Cory Busse > Recent Status Updates

I'd literally fling this book out the window, but I borrowed it from the library.

Chris Orcutt decided to try his hand at "Ready Player One," "Stranger Things," Memberberries-style fiction, and reveals himself to be a total poseur in the first dozen pages.

You don't get to try to appeal to 80s pop-culture nerds and then call the "wampa" from Empire Strikes Back a "bantha" and expect me to finish your novel.

I think I remember a Times review of this book and thinking I'd like it. Based on the blurb, I'm not so sure. Here goes nothin'.

"There's a line I read once, by an Egyptian poet whose name I cannot remember: that a diary's function is not to show you who you are, but who it is you have ceased to be."

Hmmm. Once again, off to a dubious start. Fifty pages in, and this book is utterly unsurprising. I should bail. I think I'm gonna bail. *Sigh* I probably won't bail. I'm way behind on my reading challenge, and this thing is going to read fast.

Reading this one on vacation, and I read the prologue before I tossed it in my bag. I'm not gonna lie...I dunno about this one...

Okay...I'm about 50 pages in, and I'm not sure about this one. I can't tell if Nick Mamatas' writing is just bad, or if it's SUPPOSED to read like masturbatory fan fiction. Only time will tell!

I'm hitting "pause" on this one. It's a YA novel (my own fault, I suppose; I didn't read the synopsis before diving in). That would be fine on its own, but TJ Klune rips off everything from Harry Potter to The Mysteroius Benedict Society to The Rook, and that was just in the first 60 pages. I handed it off to my 13-year-old to see if it's something worth finishing.

Very sciency. And I'm barely smart enough to separate the stuff that's actual science from the stuff that's convenient sci-fi nonsense. Just the way I like it...

"Whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad."