh truths about themselves. Maybe do things they didn't think they could.
Roberts adds a little wrinkle. Some of the people in this almost-the-same-as-our-world already had little inklings of power. If she concentrated very hard, sometimes Lana could light a candle with her mind. Jonah, a paramedic, is able to 'see' if people will live or die. The releasing of the plague, which is a big mystical thingmabob, also increases their powers and activates powers in people that didn't know they had them at all. So now it's not just good guys vs. bad guys. Now some of them are super-powered.
I think this would have been faaaaaaaaaabulous… if the events in this book had been split into two books. There is just so much story here. We follow three distinct groups at first, but they are all so "good" that they do tend to blend into each other. Only one is set apart - Jonah, who can 'see' when someone is going to die - because he is overwhelmed and considers suicide. Our groups flee the city, meet faeries and elves, discover their own powers, and eventually meet up. Oh, and there's a prophesied golden child called The One who will save the world, or something.
All this happens so quickly that it's overwhelming. At the end of one chapter Group A is setting off in a boat. At the beginning of the very next chapter they are meeting up with Group B and they are in an SUV. Um. What? Slow down, Nora! Let the story breathe, man. I wanted to see what happened in those in between stages between boat and SUV. And if there was no story there, then maybe the whole thing should have been reconsidered so that there WAS story there. I wanted to hear how Little Fred felt about suddenly having wings, and how Eddie found his dog Joe, and what the heck was up with Flynn and the people of the village. I wanted MORE STORY, because this had the potential to be so great and instead it just whizzes along like she had to get everything in under 450 pages.
It's also pretty obvious who the bad guys are, because the good guys are so damned good that anybody else stands out. The action scenes are well written, especially a harrowing trip through a tunnel. Those are the moments I wanted to see more of, because they were creepy and off-putting but also steeped in great characterization.
This is the first of a trilogy, but I don't think I'll pick up the remaining two books.
3/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 05 - 1st book of a series
Popsugar Challenge 23 - bird on cover
419 pages
Books Read: 6/85
Goodreads Challenge: 6/52
Popsugar Challenge: 6/40
Total Pages Read: 2113
.
Meanwhile, . These ones were not as successful as the previous two.
03. Hell Divers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Two hundred and fifty years after a nuclear holocaust, the last remnants of humankind live on two airships and rely on futuristic paratroopers to scavenge the blasted landscape for supplies.
After what seemed to be an EMP destroyed the way of regular warfare, humanity retreated to fifty airships. Now 250 years later, there are only two airships remaining and hell divers - paratroopers in short-term radiation-proof suits - keep them fueled with nuclear cells and supplies by parachuting to the surface of the radiated planet to search for whatever is needed.
There is an interesting idea here. The divers shoot out from tubes that were originally used for bombs, reminding them and us that the airships were not rescue ships for civilians but were actually used to destroy the planet. Unfortunately, most of the details like that get lost in the macho man style prose. I pictured this being written in the 1940's by a guy hunched over a manual typewriter with a cigar stuck between his teeth. The characters are well-worn tropes: the hardened (anti)hero who lost someone; the stalwart Captain struggling to hold things together; the old flame; the interchangeable support-divers. There's even a plucky genius kid who saves the day when all seems lost.
I am a big fan of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, and in my opinion writing the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust is the 'hardest' to pull off successfully. If you are writing about almost any other apocalyptic event you can pretty much make it up as you go… but we all know what devastation nuclear bombs would bring. We know about nuclear winter. We know about radiation.
So even if you discount the cardboard cutout characters, the centre just does not hold. There is a radiation plagued lower level and the cancer ridden residents, and I get the opinion we're supposed to think that the Captain increasing their rations - a family of three gets two wrinkled potatoes, three tomatoes and three helpings of spinach for two days - while the divers and those in authority eat fresh fruit and meat is more than fair. There are mutants who live on radiation but also, somehow, want to eat humans because… that makes as much sense as anything else. And wouldn't every piece of salvage they bring back also be teeming with radiation thus making everyone sick? If they could somehow rid those items of the radiation to make them safe why then couldn't they do the same with the shielding for the lower levels? How are they continually able to make new weapons and radiation proof suits? Couldn't they give some of those damn suits to the people on the lower levels?
Ay yi yi.
2/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 01 - title without A, T or Y
Popsugar Challenge 28 - meant to read in 2019
356 pages
04. Thirst by Benjamin Warner
When all of the fresh water suddenly disappears, some people will do anything to quench their thirst.
