2013 reading thoughts

Trying to pay more attention to what I read last couple of years. On the small scale of paying attention to each story as I read it, trying to see what works and what doesn’t to help improve my own writing. As well on the bigger scale of reading new stories and noticing when I fall into patterns of types of stories I am reading, so I can try to prevent myself from just going in circles reading the same stories, or the same types of stories, over and over again. Last year was more the latter, attempting to read new stories. This year was much more the former, writing reviews to capture what I thought about each story when I finished it so I would start thinking more about each story instead of simply reading it and setting it aside. It has been pretty successful, though for reasons I wouldn’t have predicted.

 

Book: H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction

H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions)

First off, this is a beautiful book. I can get pretty much everything Lovecraft wrote for free online, mostly due to confusion (intentional or otherwise) over how much of his stuff is under copyright. But I’ve wanted this volume for a while just because it looks impressive on my bookshelf and is a joy to just hold and examine. One of the best arguments that physical books aren’t going away. On to what’s in the book, forward ho!

 

Book: Fortune’s Pawn

Fortune’s Pawn (Paradox Series) by Rachel Bach

First mainstream fiction book I’ve read in a while. It reminded me why I’ve been sticking to fanfics for so long. It wasn’t bad, but certainly firmly in the mediocre section. Some interesting ideas, the concept for the main character was interesting, and there were cool worldbuilding bits. Yet the author never manages to make it all come together. He seems to ignore what I find interesting, and our big tough kick-ass heroine spends pretty much the entire book thinking about a guy. A lot of it comes down to the author has a good imagination, but no idea how to worldbuild. Which is the thing I look for in a book, so this one really felt flat. Plus the pacing is all screwed up. You could probably cut half of this book out, little bits here and there, and the story wouldn’t suffer a bit.

(spoilers below)

 

Pony Stories 61

Almost to the end of the year. Means I should be catching up on my posting. Would like to go into the new year with all my reading material blog posts from this year already up. Three days, three posts. I can do this. Of course that means I can’t read anything new until the first. I think I can do that. I mean, what are the chances that anything on my fimfiction to read list will finish up before 2014? Ha, I say, ha!

Also, I’m writing this on the day I’m publishing it, but through the power of the internet it will be showing up earlier this morning! Or, you know, that’s what the timestamp should say. Want all my posts to be released at the same time and I’m running behind so I can’t just have it post tomorrow and still get all three posts for my reading out by the end of the year. So, I will have to twist time itself to my will.

 

Pony Stories 60

Only two stories this time. Reading fanfics has slowed down. Haven’t run into any well recommended stories that I’ve been interested lately. Mostly just waiting for any of the 70+ stories on my read later list to finish up. Finally finished the Lovecraft book, which I’ll be doing a longer post on later in the week. Probably a day or two after this one goes up. In other news, ponyfic authors need to stop putting extra chapters at the end of their stories after I’ve read them. I’m downloading them into Calibre to put them on my kindle, which involves putting in their tags, word counts, cover images, all that fun stuff. I like data input. But there is no way to swap out a story file that I know of, so if the author puts out a extra chapter I ahve to re-do all the metadata by hand. Which is somewhat annoying.

…yeah, that’s the scale of the problems in my life. Things are pretty boring here on my bit of reality. I should probably get back to working on my writing instead of complaining about what might be the most trivial problem in existence. Existence is a fun word to use. Onward to pony thoughts.