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quaranmine · 3 months

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Book Reviews with Quara

Since I keep talking about audiobooks, now I want to do a sort of mini book review of the books I've read since starting to "seriously" pick up reading again last year. Also I just like typing about things. I'm skipping Fire Season by Philip Connors and Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams because I've spoken about them already. Keep in mind I am not super-super critical of reading material; generally if I enjoyed it I'm giving 5 stars. If I disliked it though I get a lot more critical because then I want to start analyzing what didn't work for me. Now go forth and learn about what my reading taste is when I'm not reading/writing angsty mcyt fanfic!

Books I loved, aka 5 stars:

Cold Storage by David Koepp

This was the first book I checked out from Libby and it was a banger. I am still trying to replicate that high tbh. When I gave my mom access to my library card in Libby (her rural library has nothing and my city library has everything) I made her check it out too. The narration on the audiobook is fantastic. My mom raved about the narration and basically says she doesn't want to check anything out that wasn't as good--regularly her reviews to me are "good narrator, not as good as that Cold Storage book" lmao. You may know David Koepp as the guy who wrote the Jurassic Park screenplay. This is his first novel.

It's about a mutated fungus that is a sci-fi version of the very real Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which is more commonly known as the zombie-ant fungus. In this book, a version of Cordyceps can infect all lifeforms, including humans, and has been locked away deep in a former US military vault that has since been sold and converted into an underground storage facility. The plot follows two unlikely protags who work in the storage facility, as well as the two retired military people who are the only ones to have seen the fungi in action, as they try to prevent it from being released into the world. It's funny, horrifying, and gory.

They are making a movie of this book. The release date is tentatively 2024, but I worry about it because I have heard so little news on it. They did do filming though. I have high hopes because they cast Joe Keery as a main character, which I think is perfect casting for the guy in question. I have low hopes because they cast Liam Neeson, a white man, as a character who was originally Hispanic and (as I just noticed while writing this) changed the character's name to be more white. Ugh. Who is Robert Quinn and what did you do with Roberto Diaz???????

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

What if you got kidnapped and woke up in a parallel world where everybody knew who you were, but they think you're someone else? What if you're just a quantum physics professor, but this other version of you is a successful theoretical researcher? What if your wife never married you in this universe, and your son was never born? How do you get back home? This book is constantly pulling out interesting new questions, twists, and places to explore. Also I liked that while it does feature romance pretty prominently, it's about a guy who just really loves his wife of 15 years and wants to see her again. I just like it when men love their wives.

Also, a fair amount of Goodreads reviews poke fun at this author for having way too much fun hitting the enter key on his keyboard, but since I listened to the audiobook I never had to deal with any annoying formatting choices lol

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

I feel like we all know about this one already, tbh. If you don't, heavy tw for child abuse and eating disorders. Tread carefully. It's worth it though if you are confident you won't get triggered. If you haven't read it I recommend the audiobook specifically because Jennette narrates it herself and that gives the book so much extra. It was a 6 hour audiobook and I was gripped by it all day.

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

BACKWARDS TIMELOOP BABEYY!!! This one was great. It's about a Mom who witnesses her teenage son kill a man. Every day she wakes up in the past again until she can solve why this happened, the mystery leading up to it that entangles her family, and try to prevent it. First she ways up the day before, then two days, then three, then a two weeks, then a few months, then a few years--until her son hasn't even been born yet. I enjoyed it. Also a plus for British accent narrator (can you tell I'm American....)

A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong

This one was fun. I checked it out because it was longish and I had to drive like 8 hrs roundtrip for a work trip, so I listened to this the entire way. It's about a (Canadian) woman named Mallory who was a police detective in the modern day, who gets attacked while out for a jog in Edinburgh, Scotland. The attacker strangles her and she goes unconscious. When she wakes up, however, she finds herself in someone else's body--in the Victorian era. She's now a 19 year old housemaid, and has to adapt as quickly as possible to avoid suspicion. She quickly finds out that she works for a man named Dr. Duncan Gray, who is a medical examiner. And there's a person who's been murdered in a very similar way to how Mallory herself was attacked. And she's quickly finding out that the person who's body she's in was not well-liked.

