If you missed the John Scalzi Humble Bundle last time 'round, it's being offered again for the next three days.

There are still two days to pick up the Le Guin bundle, too.

I'm so frustrated by Scalzi. He seems an enormously decent human being, and his fiction just leaves me cold.

As in, I just bought and read Starter Villain, and the premise deserved to be either a short story or a much denser novel. It was meh.

In other news, I read The Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins for book club, and it was great, although felt rather unfinished (she had a stroke 3/4 of the way through writing it and her daughter worked with her on the ending but it's a big shaky).

Currently loaded on the kindle is Countess by Suzan Palumbo. No, I have no idea why I borrowed it from the library. Presumably I saw a rec for it, put it on hold, and now it has shown up on my Kindle. Hope it's good!

Oh, that’s too bad. Starter Villain was the first Scalzi that really won me over! I’m still a bit iffy on his oeuvre in general, but that one I just thoroughly enjoyed in an uncomplicated way. I still don’t think I’m going to read Old Man’s War, though.

I liked his Kaiju Preservation Society. Old Man’s War failed to hold me.

He seems an enormously decent human being, and his fiction just leaves me cold.

Yep, same. His blog/Twitter/Bluesky is delightful, his books are...mostly pretty boring, I find. I'm glad he's successful, because I do genuinely think he's a good person, but his writing does not grab me.

his writing does not grab me.

There's no density to it, no full sensory experience, no layers. It means his work can be easily adapted to the screen, I suspect. But it's just 2D to me.

IMO! Other people may be getting more out of it than I do.

That does sound right. I’m gonna file that away to think about next time I do read something of his. I get in moods where thinking about why I don’t really like what I’m reading seems way more important than just reading something I like…and if I do like the next thing of his, considering it under this lens should also be illuminating.

I’m currently reading Days of Shattered Faith and I have zero complaints so far. Other than with my memory, since I can remember just enough from the first two books to be sure that I’m missing a lot of references/resonances (like “oh, this character is actually that character from the first book! What was his deal? Nope, don’t remember” only it takes a lot longer for me to work through that

I have Something Extraordinary up next and that whole series has been such a mixed bag of stuff I wanted to like conceptually mixed with stuff I actually like rather a lot but peppered with stuff I just don’t care for at all. I don’t know whether I hope I like it or look forward to hating it at this point

I really liked Redshirts. Starter Villain was fine.

Huh. I loved the Old Man's War series and pretty much everything else he's written.