I tried. I really tried. I was even going to finish the book, since I've abandoned a few in the last few weeks, but I just couldn't go on. It was clear that none of the major story arcs were going to have any closure by the end of Elvenbane and I couldn't care less about any of the characters. It was trope after trope after trope, a female lead who seems to have no flaws and always falls on her feet - mostly because of innate attributes or luck, mustache-twirling villains, everybody is oppressing women and young ones in particular, dragons, elves, human mages, even a brother-sister infatuation, to just catch every single cliché. The world building was shallow and the focus of the book was instead on ideas on how the world should be, what is fair, who is attractive and who is not and so on, their feelings.

  Basically, this is a young adult fantasy from the '90s: too old to face Internet scorn and too new to be actual fantasy and not derivative corporate bookstore slop.

  Not even sure who wrote what. The book I have says it's written by Mercedes Lackey. The online says it's Andre Norton, sometimes with Mercedes Lackey, both women, only Norton was 80 when the book was published. Honestly, I don't care.

  The problem I have most is that the plot is inconsistent. I don't want to get into details, but there are many jarring events that just contradict whatever happened before. Simple example: the magical Mary Sue teleports with her mind a big deer for food. Apparently you can do that, but the result is instant death for the animal. At no point in the book does she do that with any of her enemies. But there are bits where she smugly teaches people what they could do with the little magic they know. 

  Bottom line: the occasional bright spots were not worth slogging to finish this book. It's derivative, tropey, amateurish and could have been edited to half the length. Feels like a publishing house money scheme.

  I seem to be on a Did Not Finish spree, hope it's not me. Am I getting too picky? Am I turning into a snob? Will I start explaining how to read James Joyce in my blog? Hope not.

  A Darkling Sea felt so puerile that I didn't get to 10% of it. The whole idea is that three alien races (of varying technological prowess) meet on a deep ocean planet. Nothing in the book indicates James L. Cambias knows what the challenges of deep sea (or space) exploration are, or how to create characters, how to build worlds or how to generate interest. It reminded me of how I was writing in high school: all grand ideas, but without anything backing them up.

  And it's strange, I must have heard some really good things about this guy, I've got two books from him. I doubt I will try to read the other one.

  Sangu Mandanna's amateurish writing style put me completely off, this book is like written by a child. I am not going to continue reading this. The story is as shallow as the characters, the worldbuilding is terrible, I couldn't care less about anything. How A Spark of White Fire got to a four star trilogy starter on Goodreads is beyond me.

  This is a Young Adult book, featuring a young servant girl, who is secretly also a queen and protected by a god in a science-fantasy world of space ship wars and galactic empires. Only the secret is out in about a chapter and then it's all just... talking and people acting in ridiculously implausible ways. But at least it didn't offend me in any way, it wasn't a bait and switch, it wasn't agenda driven much, it was just a regular book that sucked.

  I've read Nature's Nether Regions, a book about penises, a while ago. It was funny, well documented and, most of all, entirely about male reproductive organs. So I thought I would read a book about butts and have just as much fun, right?

  Wrong. Butts, A Backstory is written by Heather Radke, a feminist writer using the idea of the butt, in her mind specifically the buttocks of the human female, as a pretext to explore the gender and racial context of history and her book has almost nothing to do with asses.

  Not only was I not interested in the subject, but the bait and switch angered me. How come all of these brilliant liberal writers who write just one book in their whole career need to trick readers to even start consuming their work? Is it maybe that their uncreative over serious surfing of the outrage zeitgeist is ultimately unfulfilling? That when the five minutes of "OMG, I can't believe they got away with that!" end, most people realize they either won't do anything about it, thus becoming part of the problem, or that their rage is just as impotent as any other of their emotions? Because I hate these overhyped books that say nothing and even when they do, they do it badly, yet no one seems to do anything about it, because how can you go against social agendas, regardless of how badly written?

  There, you've got my outrage! DNF!