My favorite part about this one is the emphasis it has on early forensics in Victorian Scotland. Dr. Gray is a fantastic character and it is so interesting to see him doing his lil cutting-edge forensics research (which Mallory, being educated in modern times, wants desperately to help him with.) Also the narrator, while being Canadian, does Scottish accents for all the Scottish characters. I'm not the best person to ask as someone who isn't Scottish but I thought the accents sounded pretty good lol

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

My mom recommended this one to me. It's also a lot of fun. The title is, mostly, accurate. Ernest Cunningham (protag) is a writer, who mostly creates how-to books for mystery novelists he sells on Amazon. No, he doesn't write mysteries, he just writes the how-to books. But he's very well-versed in the "rules" of how to write a classic mystery! He promises that, as the narrator of this story, he will always be an entirely reliable narrator. The book itself is obviously fiction but within the narrative of the book, it is being told like a nonfiction account of something that the main character is writing down. This book is sort of a bottle mystery--strange murders while everyone is snowed in at a ski resort during a family reunion, anyone? The main character is funny and breaks the fourth wall often. I am convinced that there is a separate audiobook specific version since the narration within the book references it being an audiobook. The main character will be like "so, you probably realize this isn't the real killer, since we still have 4 hours of the book left to listen to" lol. I almost want to check out a print copy of this to see if the text is different.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

First one on the list that I didn't listen to as an audiobook. Honestly, I probably read this book in 4 hours flat. Three of those hours just dead-focused while on a plane (with the book's hold expiring as soon as I landed and took my phone off airplane mode.)

I don't really know how to explain this one. I don't think I understood what it was about until I actually got like 4 chapters in and then I couldn't stop. It's just off-the wall ridiculous. There are talking cats. There are dolphins that want to unionize. There is a volcano lair. There are explosions and assasination attempts. There is a reasonably bleakly accurate capitalist picture of what "villainy" means in our world. There is a poor main character in over his head as he learns he's inherited all this from an uncle he never saw. This book is like...satire comedy. Comedy and outlandish but you're also depressed about billionaires a little while reading it.

Books I thought were Okay (3-4 stars but actually I gave both these 4 stars I think)

The Poisoner's Ring by Kelley Armstrong

The second book to the book I mentioned above. Honestly, I remember very well what the first book was about (i typed the summary by memory) but I have trouble remembering specifics about this one. It's a bit too long as well, at 14 hours. I don't have anything bad to say about it, I just didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first one.

But honestly I do remember it was still a good time. I just really like Dr Gray as a character and the setting, early forensic science focus, etc. These books are also setting up to be an EXTREME slow burn romance between Gray and Mallory, which I don't mind. (Literally by book 2 the most we have is that she thinks he's attractive, so at this rate it will take us 3 more books to get anywhere lol.) I will be checking out the 3rd book when it is released this spring.

Someone Else's Shoes by Jojo Moines

Also a book that suffered from being too long. It's a 12 hour audiobook but I think that it could have been 8 or 9 hours and gotten the same point across. My mom recommended this to me. It's narrated by Daisy Ridley, who does a good job. I enjoyed it, but I also started to feel like I really wanted it to be done?

Also unsure how to describe this one. Slightly-contrived-but-cute plot about how a bag switch up in a gym connects two women's stories. One is a, frankly quite annoying, American woman who married rich but has now been completely cut off from her money (and even passport) by her ex-husband who's cheating on her with a younger woman. One is a British woman with low self-esteem and a bad job who is struggling to keep her family afloat while her husband suffers from severe depression. I think my favorite was a side character named Jasmine who brought light to every scene imo.

Books I disliked (2 stars but after writing this review I almost want to make it 1 star)

Aurora by David Koepp

David I really believed in you after Cold Storage. But imo, this book isn't it. It throws away every interesting part of its apocalypse-level plot to focus on the characters. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love a good character-focused plot, except I never connected with anyone in the book. I just kind of didn't enjoy any of them. This is a story that is supposed to be about a solar flare taking out all electricity and communications for most of the world. And it only covers like a few days after the disaster AND THEN TIME SKIPS LIKE 8 MONTHS UNTIL EVERYTHING IS HAPPILY SOLVED NEIGHBORHOOD UTOPIA STYLE. I'm sorry????? Assuming I can believe that this little suburban Illinois cul-de-sac has managed to set up subsistence farming in a few months and is living perfectly happily, why would you....not show me how that happened.....

