Reading Responses at 2am – SPOILER ALERT!
My spoiler saturated thoughts on the books I read
Woo-EEE! That was a rootin-tootin fun time. Still not as good as Lady Jane, but still fun! Liked in the last book my favorite characters were actually the two side characters of Frank and Annie. Their back and forth and how they were so cutely in love with each other was fun to watch. Plus I really like “Annie Get your Gun” and they had a lot of quote from that, which made me happy.
Much. Better. Still not as good as “ False Prince”, but then I was reminded that not all books are meant for all audiences.
Nic had the same teenage arrogance as the False Prince guy who’s name I can’t remember, only with a lot more creative similes. And a couple of times I felt like it went a bit fast with Girl, but then I was reminded that the audience of this book is probably younger. It’s not like in the Stormlight Archives where redhead and zebra hair take three books to end up together.
I was bugged by how much was revealed, worried that like the first book she was dumping too many secrets out- but somehow she managed to keep enough around and spin it so that there is still a “so what’s going on?” to keep it interesting.
Let’s see if she dumps too much too quickly like the Deceiver’s Heart did.
Woooo! I liked this one! Not as much as Lady Jane, but this turned into all sorts of fun! Because- GHOSTS!
I liked how in the intro they apologized to England for what they were about to do to their literature and I thought they were just talking about Jane Eyre, but nope! They hit a whole bunch of books!
They also managed to hit every part of Jane Eyre that made you raise an eyebrow, but you went with it. Not here! I liked how Helen mentioned to Jane once referring to Mr. and Mrs. Rochester that they looked sooooo age appropriate for each other and just had to laugh.
Ok, I mentioned in Lady Jane how I wasn’t crazy about Edward until I was and then I loved him. Well, I REALLY didn’t like Charlotte. Her character grated on me all the wrong ways – that is, until I didn’t. And then I loved her. And of course she was awesome! Only someone dumb wouldn’t be able to see it from page one!
Anyways, these books are just so crazy fun. There is another one that I’m going to crack open tonight. Sure, I have all of Oathbringer to get through before book four comes out in six weeks, but honestly how long can it REALLY take to burn through 1233 pages?!?!
That was amazing and wonderful and DEFINITELY going on my “read every year” list.
I read something once (one of my tumbler turned pins – please don’t hate/sue me for not looking up who said it) that said basically “whenever I tell people that I’m into alternate history books, they think ‘oh! So you like books that talk about things like what would have happened if the Nazis had won World War 2’ and I say ‘yes…’. But really the truth is that I’m into stories that talk about how President Cannon imported hippos for the Florida Everglades but then they turned rabid and they had to hire samurai to come and put them down.”
This book was like that. I have NO idea how they could have come up with an idea for a book like this, but once I read it I couldn’t come up with a reason why no one had thought of writing this book before! This book’s very existence makes the world a better and more full place!
I loved Jane, and I loved G, and I loved Edward, but of course not as much as Jane and G. And I knew they would end up loving each other because when two good people end up forced into relationships it always turns out happy.
Yes that is a naïve and overly optimistic view of the universe, but right now it is easy to believe that happy endings are real. Who cares about reality?!? It’s the middle of the night (well, according to old people married with kids in their 30s standards) and I can shove all that reality out the window for a couple of hours! (Remember the year I’m currently living in… or don’t. I’ve read several memes that have suggested we just skip this year in the future when we talk about the 2020s.)
I can’t believe how good the plot was, and I LOVE the intro to part two when they flat out say they are throwing history out the window. I thought over and over “this is the part when G gets control over his powers!” But then he didn’t! And I got annoyed, but had faith that it was going to be wonderful when it happened.
And then it was.
Part of me is sad that their first night wasn’t brought on by the copious amount of nudity in this book. 😜. But like the time before, it was perfect when it came.
Final thoughts? And excellent history book that should be used as the text in all history classes for the foreseeable future.
❤️
Update: oh I needed a book like this right now. When I was looking through my five star books because my brain was breaking and I needed a safe place for it to be, I ran across this one and it was a no brainer. I loved it even more than the first time. ❤️
Update: I got this book for Christmas so it was there and ready when I needed it this time. Still brilliant 😁❤️
Spoiler alert – They all make it.
I know I sound awful to give away the ending, but this is a true story and how I sell this book to people always goes something like “it’s about an expedition to Antarctica in the 1910s and they get trapped down there with their ship destroyed so they have to rescue themselves and the crazy thing is that EVERYONE OF THEM SURVIVES.”
After that people usually respond with “WHAT!?!?!? BUT HOW!?!?!?!? THAT SOUNDS AMAZING!!!!! I’M GOING TO GO READ IT RIGHT NOW!!!!”
