Not much happens in this book. The plot of this story is so thin it's hard to say it even qualifies as a plot. For such a short story, it really drags on. I kept reading and hoping that something (anything!) was going to happen. It doesn't help that most of the book is just the self-important ramblings of an old man disguised as some sort of philosophical epiphany. He, his friends, and his girlfriend all sound like insufferable snobs who can't just say what they mean and have to go around having airs with each other. And when the big reveal finally happens in the last pages of the book, I'm just like *shrug* "is this what all the fuss is about?"

Readaroo Rating: 1 star

The Owl Always Hunts at Night is a Scandinavian crime fiction, the second in the Munch & Kruger series and my first introduction to it. It's dark, gruesome, suspenseful, and incredibly twisty. The beginning will instantly grab you, the premise of the crime is intriguing, and there were no lack of characters to suspect. It pretty much had me turning the pages until I reached the very end. That said, I feel like this book has some flaws that prevented me from thoroughly enjoying it.

With so many characters in this book, it's a little hard to keep up sometimes. It almost feels like there are too many, thrown in simply to up the suspect-count. It starts to feel a bit contrived, how everyone just happens to have connections to each other. Also, a lot of the characters have similar names--Marianne, Miriam, Marion--just to add to the confusion.

Speaking of characters, neither of the two main characters plus all the additional detectives on the team are particularly competent. Kruger is perpetually drunk and often on pills, sometimes while talking to suspects. In the course of an evening, she would go through like 10 or more drinks. It's a wonder she didn't keel over. I know she's a flawed character, but it's hard to be sympathetic to her when she can't be bothered to make any sensible decisions. She even interrupts suspects while they are answering her questions during interrogation. Munch seems confused and not sure how to lead the investigation, often ignoring relevant pieces of information as it comes in because he's too tired to care.

Really, all the detectives on the team are fairly scatterbrained, having to ask for clarification multiple times in each conversation, as if they don't even know what they are talking about. Every time new information comes in, even if it's information that they themselves requested, they still have to be reminded before they can remember. It's very odd and makes for really frustrating dialog.

This book is fairly suspenseful, but at times it feels like the author is trying to contrive even more suspense into it. For example, at one point, all the detectives watch a video and there is a part in there that shocks them! But then the book immediately switches to other characters' stories and we the readers don't see what that is until many chapters later. There's no reason for this. The book would be just as good if we find out discoveries at the same time as the detectives.

So all in all, while the plot of this book was enjoyable, the way it was written and the unlikable characters did take away from that.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

Quakeland is a journey across America, examining earthquakes both naturally-occurring as well as man-made. It takes a hard look at what we humans are doing to contribute to the frequency and severity of them, as well as what we are doing to prepare and recover from them.

The conclusion is that earthquakes can happen pretty much anywhere. And we are contributing to their frequency and severity. And we know so little about them that we don't have a way of predicting them. And because big ones happen so rarely and people's memories are so short, most governments do not find it worthwhile to spend the money so that we are prepared. It's a pretty scary conclusion.

A good chunk of this book (Part 2) is focused on earthquakes with man-made causes. This includes dams, drilling, mines, injection wells, geothermal energy, fracking, etc. Since there are so many of these topics, at times this part of the book feels thinly stretched, with fact-after-fact thrown in, but not enough depth or an overarching story that the reader can really remember it all. In the end, I'm not sure I retained much details from the topics in this part.

I went into this book wanting to understand more about the well-known earthquake zones, such as the Cascadia subduction zone and Ring of Fire, but the book didn't spent much time covering those, just a chapter here and there. It would have been nice to see more coverage about their histories, what we know about the lead-up to their tremors, and how communities rebuilt afterwards.