Also the "everything fits together" character moment at the end felt unearned. I was like yeah, okay, I guess this slots together. But the author didn't earn that moment for me. Instead of connecting with the characters and the plot and getting invested I felt like I was just being....told that everything worked out?? Or told that this was an important moment instead of actually Feeling the moment? It's hard to explain but I was like ok great thanks let's all go home now.

Sigh. I just can't get over the whole "throwing away the most interesting part of your setting" part. Again. Why would you spend a significant time setting up the science and how much of a disaster the solar flare is and then not show any of the characters figuring out how to survive it long-term....?

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

This book has such a high rating. It's very popular right now. It took me like 12 weeks of waiting for my hold to come up, and that's with the library having 7 copies.

It is, supposedly, about a smart octopus named Marcellus who helps an elderly lady solve the mystery of her son's disappearance at sea when he was a teenager.

In practice, it is about one minute at a time of Marcellus (the best part of the book) and extended sections of characters that I don't care about at all. I assume all the pieces of the story were supposed to come together later, but I was just highly bored. I was so bored that I DNF'd at 25% when my hold was up. I do not care enough to wait weeks to check it out again. Based on the one star reviews I read, the characters I didn't like did not develop into better people later and remained similarly annoying. Now, I don't need characters to be good people of course. But I do expect to be interested in them. I still don't know how the son's disappearance factors in because I felt like I heard barely anything about the supposed main character woman.

I feel vindicated because my coworker also checked out the book and told me a few weeks ago that she was at 50% and there still wasn't anything happening in the plot. I will ask her tomorrow if she finished it or not and if it ever got better.

Write an entire book for Marcellus the octopus and I'll check it out...

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

This book had so much potential. It's about a group of four women who were formerly assasins but are now retiring at 60. To celebrate retirement, they go on a cruise and then realize that they're the new targets for assasination, presumably because they know too much about the organization that used to employ them.

In execution....very meh. I actually had a Libby glitch on this one, where I think I missed about 1.5 hrs of narration total because the book skipped twice. I have no concept of which parts I missed. What I do know is that, the book was already so cobbled together before the first skip that I didn't realize I had missed anything until the end. Like sure, parts didn't make sense, but I was ready to accept that it was just Like That since the rest of the book was like that. After reading a bunch of reviews of this book I am convinced that there is NO way that all of its flaws can be explained by me missing a small part. After all, I did listen to 8.5 hours of it still.

The characters never felt their age to me. I felt like they either acted like they were 80 or 90, or like they were 20. It just seemed odd to me. The characters also felt very 2D, like the author wrote down three traits per person and called it good. There's a younger woman who appears to know the main character and conveniently helps the group, but I literally never figured out where their relationship originated or how they knew each other. Maybe I missed that too. By the end of the book I still didn't know who anyone was and couldn't remember which person was the main character. The plot jumped around to new locations constantly and often with little transition--this happened even on the parts where I definitely didn't get a skipping glitch. The main villain was a guy I literally had barely heard anything of til that point, although perhaps he came up in the 1.5 hrs I missed. They described the same painting in excruciating detail THREE separate times. It was...too feminist? Feminist in a contrived way where I have to be reminded every 5 minutes the characters are women? Like, I know, I am reading a story about women. Please don't mention it several times a chapter. There are ethical and moral considerations about their profession and chosen organization that never really get given the weight required. There was a love interest for the main character that I hadn't heard of once until he was introduced like an hour from the end--maybe I missed more about him in the parts I skipped? Unknown.

ANNND THAT'S ALL FOLKS!!!

#quara talks books #my current book is mr penumbra's 24 hr bookstore by robin sloan and i'm not getting promising vibes from it 30% in #i'm gonna try to finish it but....the mc kind of annoys me #but i could live with that!#what i can't live with is the author's incessant need to talk about google constantly. there's a character who works for google.#does the author have a thing for google....?? why do they wanna **** google's ***** in this random presumably unaffiliated book????#also more product placement vibes like macbooks and kindles coming up a lot #like dude. please. stop. you promised me mysterious bookstore not megacorp tech worship #also the tech talk hasn't aged super well in this book imo #a bit amusing to read about people being very wowed by someone attending a party 'virtually' via webcam #in the post pandemic work from home era of zoom meeetings and teams meetings etc #also getting manic pixie dreamgirl vibes from main love interest #ANYWAY. stay tuned to see if I have to put this book in the middle or bottom tier (it's already missed its chance at 5 stars)

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loregoddess · 1 year

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Ok I'm curious, could you elaborate on art school education when you have the time?

