Last time I complained about April being a rough month, and then May rolled around and was like ha ha ha and proceeded to kick my ass. So not much reading was done, needless to say. It was, sadly, pretty much the last thing I wanted to do.*
Butyeahanyway, I still managed to read a couple of things during the month of May, miraculously enough.
Alias Emma by Ava Glass. Really fun thriller with a stellar premise. Emma is a good character, if a little bland. The secondary characters are wonderful, though, and I wish some of their distinctiveness bled onto the protagonist. What really makes this book is its central conceit, which while contrived at times, is still believable and exciting enough to carry you on to the end. The climax proper was a bit off, though, feeling somehow both too sudden and too neat. Anyway, this is the start of a series, and the second book seems to take place abroad, and international spy stories are always fun.
This was, indeed, very much read because I was still on a spy high after finishing the original Bond series. The book suffered slightly from this because I found myself at times just wanting to read another Bond adventure. But that is, of course, entirely on me.
And that’s it from the book side of things. The only other thing I read was a short story, in keeping with my goal to read at least one every month.
“We Now Pause for Station Identification” by Gary A. Braunbeck. A considerably less whimsical version of Welcome to Night Vale. Neat little story with an effective execution but entirely too much going on. A lot of interesting ideas, but I wish the author would have stuck with one and developed it, instead of going with the throw-mud-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach that we got. Some solid, haunting imagery here, though, and I was captivated throughout.
I’m now in a bit of a slump after all that time not spent reading, but things on the personal front seem to be looking up, so fingers crossed that my reading will follow soon.
ricardo reading 