Eddie is stuck in a colossal traffic jam and the police are nonexistent. Panicked about his wife Laura, he runs home. Along the way he notices that the local stream has turned to ash, and when he arrives home he sees that there is no water in the taps. So begins Thirst, a book that wants to be a dreamy stream of consciousness rap but is bogged down in overly florid language and a shaky foundation. Eddie is an unreliable narrator, but in order for this to work the writer first has to set a solid ground from which he strays. Eddie is unreliable from the start - long before paranoia and dehydration set in - so as a reader I never felt connected to anything that happened because I never knew if it was real or not.
Another interesting but frustrating aspect of the story is that Eddie is clearly abusive to Laura. He has isolated her from her family and they as a couple have no friends. Eddie repeatedly refuses to let Laura leave the house - to check on a neighbour, to search for a missing child, to go to the stream, to get to her family. I wanted her to smack him and take off.
Run, Laura. Run far far away.
1/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 22 - survival theme
Popsugar Challenge 34 - picked up because the title caught my eye
286 pages
05. Boy Erased by Garrard Conley
A memoir of the author's experiences at "Love in Action", a gay conversion therapy centre.
Garrard was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church in the southern USA by a father who was called late in life to be a preacher. Prior to this, his father ran a car dealership where every day he led his employees in bible study. When he is 19, Garrard goes away to university and there discovers that there is life outside what he's been taught religiously, though he constantly struggles with feelings of guilt and shame. When he is outed to his parents, he voluntarily goes into the Love in Action program as an outpatient for two weeks.
This should have been a heartbreaking yet ultimately moving and triumphant story. Garrard broke free! He refused to let Love in Action or the prejudices of his family/friends/religion stop him from being his true self!
And yet. What we have here is meandering and overwritten. Conley takes the narrative back and forth between his high school years and his time in the LIA program, yet never seems to hit on the heart of the matter. It almost seems like he decided to write this memoir but then still wanted to keep things purposefully vague. And probably the saddest thing is that he still doesn't seem healed from the experience.
2/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 23 - LGBTQ author
Popsugar Challenge 40 - from a past Popsugar Challenge (debut novel)
340 pages
06. Year One by Nora Roberts
A plague wipes out most of the world's population and also brings forth new powers to some of those left alive.
I love a good apocalypse. And a plague is a great way to start one off. Wipe out most of the people, and the remainder are going to be split between good guys and bad guys. Now the good guys have gotta get to safety, find food, protect their people. Confront some harsh truths about themselves. Maybe do things they didn't think they could.
Roberts adds a little wrinkle. Some of the people in this almost-the-same-as-our-world already had little inklings of power. If she concentrated very hard, sometimes Lana could light a candle with her mind. Jonah, a paramedic, is able to 'see' if people will live or die. The releasing of the plague, which is a big mystical thingmabob, also increases their powers and activates powers in people that didn't know they had them at all. So now it's not just good guys vs. bad guys. Now some of them are super-powered.
I think this would have been faaaaaaaaaabulous… if the events in this book had been split into two books. There is just so much story here. We follow three distinct groups at first, but they are all so "good" that they do tend to blend into each other. Only one is set apart - Jonah, who can 'see' when someone is going to die - because he is overwhelmed and considers suicide. Our groups flee the city, meet faeries and elves, discover their own powers, and eventually meet up. Oh, and there's a prophesied golden child called The One who will save the world, or something.
All this happens so quickly that it's overwhelming. At the end of one chapter Group A is setting off in a boat. At the beginning of the very next chapter they are meeting up with Group B and they are in an SUV. Um. What? Slow down, Nora! Let the story breathe, man. I wanted to see what happened in those in between stages between boat and SUV. And if there was no story there, then maybe the whole thing should have been reconsidered so that there WAS story there. I wanted to hear how Little Fred felt about suddenly having wings, and how Eddie found his dog Joe, and what the heck was up with Flynn and the people of the village. I wanted MORE STORY, because this had the potential to be so great and instead it just whizzes along like she had to get everything in under 450 pages.
It's also pretty obvious who the bad guys are, because the good guys are so damned good that anybody else stands out. The action scenes are well written, especially a harrowing trip through a tunnel. Those are the moments I wanted to see more of, because they were creepy and off-putting but also steeped in great characterization.
This is the first of a trilogy, but I don't think I'll pick up the remaining two books.
3/5 stars
Goodreads Challenge 05 - 1st book of a series
Popsugar Challenge 23 - bird on cover
419 pages
Books Read: 6/85
Goodreads Challenge: 6/52
Popsugar Challenge: 6/40
Total Pages Read: 2113
.