GoodReads 100

My last post prompted me to take a look at the books I have rated so far on goodreads. I am coincidentally at 100 books there and wondered how my ratings of books stack up against the rest of the goodreads community.

If you take the average rating and compare it to mine, I'm pretty much in line. Overall, goodreads average on these 100 books is 3.8 stars, and my average is 3.4 stars, making me a little pickier overall.

There were six books that I gave a one-star rating to (The Wailing Wind, Falling Awake, Treasure Hunt, Bloodroot, You Lost Me There and One Perfect Word). The average rating of these six on goodreads is 3.6 stars, so it's probably just me.

On the other end of the scale, there were 16 books I gave five stars to (No Ordinary Joes, The Good Soldiers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Redwall, The Terror, War Dances, The Last King of Scotland, How I Paid for College, Interred with Their Bones, Hyperion, Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Dune and three from the Incarnations of Immortality series: #1 On a Pale Horse, #3 With a Tangled Skein and #6 For Love of Evil). Goodreads average on these is 3.9 stars, so I'm above that by 1.1 stars.

The highest rated of these 100 books according to goodreads is 4.49 stars, going to The Hunger Games, which I rated 2 stars.

Long story short (no pun intended), my taste in books is probably different than yours. :-)

Realmwalkers - reading

Finished "Realmwalkers" by E.V. Medina and Jack Shepherd. If you are a fan of Rachel Aaron's Eli Monpress series, you may also like this story. In my review of Aaron's work, I said the powerful characters stopped just shy of calling the king "dude." In Realmwalkers, Alain is so unbelievably powerful, and his companions refer to him as several versions of "dude." This grated on me. It doesn't help that he's homophobic, and for one of the good guys, seems pretty disrespectful to those around him. For example there was a missed opportunity for him to leave his "starblade" behind out of respect for the queen rather than being the only one to wear a weapon in her presence. There is also little element of actual risk in the story that it dulls the tension. Death is quite casual since you can be brought back from it.

Some of the other terminology could be owned better by the authors. Calling some characters "females" was awkward, as was the name of Alain's several powers, such as "white hand within measure at need." It didn't give me a good sense of what the power was, or that it grew organically in the world. It sounded more like it was being scientifically classified.

An epic battle was fought, but the details provided were not the details that would have excited, robbing the scene of its impact. When the goddess showed up, her presence was not revered by her faithful so much as she was held up as just another powerful being in the fight (but the focus was on Alain).

Overall I wanted to like Solita, her companions and her plight, and appreciate the world for what it was, but couldn't.

No Ordinary Joes - reading

Finished "No Ordinary Joes: The Extraordinary True Story of Four Submariners in War and Love and Life" by Larry Colton. This might as well have been a sequel to "The Worst Hard Time" (about the Great Depression) in that it tracked the lives of four sailors from growing up during the Great Depression - one of whom came from the area covered by the previous book - to joining the Navy and fighting in World War II. Their submarine was sunk by a torpedo dropped from a Japanese plane and the men were captured and taken as POWs to be held for two years, until the war ended. It then followed their lives as they returned home, grew old and, in some cases, died. I was torn between 4 and 5 stars as a rating, but I didn't want to put this one down until the end. Even then I did a bit of research on the ship and crew. Then I asked my mom about details about what my dad did while he was in the Navy since he's no longer around to tell me the stories.