Part 3 of the book is the most interesting to me. It talks about urban planning with respect to earthquakes, mental health effects of those who have experienced a traumatic earthquake, tsunamis, earthquake predictions, and early warning systems. I really enjoyed this part of the book and thought it was well-written and engaging.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

Stay with Me is an evocative and heartbreaking look at what happens when love isn't enough. Yejide and Akin met and fell in love at university. Even though they married for love, they are still bound by old traditions and values where a woman's worth is tied solely to her ability to bear children. Akin is the eldest son, and when no child materializes after years of marriage, external and internal forces proceed to exert tremendous stress on their relationship.

Adebayo writes with remarkable emotional intensity. She conveys the complexity of the characters, and shows why each is driven, through the most trying circumstances, into doing things that they are not proud of. She explores themes like love, death, and forgiveness with the deft understanding of the intricacies of human nature.

At times, the pacing of the book felt a little uneven. And when the narration switches back and forth between Yejide and Akin, sometimes it takes me a few sentences before I pick that up. But these are pretty minor gripes. Overall, Adebayo's book hits all the right notes. I have a feeling this is a story that will stay with me long after I've finished reading.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

This is my first time reading Sophie Hannah's interpretation of Agatha Christie's famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. These are big shoes for Hannah to fill, and I think she does a fairly good job in Closed Casket. I very much enjoyed the murder, the clues, the eccentric cast of characters and the way the story develops.

The one weakness is the actual solution of the murder mystery. It feels somewhat unbelievable at times, both in the explanation of some of the more outrageous details and in the motivations for murder. Also, while Hannah sticks to Christie's format of having Poirot gather all the characters in a room to explain and unveil whodunnit, Hannah takes more than 50 pages to do this (about 1/6th of the book), making that part drag on unnecessarily.

In the end, while this book falls short of its lofty goal in the inevitable comparisons with the queen of mystery, I feel it is an enjoyable book in its own right, and I look forward to reading more from the author.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

The Simplicity of Cider starts slowly, with so much description of every setting that it really bogged down the initial pages and made it hard to get into. It doesn't help that the characters are pretty dull, with their only real distinguishing feature being that they're all tall. With such dull characters, it was hard for me to get into the romance, because quite frankly I found it hard to believe anyone would fall for them.

But even all that aside, the biggest drawback of this book is that most of the characters have secrets that they don't need to have. The secrets seem to serve no purpose other than to act as dramatic plot points, which make it hard to believe in the story and the people. In most cases, holding these secrets went against their best interests and they would have been found out eventually anyways, so it makes no sense from a motivational standpoint.

While there are cute moments in this book, such as the ending hitting all the right emotional highs and eliciting the feel-good feeling that stories like this aim for, I feel its shortcomings ultimately outweigh the positive.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars

Idiot Brain is a delve into the messy ways the brain works and how it can sometimes go awry. It touches upon a variety of interesting topics, including what is intelligence, how does memory work, what determines personality, and what happens when the brain isn't working correctly.

My favorite section is Chapter 7's discussion about the brain's tendency to favor a "just and fair world", so if we see bad things happen to others, we tend to blame them, especially if the victim is someone we strongly identify with. The brain sees it as, if that someone is just like us and bad things are happening to them, then it must be due to their own fault... otherwise, the world is random and bad things may happen to us too, which is very unpleasant for the brain to contemplate.

A weakness of this book is that instead of leading the reader on a journey of understanding, everything is just told to the reader, one fact after another. This makes it hard to retain much information, as it's too dense. I would've liked to have seen more examples of the interesting psychology experiments that the author alludes to and that give rise to some of the findings, but those are quickly glossed over in a lot of places. Also, a lot of time is spent on giving proper scientific terms to everything, which I don't think is really necessary for better understanding of the content.

Another weakness is that at times the book reads like a stream of consciousness that hasn't seen an editor. This is most evident in Chapter 8, where a section comes off as the author ranting against anyone who doesn't understand that depression isn't a result of selfishness. While I agree with that, the section contains very little scientific evidence to back up that claim... it was mostly just the author going on.

