I’m defo reading that at some point and I’d hope it interesting enough to at least some of you to be part of the listing.  People need to voice either way though and if not I’ll change to something else.

I don’t really want to influence your choice, uncle.  Truthfully speaking, your choice is about far away from the things I like to read as it’s possible to get.  It’s also £10 on Kindle.  So for me it’s a pass, I’m afraid.  Hopefully there are enough here who are up for it, though.

Thinking about this thread a bit overnight and I’m just going to drop out of this.  Looking at the list of proposals shows I’m just a bit odd with what I tend to read and it just doesn’t track with the majority in here.  I’d hate to disrupt a month and I’d also hate to feel I’ve wasted everyone’s money, so I’m defo out.
Enjoy the thread, it’s a lovely idea and well set up, so thumbs up to Raiz for that, but I’m just not comfortable enough with where i sit in the group to do this.

I would say that just because you picked a book for the month, that doesn’t in any way obligate you to read any of the other books that get chosen. Why don’t you keep your choice for June, uncle, as there seem to be a few here who are game to read it.

fair game imho. I was going to nominate a book about dinosaurs until I saw it was $60.

Ooft, some of these prices, $1000 for the hardcover of The Affirmation? Glad the paperback is only $9

From Russia With Blood is also not the cheapest but it's also on sale on amazon right now, so probably should grab that anyway. 

Think the only thing I won't pick up is books that try to teach me economics. I'd have a hard time reading that.

Ooh yes. Shall get thoughts down later. Are we ok without spoiler boxes??

I think spoiler tags is still the way to go.

APRIL BOOK SPOILERS AHEAD
I'll get straight to the point.  I thought The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the worst book I've ever made it to the end of in my entire life of reading books.  The previous title-holder was Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor.  What magnificently catapults The Long Way into first place is that not only is it all the things I hated about Dreamer—poorly written, paper-thin characters etc.—but it's also a creative wasteland entirely lacking in any credible drama or conflict on top of that.  To Dreamer's credit it had a vaguely interesting setting and some small rumblings conflict.  The Long Way has none of that!

What does The Long Way offer, then?  Well, it's a bit Mass Effect, it's a bit Farscape (Sissix is a less interesting Zhan) and a whole lot of Firefly.  I mean goddamn, Chambers literally yanks plucky girl mechanic Kaylee off the Serenity, slaps the name Kizzy on her, and drops her onto the Wayfarer.  It's brazen as fuck.  There's nothing original here at all, but Chambers seems so enamoured with her own juvenile world that we have to wade through pages and pages of shitty, boring-ass exposition about it

This is a world in which ridiculously named characters (the aforementioned Kizzy, Jenks and, my personal favourite, Dr Chef) sit around drinking, smoking and eating things like kick, smash, pepper puffs and berry fizz.  This has all the feel of a world dreamed up by a ten year old girl and executed by a slightly older version of herself.  And I honestly found it excruciating to read through.

And what about the characters?  What characters?!  There aren't any here on the Wayfarer.  Just some old wooden archetypes slapped (if they're lucky) with some meagre morsels of undercooked backstory.  There's no impression at all that these might be real people.  We get multiple points of view, but at no point whatsoever do we lose sight of the author and start to feel we are getting to know a uniquely drawn person.  It's all just Becky Chambers with her hand up their shirt making their lips move.  She has no ability whatsoever to convey the granularity of complex human (and alien) emotion and behaviour.  In the end I started seeing Ashby as a basketball on a stick with liquorice loops for eyes just because it was so easy to disregard him as a living, breathing character.  All the way through I was thinking this author must be really young and severely lacking in life experiences to write characters this poorly, this blandly.  Imagine my surprise when I found out after reading that she was in her thirties when she wrote this.  Jesus wept.

