GoodReads challenge

Been reading.  The Goodreads Reading Challenge is good for that.  Since the New Year I have read 10 books of my 25.  I have more time now so reading more will allow me to meet the challenge.  I read about 25 novels a year, sometimes more, but usually I don't enter them into the GoodReads app until they are finished and that means they are not counted as part of the challenge.  

The first book I read this year was The Slow Regard of Silent Things, by Patrick Rothfuss.  A charming book about a tertiary character from the Kingskiller Chronicle.  It is the story about a person who believes everything is alive with intent and emotion.  It is a person whose sweet innocence has been left undamaged even though she lives in abject poverty and deprived of human content.

Next I finished a novel that I began three years previously.  It lay abandoned after the main character was killed off halfway through the book.  The book was called Red Mars.  The main character is infact not the human who was killed off buys the Planet Mars.  It is the story of the first human inhabitants and the terraforming of the planet over a small space of time.  Most people loved the book.  I did not.

Then I finished of a series that I started the year before, that is about 400 days previously.  Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet.  It was a good series, I had dropped it because I was reading it in a transition period and because the transition took a year to complete, it took me that long to start and finish the last two books.  But they were good.

Next I read two books from the Chronicles of Elantra series.  Michelle Sagara worked at a bookstore that I frequented and this was her first series.  I read the first book a few years ago and liked it, picking the next two books and putting them on the bookshelf until now.  Fun and easy to read, also formulaic, but that is not a bad thing.  

I started the Lightship Chronicles last year and this year I read Starbound, the second book.  It was another easy read and also fun.  Easy and fun can be a good combination so I finished Dave Bara's book quickly.

Last week I picked up and read a few short stories of Peter V Brett in a short book called The Great Bazaar & Brayan's Gold.  A short interlude from the past of the Demon Cycle books.  Very fun and easy to read and the characters are old friends.  

Last weekend I started The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Tronhiem.  It was a short book made easy to read by being set in a fictional town in a place not far from where I live.  The place names are mostly the same, the effect of history was almost the same but what happened was different because there were Dragons.  Dragons eat pollution.  But they also eat people and destroy stuff so they need to be killed.  Dragons are also utterly mindless in this world.  Fun fun fun.

Last week I read another alternate present SciFi, Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson.  This author has many award winning novels and this novel shows why.  It was a real page turner.  Alternate history where an alien is manipulating humans to make them more peaceful.  Sounds great right?  Set in the present with only a few people aware of exactly what is happening.  

Last book, the one I am reading now, is difficult.  And all the more addictive.  I have been looking up definitions of words at the rate of one every ten to twenty pages.  I have been reading in the dark, reading in bed at both ends of sleep and while eating.  The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.  When I finish this one it will be eleven books read.  

I am a slow reader and I have been discracted by Neko Atsume app and computer games.  And cats.  And writing this and other stuffs.