This month I wanted to practice Go outside of Advent of Code puzzles. So I decided I would port over my Dreamhost DNS updating script from Python to Go. This would have the advantage of being a compiled program. Every time I update Python on my system, the virtual environment points to the wrong Python version and my program breaks. But, boy is parsing JSON in Go (at least with the built-in JSON tools) a real pain in the butt. I have to make a struct to hold and parse the data, but it comes back from Dreamhost as a 1-key dictionary holding an array of dictionaries. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get Go to parse the JSON I was still unable to get the struct right. I may do a little debugging to see if I can figure it out before searching for any simpler JSON libraries.

The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel by John Ripin Miller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book for free as part of the Kindle First Reads program

I like to geek out on many things and one of those is history. Thanks to books like 1776 I already knew that it was only through a series of coincidences and good luck paired with General Washington’s leadership that we won against the British. But I had no idea just how many mutinies there were or even that there was a week (the subject of this book) where things could have gone in a very different direction.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. Rating went from 2 stars to 1 star.

I didn’t like this book all that much when I first read it and I liked it even less this time around. I don’t like The Auditors as Death’s antagonist. Susan as a Discworld Mary Poppins is a joke that isn’t quite enough to carry a whole book. Death once again not doing death stuff….meh. And the Wizard b-plot seems to mostly exist to keep the story from just being novella length.

Annihilation Aria by Michael R. Underwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t know if it’s from reading this book right after Becky Chambers Wayfarers series, but this book did not pull me in the way the other series did. It was fine, but I just finished it more out of obligation to finish than because I wanted to know what came next.

I think the best thing the book had going for it is that the antagonist was a 3D, fleshed out character rather than an out-and-out villain. He had rational motives that had more to do with the culture he was born into and political ambition than with mustache-twirling evil. The fact that he was part of a faction advocating more peace and financial gain than war also kept his species from being from a Planet of Hats.

The Breaking Light by Heather Hansen

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of Amazon’s Kindle First Reads where Prime members get a free ebook from a selection of ebooks each month

I didn’t like this book for 2 reasons:

1. It’s derivative in all the ways that don’t work for me. It’s got a Fritz Lang Metropolis setup that I’ve seen done a million times before from books like Red Rising to a half dozen anime. It tries to draw lots of parallels to Romeo and Juliet, but in that play, the families are equals. Here our Juliet is a poor girl in a gang and our Romeo is a rich boy who is trying to fight the city’s corruption. It IS a YA book. Maybe it works better for young folk who don’t know where the book cribs from.

The Boys, Volume 3: Good For The Soul by Garth Ennis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Things are a little less profane and a little more of the story gets revealed. Maybe Ennis felt he had to be edgy in the first 2 volumes just to shock an audience into interest? That said, there’s still plenty juvenile gross out humor (Little Hughie’s face after a certain event) and the continued use of homophobic language to an extreme amount I haven’t heard since the middle school playground.

The Boys, Volume 2: Get Some by Garth Ennis

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This continues the feeling that Ennis is simply trying to be as profane as possible just because. The first story revolves around a super hero (kind of like a Batman crossed with Iron Man) who suddenly is unable to keep from having sex with anything living around him. The second story is actually a good, fun mystery but Ennis has a main plot point revolve around the main antagonist constantly having to use a vibrator.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I got this book for free from Tor.com’s ebook club. I highly recommend it - in exchange for your email address you get access to free books from Tor.com’s catalog; a new one each month. (Currently it’s a Brandon Sanderson book from Mistborn Era 2)

As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, I usually don’t go back and read the descriptions of books I’ve added to my “Digital On Deck” list and lots of these books have been on that list for 1-2 years. So I had no idea what this book was going to be about. The title of the series, the artwork on this book, and some general buzz I’d heard about it gave me some idea. But they were the wrong ideas - IN THE BEST WAY!

Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interestingly enough, I heard an audiobook of this picture book. It was on sale recently at libro.fm and I was curious about how a picture book became one of the first live action/adventure movies I saw as a kid. This book basically reads as a less whimsical, less rhyme-y version of The Cat in the Hat. The kids are left alone (oh, the freedom of kids in kid-lit) and they find Jumanji at the park. The parents leave them with the admonition of “not one thing out of place” because they’re coming back with more adults for an adult party. The game has the same effects in the book as it has in the movie.

Phenomenons: Every Human Creature by Michael Jan Friedman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What if you took Wild Cards and started off from a more modern place than the 1980s. What would you have? Well, for one thing, less gay slurs and stereotypes. For another, starting with a less sleazy, more modern NYC. I Kickstarted (at the level to get a Tuckerization) because I was a big fan of Mary Fan’s writing. As I mention below, during the Red Sky in Mourning review, my only real criticism of this shared world anthology is that the stories seem too short. Maybe it’s something about the way these authors write compared to the Wild Cards authors, but I feel like I’m just getting into the grooves of the stories in this anthology before they’re over. They’re currently working on a second anthology and I’m hoping things can expand a bit the second time out. I also think it would be neat to have them maybe have tighter intertwined stories like Wilds Cards 2 and 3. Or maybe a full-length story like later Wild Cards volumes. If you’re a fan of superhero comics, but wouldn’t mind experiencing it as prose, this is a good anthology for you.