I remember wondering to myself when I came up on page one hundred, When does the story start?  By page two hundred all that's really happened is they've got a new job.  I imagine Chambers was thinking her characters are so great and her world is so cool (stuffed to the gills as it is with infantile terminology) that it's okay to not really bother with a plot.  And there's over five hundred long, long pages of no plot and no conflict.  Sure, she throws a few pebbles in along the way, but Chambers doesn't seem to have the first clue how to build conflict and resolve it.  Let's take Corbin's own little drama from the latter half of the book.  Oh no! he's an illegal clone and some grumpy aliens have banged him up.  How does Chambers go about resolving this particular pickle?  Maybe a daring prison break?  Steady on, let's not get over-excited.  Why not instead have all the characters sit around the table wringing their hands until good old reliable Rosemary comes up with a cheeky little bit of legal wrangling to get him out.  Cut to Sissix (who didn't see that coming?) picking the poor mite up from prison.  That's it.  There's your bit of drama.  No, that's it.  Move along, nothing to see here.  Holy hell.  And then the denouement: a lengthy chat between a character we've hardly heard anything from since the beginning of the book and his dad.  Are we seriously supposed to care about any of this?  It's excruciating.  And her action-packed ending is riddled with the usual cliches.  Bangers such as "I didn't sign up for this!" and "We're coming in too fast!" and then of course the bit where they just about make it out alive and then there's a silence before they burst into laughter.  There were more but I wasn't about to start taking notes now.  I wanted it all to be over.

So finally we come to the quality of the writing itself.  It's abysmal.  Sure, she strings a few sentences together and throws a bit of punctation about the place, but the writing here is at best perfunctory and boring, and at worst ugly and puerile.  I kept asking myself as I trudged through it how on earth this rubbish made it into print.  Have our literary standards plummeted that much?  So it made a certain kind of sense when I discovered in the afterword that the book was crowdfunded.  Though that doesn't explain the popularity beyond that platform and how she subsequently picked up a publishing deal.  Who are these publishers and where are their editors?  I mean as soon as I was done with this I had to quickly get my eyes onto a classic (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) just to get rid of the bad taste this book had left in my mouth.

As for the things I liked about the book?  The title.  I liked the title.

Oh, and I started The Builders last night, which has more flair and more character in a single page than The Long Way managed in its enire five hundred-odd pages.

Okay, I’m done now.  

I don't really agree, Raz!

It has been a while since I read it, so finer details escape me. It is a meandering novel, that's for sure, with the main plot essentially being the journey and with no real urgency behind it it falls into the background. This is fine, for me, as it's different. It's window dressing to the strengths of the book and author's focus- The characters.

I thought they were great. Tropey, yes, but tropes are tropes because they have proven to be popular. Kizzy is fantastic fun and delight to read about. The notion she was lifted wholesale from Firefly seems unfair. Influenced, likely. But Firefly didn't invent the idea of a sparky, impish girl engineer, and I thought she was brought to life brilliantly. I don't think they are hugely original, but I think they are brought to life wonderfully. It's a warm bathtime of a book, full of lovely sci-fi bubbles and scented candles and a back massage from the wife.

Someone mentioned it was a little like a series of Mass Effect side quests, and this isn't far from the truth. I remember it very much feeling like a series of mini-adventures with different members of the crew, exploring and learning about them and their personalities. A book very focused on the individuals and their interactions with one another, rather than the wider narrative. This was different, but I enjoyed it a lot. 

I always find longer books to be a drag, but I didn't realise how long this way until I'd finished - For me, that speaks volumes. It partly picks up on what Uncle (?) said earlier - The prose is simple. This book is all about the people and the writing style isn't overly intricate or trying to 'add' to the atmosphere in any other way than telling us about the these characters and the adventures they have. I am down with that - It's quality writing, but it's not trying to do anything clever or new.

I haven't read the other books in the series, though I have read another novella by Becky Chambers (To be Taught, if Fortunate), and I think she is a treat.

tigersgogrrr wrote:

And, yes - The Builders is very quick. Part of why I chose it. There should be more books of around the 200 page mark!

I'm happy this will be the first book I'll jump in on. Have ordered all from Amazon yesterday and they arrive between 6-20 May, so I think I should be able to finish it this month.

I'm with Tiger on this one, I thought it was a great book - well written, with interesting and developed characters in a well thought out and fascinating world. I think it had quite a few interesting things to say about humanity and what it means to be human, particularly from the perspectives of completely different species.

I liked that it didn't feel the need to be full of action and conflict all the time and that there was no major jeopardy on the horizon for the story to drive towards - just some folks doing a routine job in the context of a wider political and cultural background that actually didn't matter that much. The galaxy didn't need to be saved and that was fine.

I enjoyed it so much that I immediately bought the next two - the second book in particular is fantastic.