Throwback Thursday

I’m currently in the middle of a couple ARC’s so reviews are coming, but in the meantime I thought I’d try out something a little different on my blog until the reviews are ready: Throwback Thursday, the Book Blog Edition! Here are a few books I read around this time in 2017 and some thoughts about them. Shoutout to Goodreads for giving me a platform to obsessively log all my reading.

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Ready Player One was absolutely amazing, easily one of my favorite reads of the last decade. I initially read it in print, but before the movie came out I listened to the even more impressive audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton. So when the Armada audiobook became available at my library I immediately downloaded it and blew through it in just a few days.

Now, even when a book isn’t great Wil manages to make it a lot of fun so that will always affect my reviews of books he’s narrating. However, even though Armada wasn’t as good as Ready Player One, I still enjoyed it. It was yet another awesome trip down Nostalgia Lane for retro gaming nerds like me. It was a cracking good read/listen.

My mom, the one who introduced me to Star Trek and science fiction practically from birth, gave me Stranger in a Strange Land in high school. It then took me 13 years to finally finish it. I would get a few chapters in, put it to the side, pick it up again at some point and repeat this process until I finally sat down in 2017 and said, “This will be finished!”

So, I started it from the beginning and finally finished it. Taking into account when it was written, I’ve given it some leeway. My mom read it in high school in the late 60’s when everyone was still going crazy about it. I grok that at the time it was pretty groundbreaking and it’s definitely a product of its time. For what it is and the influence it still has today I give it a lot of credit, but the middle of the book really dragged for me. And it was sooo sexist- the whole stint at Jubal’s house was a misogynistic nightmare. The beginning and end were pretty fantastic, though, and I would still wholeheartedly recommend it to any sci-fi enthusiasts.

Listening to One Hundred Years of Solitude as an audiobook might have been a mistake. It’s a very surreal book with characters who pretty much all have the same names so sometimes it was a bit hard to keep up with it. I imagine reading it in print would have eased this confusion somewhat, but looking at other people’s reviews maybe not.

Still, it was a beautiful and intricate story, one I’m immensely glad I read. You can’t really go wrong with Gabriel García Márquez though, can you?

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Have you read any of these? Let me know about any Throwback Thursday reads you want to share!