Nona > Recent Status Updates

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck

Well well well. At one point I thought I had figured out who killed who and why, and I didn't mind that I had figured it out, it was satisfying. Then more information killed that theory, but that was OK too. Now some stuff has come out a little out of left field and I'm kind of annoyed, to be honest. Whether or not it's a red herring, I feel like there should have been more about it sooner.

As much as I like how the secrets were hinted at, I now see that what was hinted at as being very bad when revealed tends to feel a bit disappointingly tame. But that same kind of gradual reveal that feels natural works well for other information that's not labeled as significant but may well be. Again, really enjoying the multiple narrators of the audiobook.

I've seen reviews complaining how unpleasant most of the characters are, but I don't entirely agree, or at least they're not unpleasant enough that I'm turned off. The red herrings are obvious but fleshed out enough to make them fit easily into the story. The multiple narrators of the audiobook work well and I like the way secrets are drawn out, adding small details here and there.

There's an infodump that could have been trimmed considerably to help with pacing and some of the supporting characters weren't as easy to remember as they could have been, but the characters that get more focus are wonderfully drawn. Unsure how I feel about certain aspects of the worldbuilding at this point, because there are things that are familiar but other things that don't match up.

I've just gotten to that point where we're given a clear indicator that things are a WHOLE lot darker than we thought and now I kind of wish I could race through faster. (I'm listening to the audiobook which means I could speed it up if I wanted to, but I won't.)

This is like the embodiment of everything I hate about 20th century literary fiction. Another idealized man, exceptional in every way without effort or error. Not to mention that Ms. Buck uses the common erroneous meaning of the Immaculate Conception.

There's a reference to a Stephen King novel here that I don't think was intentional, as it unnecessarily called attention to a similarity between a character in this book in that book. The truly unfortunate part of it is that both characters actually owe their existence to a much older character that's been an archetype for a long time now.

I'm embarrassed to say that I gave myself less than a day to read this before the book club met and unsurprisingly I didn't finish it. I did like what I read though, and would be interested in going back to it at some point. She was an impressive person.

Oh God, why didn't I read this years ago?

So anyway, mysteriouspress.com was having a sale and I may have gone a bit crazy ... but for four shortish novels, one shortish anthology and one short story for nine dollars, not too bad. And only one of them hadn't been on my radar before (but the author was).

Library books working again on the Nook, but DAMN it should not have been that difficult.

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating it!

Tried the reboot and re-install multiple times in different order. Adobe Digital Editions swears my Nook is authorized. *cries*

So my Nook gets a system update and now it won't open my (Adobe Digital Editions) library books. Updated to the most current version of ADE and then removed & re-copied the library books, restarted the Nook - still no joy. It's waaaay too late for me to continue messing with this, but I think I'm going to bang my head against the digital wall a few more times before I give up for the night.

A tip for writers: if you're going to include a descriptive detail, sooner is better than later. Don't give your readers 114 pages to come up with their own mental picture and then suddenly upend it for them (it's an ebook, so I did a search and confirmed that was what happened).

I hate it when they tick me off in the introduction. She gives a list of books that contributed to the surge of vampire popularity in the 70's and then dismisses *Salem's Lot* because it didn't make vampires more sympathetic. No, it just brought the monster to Middle America like the rest of his books - you know, that thing he did that made horror the viable genre it is and probably the reason you have that job?

I laughed out loud when I read metaphor being called a "semantic impertinence".