  I occasionally try to add to my list books that have won literary awards, so that maybe I start to get what writing masterpieces are about. Unfortunately, most of the time I get to read obtuse and pompous works which have reached the top due to some alignment of agenda or talking about something fashionable. I guess this is somewhere in between.

  The Essex Serpent is certainly not a bad book, but it is boring as fuck. Imagine a gothic novel set in the 19th century where the focus is a giant serpent somewhere in Essex. A science leaning recent widow (coming from an abusive relationship, no less) is fascinated by the possibility of this creature. Around her orbit a socialist maid and good friend, a handsome priest dedicated to his terminally ill wife and a talented but unattractive surgeon who has a crush on the widow. Women kind of win, men sort of lose, but with some dignity. That's it in a nutshell.

  Now imagine that at every turn of phrase, EVERYTHING is being taken into focus: what people have eaten, eating and what they thought about it, what people have said, felt, felt that someone else feels or thinks or about what they said, colors, smells, sounds, social norms, romantic tension, you name it, it's there.

  I cannot believe many writers would have the talent to write like Sarah Perry, but I feel there are even more who wouldn't ever want to. You have to dedicate attention and effort to dig out the meaning of every sentence and then have the memory and fortitude to weave that meaning into the story that you think the author is trying to tell. There is a saying you shouldn't walk faster than what is needed to look around, but there is a difference between looking around and combing the plane of experience for every single thing. 

  Personally, I gave up after a quarter of the book, when I realized I didn't care about the characters, the world, the time or even the giant creature. This is categorized as fiction, but it's just a slightly dramatic historical tale that just happens to not be about people who have actually existed, although it is inspired by true events.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.

  Fortune's Fool is something that feels like Game of Thrones, but set in a 16th century type of world inspired by Spanish and Italian history, focused on a woman ex-princess, now warrior. A lot of intrigue, world building, betrayal and feudal machinations. I didn't feel like going through with it, though. 

  It's not that I didn't like Angela Boord's writing, I just didn't feel like going through the motions with the female ingénue, betrayed by unscrupulous men, forced to see the world as it is, harden, then get betrayed again in a somewhat cathartic situation that will bring closure to her teenage trauma.

  Bottom line: I might pick it up later, if I feel like reading about feudal intrigue and cruelty, but at the moment I choose not to.

  One Second After sounded really interesting: what happens after a massive EMP attack disrupts all electricity use in the United States. However William R. Forstchen's writing style and the things the book was focusing one really repelled me. Have you ever read one of those American airplane books where everything happens in a small U.S. town, where people all know each other and help each other through tight social networks and they are all God fearing red blooded nationalists and everything is about how the average Joe feels about things and how they fight to protect their families? Well, this is one of them.

  Bottom line: I might pick it up later, but I wanted to relax, not get aggravated, so I did not finish it.

  I have no idea who recommended me Singularity, by William Sleator. It was probably a horror channel or something. The idea in it, as well as its metaphorical interpretation, are pretty cool. Unfortunately, the writing style, characterization and plot are so bad I couldn't keep reading.

  So here is the story of a family who had prepared a two week vacation for the parents alone, also taking draconian measures that the two twin boys remaining home would have absolutely no fun. "But we're 16, we shave!" - a valid argument - is ignored. So here come the news of the dying of a forgotten relative which leaves them a mysterious country house. So here's the idea: how about the kids go keep people from vandalizing the house while the parents are on vacation, completely unsupervised, in a different environment than they are used to, on the advice and in the 10 minute care of the local lawyer who they had not met before? Perfect!

  The two boys are as different as black and scared. One of them is a full on psychopath, while the other is a soft scared little shit. They get there and immediately meet a random neighboring girl of the same age. They also discover just as fast a "singularity" of time and dimension with weird (and inconsistent) properties. One boy wants to "experiment", the other just wants to be careful and play with his dog, the girl seems to have no personality whatsoever.

  The cartoonish simplicity of the characters and the writing style makes the whole thing, narrated of course first person from the perspective of the "weak but good" brother, unbearable to read for me. And there are these leaps of logic and robotic reactions of the characters that are simply grating. There is this moment where the dog dies. One brother cries, the other and the girl go to eat and then have a swim. Yes, it's that dumb.