In case you didn’t know this is the only correct response.
I put this book up for book club this year and everyone picked it. Maybe because everyone is nice to me when I get emotional and practically beg them to pick my book, but I still think I convinced them all when I read this quote to them: “No matter the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.”
I know you just said “wow” under your breath, and that is pretty much what everyone else did too.
Or maybe I just thought they did because I did and I like to project my obsession for certain books on other people. 😛
I read this book for the first time in college when I was going through a hard time (when wasn’t I going through a hard time in college?) and was just enthralled the entire time. Every single moment just drove me crazy, even though a lot of it is them sitting around being cold. But those moments, like when they were rowing for their lives in that storm or being chased by the killer fog, ug, my heart still speeds up with excitement thinking about them!
I could ENJOY this book because I knew the ending, and I could be INSPIRED by this book because it really happened, and I was driven to finish it because of that amazing, tantalizing HOW.
And that’s where I was punched in the face with the incredible leadership of Shacklton.
When I read Boys in the Boat back in 2017 (another incredible true story book) Spicy was still giving the White House press briefing. The government was so messed up at the time that things that should have been so boring they weren’t even on your radar (coughC-SPANcough) suddenly became enthralling. (We were never meant to know who held the cabinet position for housing and urban development!!!) It wasn’t from any real civic engagement as much as watching a train wreck to see every day how bad it was going to be.
ANYWAY! I was in the part of the book where the Nazis were bugging the journalist in Germany to stop writing about things that the government was doing wrong because it would only make people sad, and the next morning Sean Spicer (I really don’t feel like looking up how to spell his name) said almost word for word the exact same thing.
Yeah. I know.
The week I started this book this time around was the week when the Woodward tapes came out with Trump saying junk about how he knew how serious the virus was even though at the same time he was blowing it off when he talked about it to the public. The official reasoning was he did this to keep America from panicking. And despite everything I had concluded from previous data collection about his leadership abilities I found myself thinking “maybe that’s not such a bad reason. A leader is supposed to keep people calm during a crisis, and telling everyone how catastrophic the situation really was might have spun the nation into a deeper spiral than it is now.”
Then on Friday, I started reading this book and came across this line:
“Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent – a genius even – that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history – genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, ‘the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth, bar none.’ For all his blind spots and inadequacies, Shackleton merited this tribute: For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
2020
He never lied to his men. He always made sure they knew what was at stake, but he remained calm and radiated confidence so those around him were able to keep their confidence as well. He kept them focused on the goal of getting back to civilization by giving them daily tasks they could accomplish that day. And most importantly he carried the weight of the lives and welfare of every single man under his care.
The contrast was too much for me not to have found the answer to my question.
For the rest of the week, I blabbed to my friends and select family members, always ending with “clearly we’ve been praying for the wrong thing all year. We should have been praying for Shackleton!”
I wish the percentage I was joking was higher.
I tried. I really did.
The last book was hard-ish to get through because the writing felt… jarring. I can’t really explain it. Something about how the scenes were set up in the overall plot and how they were written and a bunch of junk I guess. The characters, plot, and world-building was great, but reading felt like a car that just had a little bit of a grinding sound even though everything else was fine.
Anyways, it was fine enough that I wanted to finish the trilogy and see what happened because I’m a sucker for stories, but I was just a few sentences into this one when I was so confused because I couldn’t really wrap my head around the fact that she was really beginning the book with such a climactic scene that I felt like should have been climax number 1 (you know, the one that everything is building up to but then goes horribly wrong before the actual climax later). I was able to accept it by the end of the chapter as interesting because I was drawn into the mystery of what she had actually been doing between books, but really it was just “wait, so now the bad guy knows her secret? So what was the point of having that secret in the first place? It was what everything in the last book was building up to, and now you just throw it away in the first scene?” I get why this plot trajectory would work, but it just felt… jarring.
It had the same grinding writing that the first one had that hurt my head a little, but I was pushing through it because I had committed. But then the potential love triangle for Simon showed up and I was just “ok, this book isn’t good enough for me to go through the potential emotional blaa-ness that having the guy be tempted to go off with another girl gives me.” So I stopped and moved on.
I was really disappointed and even more confused because I remembered that False Prince was really well written and I enjoyed it a lot. So then I started doubting myself wondering if my memory was faulty (hahaha), or if I just had a weaker ability to notice good writing back then. It just didn’t make sense. But then I started another trilogy of her’s with Mark of the Thief and was “there we go! I’m not crazy! this book reads great!” and could breathe again. No idea why this one was so ug, but the other two series are pretty great. ❤
The worst thing about this book was how it made me doubt myself as a writer. I kept thinking “well, this book got published… and I can see things that are like what I’m doing in my books plot and character wise… and I’m sure that her friends and family thought this book was great and told her so just like my friends and family… therefore I’m a bad writer and my proof is that my friends and family have told me that I’m a good writer!”
