H.S. Stone's Blog

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on a new non-fiction book. Well, it's completed and published! Introducing... Your First Investing Playbook: A Beginner's Investment Roadmap.

What led me to write this book was wanting my kids to be financially prepared when they enter adulthood. Unfortunately, financial literacy isn't something that was taught to most of us in school, and we either learned it through trial and error or didn't learn it at all. I experienced the former path, so I want...

It's been ages, but I'm writing a new book again! Instead of writing another speculative fiction story though, this time, I'm writing a non-fiction book. 

The main reason that I chose non-fiction is that I found my schedule is more suitable for writing non-fiction than fiction. Although I've been doing more research for this book than I have for any of my fiction books, it's also been easier for me to dive into writing when I have just a few minutes to spare. This has been a problem for me in wri...

Today and tomorrow, Hopeless, the first book in my After Z-Day series, will be FREE on Amazon! Go on and give it a try, especially if you're a fan of zombie apocalypses. If you like it, consider picking up Relentless and Soulless too. You can get the entire series for less than $7 this weekend!

 

 

In May, I listed some highly rated fantasy books that I didn't like as much as other readers did. In this post, I'll do the opposite: list books I liked more than other readers did, but I won't confine the list to the fantasy genre. To determine the list, I sorted my Goodreads read list by rating and chose the books with the lowest ratings that I gave 5 stars to.

In alphabetical order by title, here are the eight lowest-rated books that I liked more than other readers:

All This & More by Peng Shep...

At the beginning of the year, I set a reading goal to finish reading more series, or at least make more progress through them than I usually do. This is because I'm notoriously slow in making my way through a series, even the ones I like. 

I've been reading at least one book in a series each month. The books I read so far were:

Royal Assassin - Robin HobbFatal Revenant - Stephen R Donaldson The Poppy War - R.F. KuangThe Dark Forest - Cixin Liu The Valiant - Lesley Livingston Death's End - Cixin Li...

No book will appeal to every reader. That is true no matter what the book is or how well-written it is. On this blog, I've documented my reading history with well-regarded books, including my positive experience with Goodreads Choice Awards finalists in 2021 and my less positive experience with NY Times bestsellers in 2020. I thought it'd be interesting to look back on which books from my read shelf have the highest Goodreads ratings that I didn't like. In this post, I'll focus on fantasy books ...

I've seen several social media posts lately where readers share their auto-buy authors. These are authors whose books a reader would automatically buy just because they were written by the authors. 

I went through all of the books I rated on Goodreads to come up with my auto-buy authors. I was surprised that there are only three:

Brandon Sanderson - For anyone who has been following me, this is a no-brainer. Not only will I buy any book he publishes, I will fund any crowdsourcing campaign he start...

For the past few years, I've come up with a reading challenge every January. This year, I decided not to. However, that doesn't mean I don't have any reading goals. I'm notoriously slow in reading a series, and I intend to address that this year.

Months or years can pass between my reading one book in a series and the next. Even when I enjoyed the book I read and the next book is already available, I don't continue the series immediately. There's no good reason for waiting such a long time betwee...

 

Based on the fact that books from The Dandelion Dynasty series took the top three spots on my favorite reads list, you could say 2024 was the year of The Dandelion Dynasty. After reading the first book in 2023, I completed the series in 2024, and it has become one of my favorite series of all time.

Now, on to the list...

1. Speaking Bones - Ken Liu 

It was difficult to choose the top book in The Dandelion Dynasty because they were all great, but I gave the nod to Speaking Bones, the conclusion t...

As we near the end of another year, it's time to look back on the books I read in 2024. At the beginning of the year, I set a goal to read at least 100 books, including re-reading some of my favorites, and I managed to read 102, the same number of books I read in 2023. (The graphic above shows 91 books because I didn't log the 11 books I re-read.)

As for the average rating for the books I read, if I exclude the re-reads, it was 4.04 stars, slightly higher than the 4.01 average from 2023's books ...