  It's a really short book, but after approximatively a third in, after the dog thing, I've decided I would not continue. There are spoiler synopses of the book online, I've read those, yes, interesting premise, terrible execution.

  The Humans started from an idea that I don't really like so much: an alien telling the story of how humans are. I've seen so many of these during the years and they are almost always boring, conceited and full of logic holes. Unfortunately this book is no different. Add to this I did not enjoy Matt Haig's writing style at all and you get a DNF.

  Bottom line: I will not be reading this book.

  I have to admit I had no idea what this book was to be about. I hoped maybe Jennifer Egan is related to Greg Egan, maybe A Visit from the Goon Squad is science fiction or at least something humorous. But it was about random characters (New Yorkers, no less) and their private lives and introspections. The writing was good, even compelling, but I really wasn't in the mood for it.

  Maybe I will retry later on.

  Oh, the disappointment! Considering I loved the Frank Herbert's Dune books and I've read them repeatedly, I was expecting to at least like something from his son's books set in the same universe. I mean, how bad could it be? He even wrote it in collaboration with a seasoned writer. Well, bad! I hated everything: the writing, the world which is completely different from Frank's, but mostly that Brian Herbert seems to have missed the point of Dune completely!

  Gone are the superhuman abilities of people that had ten millennia to evolve, after escaping A.I. annihilation and brutally training themselves  on hostile planets to become the best version of a human being. Gone are the thoughtful insights into people, the careful dialogues, the grand visions. What we get instead is formulaic trope after formulaic trope, the standard writing style taught by hacks in most "writing classes" in the U.S., dull characters, boring writing, dumb people, unneeded attention to technology and little to worldbuilding or character development, cramming all storylines and possible characters and references to the original books together. And then the way things people have not learned about the Dune universe until the sixth book, just casually blurted in a prequel book, just because Brian wanted to check all the boxes.

  I mean, there were moments when something was happening, like a full Reverend Mother assessing the situation in a dangerous context. And I was thinking "It's on now! She will come with brilliant insights, impossible strategies, use her..." and Brian started to describe the lighting in the room! Consider that this book has a lot going for it in terms of source material. I love the original Dune books so each reference, each character, each world, each culture that existed in those books should have anchored me to this one. But even so I couldn't damn finish it. After three weeks of forcing myself to read it I have barely reach half. No more!

  I am not unreasonable. I know that probably Brian Herbert was pushed to be a writer, even if he didn't have the skills or maybe even the drive. I know that people are not instantly good at what they are doing and that after a shitty book they have the opportunity to grow when writing the next ones. There are 25 books and comics in the Dune universe now! When the hell did he write all of those? Surely at least some of them would be good. But this first one is so bad, so incredibly bland, that I have no desire to read anything written by Brian Herbert ever again, except perhaps the biography of his father. I mean, at least he will have been invested in that one, right? He can't murder his dad's story like he did his legacy!

  I would rather (and I actually plan to) reread everything Frank Herbert ever wrote than try another butchery of Dune by Brian Herbert.

  Prions are a fascinating subject that we know almost nothing about. They are misfolded proteins that somehow proliferate inside our bodies and kill us with 100% efficiency. The diseases produced by prions are the deadliest there are, yet we know little about how prions multiply and even how they manage to kill us.

  Prions, a Challenge for Science, Medicine and Public Health System is a 2001 summary of works on prions. What does it say? That we don't know much. Then it gets terribly technical and, as I am not a biologist, I've decided to stop reading instead of pretending I understand anything. But I did scour the Internet for newer sources of knowledge and my finding is... that we still know shit about prions!

  So, what does misfolding mean? Prions are proteins, long chain molecules that are at the border of chemistry and mechanics in such a way that the way these molecules come to rest (fold) determines both their chemical and mechanical properties. Somehow (and no one actually knows how) a protein that is manufactured by our bodies (and that we don't really know what does) gets folded in the wrong way, leading to behavior that is detrimental to the body (in ways we don't really know). There is also a mechanism that turns proper proteins to this toxic form, much like a zombie invasion at nanoscale. And we don't know how it works.