I know. I’ve had the logical flaws of this argument pointed out to me, and after starting Mark of the Thief I felt better, but still.
For another layer of comfort I’m holding onto the fact that after my mother-in-law and my best friend from college read the second draft of book one of my Healer Academy books they told me that my ending was weak and disappointing. It was sucky to hear at the time (sorry Mom for my strong language) but after a week or so I could see what they meant and am rewriting it (assuming that I start writing again… quarantine is annoying – I was getting so much done when I was able to go haunt Starbucks while my daughter was in preschool for three hours). I’m also grateful to another friend (hi Liz) who told me that the beginning of the same book needed to be more engaging. I limped around out for a couple of months after getting this feedback too, but then saw she was right and fixed it as well.
Ug. I need a thicker skin, or my worst nightmare will be realized: that I publish something that will grind on people’s brains like this one did mine.
Wow, I think this is the harshest response I’ve ever written. Nielsen is a great writer and I super recommend her other books!
Just not this one.
What the heck?!? And unlike other times I mean this in a good way.
I was enjoying the Pund book without realizing that it was a book within a book. I thought this was the actually story – it had the same name as the book in my hand, well, on my phone, after all.
And it was enjoyable. It reminded me of watching English murder mysteries with my mom. We had a quite a good run of Father Brown right after Asher was born and she was taking a shift and I would watch with her and my new squishy. I always enjoyed them, and am thinking about watching some after this book. And calling my mom. I miss her.
Anyways, so I was royalty ticked off when my book suddenly ends! I do that thing where you start bulldozing through what comes next looking for the rest of the book, but all I got was this random person blabbing about how they worked in publishing and was so ticked off as well that they were missing the end of the book. But then she decided to chill out because she heard that the author had died, and then it just kind of seemed like it was going to be her rambling when all I wanted was to find out what had happened in the “real book.”
But then it hit me that her story WAS the real book!
The problem with ebooks is that you have no sense of where you are. At this point I looked to see where I was and when I saw I was only HALF WAY THROUGH I kind of went crazy.
Before, while we were in our cute English countryside, I had been reading some before bed but it wasn’t enough to drive me. That changed when I realized that the mystery was actually to find the killer of the mystery writer! Gasp! Plus, she was an awesome character that was weirdly relatable even though I’m not a successful professional with a Greek boyfriend.
Anywho, I kept thinking “I can’t wait to tell my mom about this book! I hope it has a good ending so I can recommend it to her!”
Mom. It had a good ending. You should read this book. ❤️
UG! I don’t know what is wrong with me?!?! I LOVED False Prince, and this book’s protagonist has the same “stick it!” energy, but the push and pull of Simon and Kas’s relationship just feels so disjointed – and it’s itching at me.
The story and everything is fun though! I was honestly so afraid to start reading it. I’m partway into the next Glamourist book and have been suffocating in the powerlessness of their situation in Venice. I also had nose surgery and have been having trouble sleeping for the last week, but I blame most of my inability to function from the tension of what that book was doing to me. So I hoped this book would not be so bad….
And it wasn’t. I want to see how it all plays out. 😊
My nose hurts and I’m tired.
I love Murderbot. Something about her resonates with me.
Also, the absolutely craziest thing about these books is how the extremely technical play by play of what she is doing is so not boring! It’s so cool!
Funny story. I just had nose surgery ( I have to keep reminding myself why this was a good idea) and sometimes my nose dribbles. When it did that the first time I totally thought “Ug! I hate it when I leak fluid.” 😜
Update:
I’m really sad it’s over. Like I had an emotional reaction, something I could physically feel. Like I’m tempted to just start it over I liked this book so much.
You know what I love about these books, other than Muderbot’s snarky personality? Everyone lives. You can’t possibly imagine how that makes me feel while reading this. This is the ultimate safe book. And there is no romance in it. Because a good book just needs to be awesome to be awesome.
Now I just need the next book………..❤️
This is another book I’ve read a million times and should just buy.
While Edenbrook has a lightness about it where she is surrounded by good people, this one is hard because there is only one good person in Kate’s life. That being said, Henry more then makes up for it.
I’ve been blaaish lately and didn’t want to read something hard where the entire plot is about a young woman’s powerlessness and ends horribly tragically- even though I knew before hand that everything turns out awesome. It just takes a while to get there- and the path there is painful.
But then I decided to plow through it anyways, for Henry and Kate and their story. I’m glad I did. 😜
Reading Responses at 2am - SPOILER ALERT!