Mainly because my friend went to art high school and feels she wasted all the years there while I've been self-teaching myself for a few months by just messing around, so I was wondering just how different the two approaches are :0

Oh, I have lots and lots of thoughts on art education. I do feel that I need to preface this with the whole "my experience is not universal", bc all my feelings about art and art education stem from my own experiences of being self-taught and then getting actual formal college degrees in art.

The shortest version of my long rant, under the cut, is that there isn't a superior way to learn art. With art education, you run the risk of getting bad teachers who don't teach the subject well, and you can also run into teachers who aren't open-minded about approaches to art that differ too much from their own--the flipside, of course, is that there are sometimes amazing teachers who can challenge you to try new things you'd never had thought of on your own, or who have already made a lot of mistakes that they can tell you about so you don't have to make them yourself. With being self-taught, you have to figure out everything on your own, and sifting through online tutorials or reading books can be difficult to find "actually useful and well-explained" advice, but you do also get the freedom of doing literally whatever you want and really focusing what you learn based on what you're actually interested in. Each has it's pros and cons, but neither is technically better or worse, per se, although education of any sort comes down a lot to each person's situation in life, as not everyone has access to education or even the tools for making art.

For the long, long expansion of my thoughts and some of my personal experiences with art education specifically...

In short, I'm technically entirely self-taught, despite holding two different art degrees. Aside from some feedback I got from my 8th grade art teacher (who had agreed to look at my hobby art in her own spare time outside of class), I basically taught myself to draw entirely on my own, using various "how to draw" books, online tutorials, and just a lot of general experimentation and continued drawing on my own. Which meant I made a lot of mistakes, or didn't try out certain things, or got frustrated bc I couldn't figure out how to do something, but overall I had a lot of fun. The actual art classes I took in middle and high school? Well, I took a life drawing class in high school that taught me how to draw from life, a skill I never would have acquired on my own bc the process for learning that skill requires a lot of patience, and personally, I find life drawing to be extremely boring. My high school art teacher was also allowing blatant copyright infringements to occur in her class, which was something I learned years later when taking a media law class in college to learn about copyright law specifically, so I guess I learned what to not do as a teacher if I manage to become one, but I didn't learn a whole lot of actual art skills or even really improve my art in any significant way. I never actually learned anything like the elements of art and how to use them, or color theory, or any of that, in class or even on my own, but because I was constantly looking at lots of art online, and making art on my own and experimenting with new things, I ended up learning all of the "essentials of art" intuitively, sort of like how children learn the grammar of whichever language(s) they grow up speaking without learning the actual formal grammar of the language. Which I think a lot of artists actually do as they continue to make art, even if they don't realize it.