  Why does it matter? Well, diseases such as scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle (commonly known as "mad cow disease") and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), its variant (vCJD), Gerstmann–Sträussler–Scheinker syndrome (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), and kuru in humans are caused by prions. There is evidence that the same mechanism that destroys the nervous system in these diseases is also at fault with Alzheimer's. A biological weapon using prions, assuming it affects a large portion of a population, would kill 100% of the victims, decades after the weapon was used and without spreading the disease further.

  And why are prions so deadly? Because the immune system doesn't react to them. They are not viruses, they don't have nucleic acids, they are really tiny proteins that slowly but surely spread throughout the body and and up killing the brain of the victim (not unlike zombies, hmm).

  The leading expert in prions is Stanley B. Prusiner, the man who coined the term prion in 1982. The idea that a disease could be spread by just proteins was developed in the 1960 by people such as biophysicist John Stanley Griffith. Prusiner did a lot of work, but even so, there is little we understand about this, more than 70 years later.

  Bottom line: prions are fascinating and show us how much more we have to learn about biochemistry and disease vectors. Even if we hypothesized their existence in the '60s, we still don't know much on how they work. I welcome more research on the subject, as diseases caused by prions, even if rare, are deadly without exception.

  I have a problem with LGBT books, because they are read by mostly LGBT people who then feel obliged to praise the story and how they identified with the characters. Have the writer be a woman and you will be hard pressed to find the few reviews written by people who just randomly stumbled upon the book or maybe lazily read some very positive reviews and decided to read it, like I did. And when you get burned like that, the more you stop trying to read these books, amplifying the effect.

  Unfortunately, Karen Memory is one of those books. Funny enough, I've previously read a short story collection by Elizabeth Bear and I've forgotten all about it, but then I reread my review and... it's kind of the same. She writes well, but I can't relate to the stories or the characters and mostly because she uses fantasy settings to sell basic bland ideas that are not related to fantasy or sci-fi. A bit of a bait and switch.

  Karen Memery (with an e) is a teenage middle-end lesbian prostitute who knows horses, fighting, shooting and is also a seamstress. In a Western-like steampunk universe which sounds suspiciously similar to episodes from Warrior (great TV show BTW), she is the protagonist, but there is very little steampunk and no sex. Instead it's all about diverse people caring about each other's feelings while the bad men are coming for them.

  20% of the book in, I've decided to abandon it, but I did make the effort to hunt down the reviews that were focusing on the story and not on the diversity or how cool steampunk westerns are. People finishing the book didn't think much of it either, especially since she seems to go all Mr. Nobody towards the end. She's a teenage girl!

  Anyway, no.

  Mirage is inspired by the "Years of Lead" in Morocco's 1960s history and its underlying message about the terrors of colonialism is quite important. At first I thought it was inspired by the plight of Arabs in Palestine, so it's also very timely. That is why it pains me to say that I couldn't go more than several chapters in. The writing is amateurish, the lead teen character inconsistent and annoying and this is clearly a YA book written by a woman for other women.

  That may sound misogynistic, but everyone who has ever hunted for a good book to read knows what I mean: you get to something that has rave recommendations, raised to the level of masterpiece by a few articles, but then when you start reading and you look closer at those reviews you see that they are mostly from women writing those five star animated GIF capital letter emoji filled things. And all the men give two stars and wonder how did they get to read the book in the first place, just like you.

  I don't want to be unfair to Somaiya Daud - this is her debut novel and I am sure her writing will get better with time - but for me reading through the rest of the book and knowing that it's yet another trilogy in the making, so having to wait even more to even get to the end of the story, was too much. It also addresses issues of personal helplessness, which is probably my Achilles' heel. If I ever want to get to those good books that I want to find, I have to fail fast and cut my losses early.

  Bottom line: I couldn't even begin to start reading the book. A combination of subject, debut writing style and aggressive and misleading advertising made me abandon it immediately.