Donna > Recent Status Updates

During Our Heroine's introduction, she stares into a reflective surface and thinks about how she doesn't fuss with long hair or makeup because, after all, she's not beautiful. A few pages later a new character decides that she's surprisingly unique, but no one would say she's beautiful. The next time someone describes this chick as striking rather than pretty, I'm out. I don't care how high the ratings are.

The start of the book picks up out of nowhere, not a very gentle entry point for those of us who didn't reread. I was bearing with it okay, but I just ran across a pointlessly squicky description of the new antagonist's sex assault based interrogation technique. Tell me again why repeated rapey plot elements have any place in romantic fantasy?

As an NC native, I wish like hell that he'd have picked a different setting. I don't normally get all precious about my immersion, but none of this feels the slightest bit like NC.

The book has moved on from castaway stories to mountain men, which is much less interesting to me.

I'm going to keep pushing through this because the stories are fascinating, but it's sometimes awkward and unclear. It feels a little like the author absorbed too much of the style of the centuries-old sources he consulted.

I was looking forward to this, but between the awkward writing and Midshipman Exposition I may not make it much farther.

I think I'd enjoy the Prisoner of Zenda similarities a lot more if the heroine stopped pointing out how "Prisoner of Zenda" everything is.

It's way too early to make a fair judgement, but I'm already grumpy. Giving character description by way of a handy reflective surface is nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying.

I can't decide what makes this one drag more, the jumpy flashbacks or the wordy descriptions of food, clothing, and architecture.

This book is a slog so far, but I keep hoping it's going to pick up.

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They're all participating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Normally I think authors overdo it when refreshing our memories about the events of previous books, but I'm drawing a blank at some of these references. I think the constant upheavals in cast, position, and location in this series make it more difficult for any but the most major details to worm themselves into my head.

I got some books as a Secret Santa gift, I'm so excited!

I don't think the author fully makes his case in this chapter. He wonders why Carter wouldn't use his projection ability to hop to more planets, and while Burroughs is an inconsistent writer at times, is it really that amazing to believe the character would want to settle down with his family and adopted home?

Nick Carter: Killmaster is apparently the kind of guy who names his gun.

"But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folks, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity."

Bonus points for using the word "highfalutin."

I'm less than fond of the heavy use of antagonist PoV so far.

Is it bad that I'm actively rooting for at least half of these characters to drown?

This afternoon I was reading a passage from this one about an earthquake and then we had a small earthquake here in Raleigh (which never has earthquakes). So that was weird.

Is it bad that the author misnaming a popular Madonna single while describing a bar scene makes me less trusting of her actual research?

Hey friends list, if any of you still need a Google+ invitation, feel free to message me an email address and I can try to send you one.

I'm having issues with the focus of this one. The author keeps mentioning things that sound cool so briefly that they're confusing, but will then spend an entire page describing, for example, the plot of Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn to introduce a chapter about a museum near the inn that the book was based on.

Just got six Sabatini paperbacks on ebay for $11. I win.

If Julia and Brisbane actually manage to iron out one of the most annoying aspects of previous books, I'll be very, very happy.

The author writes that Jean Baret's unmasking as a woman meant the sailors "no longer treated her as one of the guys." Wow. The Baret info is sourced to a 1866 book that probably didn't include the accounts that Baret was brutally assaulted by her shipmates, but reading that part was awkward all the same.

The author just namedropped someone in context of another traveler's statement about her, without giving any context or info on the first woman at all. Wikipedia tells me she was an opera singer, but what's the point of including someone else's opinion on her if we will never be told by the author why that's significant?