Anyhow, moving on. I personally really enjoyed my undergrad illustration degree. Now, to be fair, if someone was willing to pay me to attend college for the rest of my life as my actual career, that is what I would do bc I love learning, and I love the challenge presented by college courses. But do I feel like I learned anything new about art in those classes? Yes and no. I took a lot of art history classes bc I had never had any art history before college, and found I loved the topic a lot. The life drawing classes I was required to take felt like a waste of time bc I already had that skill from the one high school class, and I spent most of those classes fighting the teachers about why we should have less nude models (bc nudes are super easy to draw from life, but clothing is very, very difficult, and I wanted to learn how to draw clothing as a challenge bc I was bored in those classes). I spent one class teaching the entire class how to use Photoshop bc the teacher's method was absolute BS and I could do everything faster and easier than what we were being taught bc I had been using the program for years (the teacher even joked about how I had hijacked the class, to which I'm still not sure was meant to be friendly or malicious). The "Anatomy for the Artist" class I took was one of the most useful classes I've ever taken, and really helped me with drawing not only humans, but anything with a skeleton and muscles, since the teacher's approach made it so I learned the skill of using actual real-life anatomy as a means of creating art from the knowledge of anatomy (and I lucked out for this class bc I had an adjunct who was there to cover the actual teacher who was on sabbatical, and from what I heard from classmates I would have learned nothing from the usual teacher's approach to the class; I hope the teacher I did have found a good stable job bc she was amazing). Most of the actual core illustration classes helped me improve my art a great deal, but not bc they taught me anything--more so, it was that I had to create a lot of art for them, and find creative solutions to the challenges the projects would present (there were lots of "illustrate this abstract concept without using x, y, or z imagery" or "create an illustration within these specific parameters" which really required me to think about how to plan and go about completing the final project). Somehow, the actual "foundations classes" that I took--where I was supposed to learn things like design theory, the elements and principles of art, color theory, etc.--well, let's just say the teacher was on his way to retirement, and didn't teach any of that really well, so I still ended up going through my undergrad more or less on intuition and the art skills I had cultivated on my own. Mostly, college art classes were useful in helping me to improve my art, not because I learned new things (although I did learn some new things), but rather because I needed to make lots and lots of art in a relatively short time, and making art constantly is the fastest way to improve.

That all said, I still never really got the point of things that I kept seeing or hearing as common art advice. For example: "Use references." Okay? What does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do that? I was never taught that once, and it was only partway through college that I figured out that people meant "look at a photo of a real person to figure out a pose or something" and not "learn about the subject you're trying to draw so you have an understanding of that subject that allows you to draw it from your imagination how you want". And honestly the former advice is useful but...only useful to a point, so I'm kinda glad I never learned it bc it would have stunted my development and presented a roadblock. In either case, I was never taught how to use a ref or what "use a ref" meant in my formal art education, and by the time I figured it out on my own, my repertoire of art skills made the advice moot.

So what's all the long and short of this? Is art education a sham and useless? Well, not entirely, but maybe sort of. It really comes down to which teachers are teaching the subject, and how they do it. I only had a handful of art teachers who were really able to get me to think about art differently and push me to learn more and improve. But I also had a friend in my undergrad class who had never drawn in his life and he found most of the classes super useful bc he wasn't coming in being self-taught and already drawing. We were at different places in our art journeys, and so we got different things out of the college classes.

I do feel overall that the focus of my college classes was more productive than the lack of focus from my high school classes. Would I tell everyone who wants to get better at art to go to art school? Hell no. I got a degree in art because I love it, and because I had hoped to work as a video game concept artist (for which one does need at least a BFA to get hired by most companies). Of course, by the end of my degree I had figured out the video game industry in America was absolutely not a place I wanted to be working for my own health, but my frustrations with how my art education had been structured, paired with the fact that I spent a few classes actually teaching my classmates things, made me think I might make an okay art teacher. But even my wanting to be an art teacher still comes from a place of deep love for art. For those who just want to take up art as a hobby, self-taught is fine, and sometimes it will be better than getting stuck with a bad teacher who'll crush the enjoyment of art. Yes, I think a well-structured art course could help someone learn art and become confident in their art, which is part of the reason I want to try teaching it (esp. bc it took me years to learn some things that a good teacher would have just like, covered in a core class), but like...self-taught or school-taught, there isn't a superior way to learn art. They're both just very different approaches.

#I think I got a bit off-topic from your question at the end there so uh...sorry if this doesn't really help answer your question #I maybe should have slept on this before answering but also I'm like #really really passionate about art and Will Not Shut Up About Literally Anything Art-Related #a few of my coworkers have been subjected to hour-long rants about art bc they asked me one (1) thing #anyhow I think art education CAN be good it's just...like any education it really relies on good teachers and a good curriculum #and yet being self-taught I know it's entirely possible to learn all the basics needed for making art on your own so #like #yeah #I dunno #anyhow #I love art a whole lot and I do not regret going to college and getting two different types of art degrees #no matter how useless certain members of my family think they are #(to be fair graduating in the middle of a pandemic was not in my future plans)#anyhow if you want to just mess around making art and having fun that is honestly one of the best ways to learn art #actually just messing around and having fun is the best way to learn most things #so...yeah!#unsuspecting-person #I still don't have an ask tag

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