Mystery Book # 84 - The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Way back in high school I gave Tom Clancy a try. Reading The Hunt for Red October  now just reinforces what I thought back then... His plots are decent but there are just too many details about stuff I don't need to know. I feel like I learned something about how submarines work and the inner workings of our military but really I have no clue if any of it is actually accurate. Still I enjoyed it for the most part, B+.

Book # 4 - Ulysses by James Joyce

Well it was bound to happen... I finally got to a book that is highly acclaimed (# 4 on the list!) and did absolutely NOTHING for me. That book being Ulysses by James Joyce. Now I can see why people admire the technique and varying styles within the book... but to me that's all it is. This was a huge chore to get through. The only upside is that it put me soundly to sleep every night for a month and a half. I could probably go on and on about how much I didn't enjoy it. Sure there isn't really a "story", and I'm fine with that but neither did it capture any type of emotion for me. It is just chapter after long chapter in varying experimental styles. To me it is just style over substance. Sure maybe I just don't "get it" but the book seems to try and alienate the common reader at every turn. I'm not sure what kind of person would even enjoy this book. It seems like a book written purely to be studied and not enjoyed. Supposedly it is funny... but I just didn't get the jokes. Maybe Joyce is laughing at me from the afterlife because I actually sat and read the whole darn thing. Maybe for me one of the problems is the length of some of the chapters that are totally experimental. Like there's one chapter that is a nonsensical hallucination that takes a couple of hours to get through. Another chapter is written as someone's thoughts. Now that chapter is unique in the way it captures the fragmented way people think... but 1. I don't care about this character , 2. this character doesn't have novel or interesting thoughts, and 3. it takes at least two hours to read. So I don't think I can really even give it a grade. It gets a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  but is placed only above Atlas Shrugged in my rankings. Also it mentions Don Quixote. 

Horror Book # 25 - Books of Blood Vol.4 by Clive Barker

So while I was taking a break from reading nightly for a bit I still needed something to read if I went out for lunch. And so that's how I ended up reading Books of Blood Vol. 4 entirely on my phone. And it only took two months! This volume has five stories and all of them were pretty solid and definitely scary. My favorite is the one about a guy's hands that take on a life of their own and decide to rebel. A-.

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

This may have been the first Stephen King book I've read that I thought was too short! Gwendy's Button Box is a nice short novella about a young girl, Gwendy, that is given a magical box by another incarnation of RF. Will the box corrupt her? Destroy her life? Maybe because it is a collaboration the ending here is completely satisfying. Let's say it gets a B+.

Mystery Book # 67 - Stick by Elmore Leonard

Wow... almost two months between entries. See this is what happens when I decide that the next book I'm going to read is something that is super long and generally considered a difficult and not fun read (Ulysses). So instead of reading that specific book I find ways to procrastinate. First I started using my small window of free time each day to watch television instead of read...(Westworld! Check it out!). Then I put holds on library books (like Stick) and figured I'd have to read Ulysses after those... So someday I'll start Ulysses... just not yet.

Anyway, Stick is pretty much what I expected from an Elmore Leonard book... a likable criminal type gets in trouble with unlikable more criminal types and finds a way to scam their way out of a jam. I enjoyed it but the details are already evaporating out of my memory. Maybe I'll watch the movie version from 1985, it looks like it has a good cast but then I won't have time for Ulysses. B

Acceptance (Southern Reach #3) by Jeff VanderMeer

Well Acceptance doesn't really answer all of the questions posed by the previous two books in the series. But really those kinds of questions usually don't have satisfactory answers anyway... So I did enjoy reading it and several of the threads from the previous two books are picked up while giving a sense of what maybe Area X really is. I guess it ties up the story as best as possible. B+

Book # 54 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Even though I watched the film version of The Age of Innocence maybe fifteen years ago or so I had no idea what this book would be about. Memory huh? Anyway the book is set in New York during the late 1800's and is about this guy that falls in love with his fiancee's cousin. The writing is to be admired and there as some lovely passages... but for the most part I couldn't get into the story. I guess I wasn't really sold on why Newland would fall so much in love with the Countess, or vice versa. And the end was a bit frustrating too, or at least that's my interpretation of it. Another list book, Middlemarch, gets a mention. Let's say B+