In conclusion, while the topics covered in this book are interesting and it has a few illuminating moments within its pages, I think the way it's presented makes it hard to retain and take a lot out of the book. Also, the quality of the sections in the book are uneven, with some being very well-researched and insightful, and others much less so.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars

The Snowman is my first foray into Scandinavian crime fiction. The backdrop is gloomy and dark, and the story itself is intense, creepy, and gruesome. Harry is an appropriately flawed detective, battling substance abuse and demons of the past as he tries to solve the mystery and catch the serial killer. It's satisfyingly twisty, with Harry following multiple false leads until he finally arrives at the answers he seeks.

This is my first time reading the Harry Hole series, and I had no trouble jumping straight into the 7th book without having read the previous ones. While there were a few unfamiliar names of the supporting characters at the beginning, it didn't take me long to get the hang of all of them. If I had read the previous books, I probably would know more of the back stories, but reading out of order doesn't seem to have taken away any of my enjoyment of this book.

I'm looking forward to reading more from this series!

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars

This moment slips past unnoticed.

The end of everything I know, everything I love.

If there ever was a science fiction story that could appeal to everyone, this is it.

Jason Dessen was living the normal happy life with his wife and son when one night, a stranger abducts him and knocks him out. When he comes to, everything has changed. How will he survive and get back to the life and the people he loves?

Ok, that's a pretty measly teaser, but it's all I can say without giving anything away.

This book blew my mind when I originally read it. But to be fair, I went into it almost completely blind. Not only did I not know the story, but I somehow didn't even realize what genre it was. So when strange things started happening, I was really REALLY surprised.

Even though this book is science fiction, it reads like a thriller. It's fast-paced and relentless in its drive to propel the plot forward. The action never stops, and the intensity just builds and builds. Every time I think I've got a grip on what's going on and where the story is headed, something happens that I didn't see coming.

This book is the rare one that's got something for everyone. It mixes together a variety of genres—science fiction, thriller, suspense, mystery, and romance—and it does so seamlessly. Even if you're not normally a sci-fi reader, it's worth considering this book. The concepts in here are accessible to everyone, and it's really the perfect introduction to the genre.

At the core of this story are questions that everyone can relate to. What happens if we made different choices in life? What about the road not traveled? And how much would we sacrifice to be with the ones we love?

I can't think of another story quite like this. It's worth the journey to discover it for yourself.

Readaroo Rating: 5 stars!

Knowing this is a much-loved modern classic, let me tread carefully here.

Going into All the Light We Cannot See, I had heard nothing but great things about it. How enchanting the story is, how the writing will sweep me off my feet, how I will come away changed as a person. And I admit, it does have beautiful prose everywhere. But that isn't enough to save it from being a complete dud.

Essentially, a book with more than 500 pages can't just be made up of nothing but beautiful, flowery, descriptive prose. Things need to happen, plots need to advance, characters need to grow. But so little of that actually happens in this long book. And when something exciting does happen, there is flowery descriptions and random musings embedded right in the middle of it, slowing down what little forward progress there is.

It reminds me of school assignments back in the day, when I'm told to expand on what I've written. But I had no more content, nothing more to say, so I just found different ways to write the same thing over and over, hoping the teacher wouldn't notice. In this way, I would achieve writing alchemy, turning one sentence into four sentences. And that's what happened here.

The book has a dual timeline, alternating between 1944 and the years leading up to it. But that didn't really work for me. The story would have been the same told in chronological order, so the switcharoo back and forth, instead of adding tension or suspense, only led to confusion. The odd thing is that 1944 is supposed to be the climax of the novel, but those sections are so slow and boring, filled with almost no progression of the storyline, merely descriptions of streets, walking, digging, sitting, hiding...

So many people love this book, but it just isn't for me. I fell asleep multiple times while reading it and almost gave up. It's the sort of book where you can pick out any page and be impressed by its descriptive beauty, but when you read the whole book it ultimately is tedious and uninteresting.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars