What I read this month

It was a slow month, reading-wise. We’ve been hammering away at household materials as we continue to settle into the reno, there’s a glut of various paperwork that needs doing (and for added kicks, we’re also renewing our passports in anticipation of actually being able to maybe possibly travel soon, and that’s a whole other stack of pages and hoops to jump through), plus my job search continues and that takes its own time, and one application in particular requires at least one more key writing sample that I don’t have finished as yet but work on daily to hopefully get it squared away to get my application in for the job before its unknown deadline hits…

It all adds up, is what I’m saying. So while it’s been a productive month on the whole, and I’ve yet to figure out how to invent extra time for myself, not as much reading as happened lately.

Here’s how March reading looked:

Read
Razor Girl – Carl Hiaasen

Started and stopped
Mission Multiverse – Rebecca Caplan
The Shadow Prince – David Anthony Durham

Reading
Fire Up Your Writing Brain – Susan Reynolds

Carl Hiaasen is an excellent writer, so the few issues that I had with Razor Girl–one key issue I had with it early that was never resolved and most frustratingly, would have been an easy fix; what felt like a forced situation to get the main character into a certain situation (which is saying a lot, given the crazy events going on in his adult mysteries), etc.–stood out a lot. On the upside, it turned out to be a sequel to Bad Monkey, which I really liked. On the downside, it wasn’t up to Hiaasen’s normal quality, which was disappointing. Having said that, I still like the main character enough to wonder what’s happening in his next book, so we’ll see how that goes.

The books I started and stopped were total crapshoots. I’d picked them up for my daughter on spec at the library when I was getting some stuff on hold anyway. There’s plenty of stuff we’ve gotten her over the years that turned out to be excellent even for grownup reads. These two, to my tastes… well… weren’t. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that.

And Fire Up Your Writing Brain I’m genuinely enjoying, though it does open with a lot of detail about how and why our brains work, which is at once genuinely interesting yet not at all what I expected to get into. Paired with that is my tending to read largely at night once the family’s asleep, and you get a lot of detailed info about the cellular operation of brains being relayed to a guy who’s often having trouble keeping his eyes open to start with. All of which is to say, it’s been a slow start to the book but I hope to get into the meatier material (no brain pun intended) soon.