Books I did not read.

This year I set out to read 52 books ie 1 book per week. I thought I may have some trouble with this target, as I mostly read epic fantasy. So books can be 700+ pages long, and difficult to complete unless I put in a few marathon sessions between regular monotonous tasks each week.

My total stands at 30, and will most likely end at 32 with The Eye of the World reread and the Swarmthief's Dance (Deborah J. Miller) which has some cool fantasy concepts.

It would of been possible if I hadn't taken a 3 month break from reading books. This was caused by the Book 9-10 slump in the Wheel of Time, amongst other books I tried to read and were just terrible for whatever reason. I was really unlucky with my choice in books. Often they sounded really awesome, it was the actually reading them part which got me.


The Book of Names (Jill Gregory & Karen Tintori)
Its a Davinci Code-esc thriller that takes its cues from the Kabbalah and works a story around 36 righteous souls whose existence alone the world survives. The story goes these guys are getting assassinated as the bad guys have got their grubby mits on a book containing all the current righteous Souls.
So it falls on a professor Langd-ahh Shephard to save the world and solve the mystery.

The mystery and the pieces of the puzzle get more and more absurd. I didn't particular like their style either. I felt it lacked any kind of depth.
But the part that had me turn off is when the Ancient Super Secret orgasisation of killer Rabbis raided the shit out of the Professors office to recover some arbitrary ancient Jewish artifact. What they really needed was some pie in the face gags.

The Gone-Away World (Nick Harkaway)
Reason for buying: Cool name, cool cover. The gist of the blurb is an offbeat tale of a post apocolyptic world. "a tale of... ninjas, pirates, politics; of curious heroism in strange and dangerous places."

Pirates you say? Is that ninjas I hear? Sold good sir. Apparently the author is the son of an uber famous british author also. It is a thick read, at 532 pages with tiny font.

The trouble is I read for a couple of hours and nothing really happened at all. As far as I could tell all that happened was some merceneries had a game of pool and some other rough and tough guys had a job for them. The narrator goes off on essentially 5 page random tangents that are irrelevant to whats going on. It would be like "So Gonzo took a shot at pool.... WHICH reminds me of the time we were blah blah blah, alice liked to play cards, bananas, cabbage patch dolls, loud noises.... and so Gonzo started to line up his second shot WHICH reminds me of the.... blah blah blah

The Dark Mirror ( Juilet Marillier)
The family tale of the lonely orphan who grows up to realise hes the chosen one and will need to save the world with politics, magic, wise old guys all thrown in for good measure.

Sounded cool. But really wasnt my favourite type of book. Its essentially a romance novel in save-the-world fantasy's clothing. It appeals more toward the feminine spectrum of fantasy readers.

Souls in the Great Machine (Sean McMullen)
Post apocolyptic tale when a new society has been built with no real electricity. The calculor is a large scale attempt to build a computer type machine with units being enslaved intelligent librarians skilled at maths.

It was a really interesting concept, but I didnt feel the characters to be highly engaging. I may have another go at reading it. I still have it bookmarked on my shelf. As well as the Book of Names for that matter, but that one is only bookmarked with an old receipt. 'Souls' is privileged enough to earn the use of a shiny purpose made bookmark.

The Broken World (Tim Etchells)
I'm going to throw this one onto the list as well. Even though I only had a go at reading it a few days ago, a good few months after my reading drought had ended and I perserviered through Books 9 and 10 of WOT. They weren't half bad really.

The Broken world is a little different. Its about a guy in his 20s who is writing a walkthrough for a fictional videogame. So half the book is his walkthrough, and Im assuming the other half is about how his obsession and laziness affects his real life.

Note that this book also had a shiney awesome cover and cool name. (Maybe I'm strangely attracted to novels with 'world' in the title..)

Ok I did not really give this one a fair go. But reading the walkthrough section at the start was incredible dry. It is exciting as reading an actual walkthrough for a game you have never played. It is like 'Guy goes here, jumps through this, collects item x' It was all action and no real thought or emotion in the writing. And he chooses an idiotic nerd as his view point character, one that uses non-words such as 'coz' and 'thru'. It gives a bad name to all nerd kind. If the main character was a 14 year old who 'teh pwnzorz teh n00bs' then maybe it would be a little more forgiven as they don't know any better. But even writers of walkthrough have to have some writing credibility.