...
And I finally managed to finish reading The Hobbit. I'm still of the opinion that it's not a very good book.
I enjoyed the first few DS9 relaunch books a lot, but I'm struggling a bit with Mission Gamma - The station-bound plotlines are interesting, but i'm finding the gamma quadrant stuff a bit of a slog. I'll probably take a break from it for a while before reading books 3 and 4.
I started reading
The Hobbit shortly before the first movie came out and got about just as far as the film does when I saw the film. I continued on for another 40 or so pages before stopping completely. It wasn't so much bad, but I found it to be too cursory. Whole sequences are just summaries of things that happened. Or in the case of the rock giants, two sentences. I appreciate it as a work of Tolkien's - that cave scene is fantastic - but I don't think it compares to other works, even something reconstructed like
Children of Hurin. As Chris says, it's probably best if encountered early in life. There's a very clear divide between my friends over people who read it as a kid and loved it and people who read it later and are more mixed on it.
As for the
Mission Gamma books, I too found the station stuff more interesting.
Cathedral is pretty good though. I will admit, though, that I found the fourth book's Gamma Quadrant portion to be uninteresting. However the station stuff in it is quite good.
I just finished out
Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire. This was quite a slog. It feels very bloated. There's really no reason for it be a 500 page tome! The unfortunate thing is that there's a decent book buried in it somewhere. It feels like a draft work that should have been edited down. There are some entertaining mistakes throughout. White-Blue is referred to as Blue-White a few times. Several female officers are called Mister, without any precedent of this being something Riker does. In a particularly eyebrow raising typo, Keru thinks back to the time the Gorn killed Sean Hawk! There's also just a lot of repetition: every mention of the Typhon Pact comes linked to a full listing of the members, a question followed "s/he wanted to know," Vale constantly thinking about her time as an ex-police officer using the exact same wording.
The book is just a problem from the plot right down to the book assigning four different names to the McGuffin. (Five if you count the one time it's called an ecocaster.) The motivations for the second Gorn ship don't make sense and end up feeling like redundancy. Oddly enough, this was one of the few times Keru didn't feel out of step with the rest of crew, just constantly arguing against everything. This does come at the expense Christine Vale, who ends up coming off as Debbie Downer, just constantly thinking about the worst outcome. It becomes less pragmatism and just morbid after a while. Anyway...
Also tore through
Doctor Who: Time Trips: Into the Nowhere by Jenny Colgan, one of the new eBook novellas they're putting out. It was pretty enjoyable. Colgan really got the right feel of The Doctor and Clara, but sometimes their individual reactions seemed off. Clara, especially, comes off as kind of meek and afraid which doesn't mesh with her as presented. Not the greatest, but some fun concepts. Oddly enough, it appears to be set between
Day of... and
Time of the Doctor.
Not sure what's up next for me, either
Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire or
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto, the writer of
True Detective.
