Mr. Burke's Reading List

InQUIZitive - The Pub and Trivia Quiz Game Book: Omnibus Volume I & II , by Sumit Dhar (2013) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) A few of these popped up, and who doesn't like trivia? (No, seriously, if you're not a trivia fan, you are way too serious.) I'll count this as one book because there was no delineation between the two volumes. Altogether, there were 40 quizzes of five questions each. I've never attended a "pub quiz", so I do not know the format of those. These quizzes were generally a paragraph of background information leading to a question. Sometimes the answer was obvious from hints in the text. Other times, that was only true if you'd heard of the answer in the first place. (There was a company I guessed from the translation of two words, but I never heard of the company.) The annoyi...

Dark Space: Humanity is Defeated , by Jasper T. Scott (2014) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) Back in college, I might've said, "Wow, I wish I could write like this." Now that I'm much older, I read this and think, "Dame! I'm glad I don't write like this." It's not good. The cover says "over 200,000 copies sold". Well, I downloaded mine for free (legally), and it makes me wonder how many of those 200,000 copies were free downloads. This popped up in BookBub, or some mailing list. I've downloaded too many free ebooks that weren't very good, so I checked on the reviews. There were over 5000 ratings of them and mostly 4 and 5 star. I guess those can be purchased, or found through mailing lists. The actual reviews are less pleasant. The book opens with Ethan in the middle of a...

Out of the Silence: After the Crash , by Eduardo Strauch Urioste with Mireya Soriano, translated by Jennie Erikson (2017) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) This was a free download from Amazon for it's World Book Day . And, yes, I chose this one to read first because it was the shortest, and I wanted something quick to read electronically. (I have a printed book I'm in the middle of, but I'd rather read it outside, if the weather would cooperate.) The prologue is Eduardo Strauch Urioste recalling when someone had found his lost wallet and passport that he had lost many years ago, and decided it was time to open up and tell his story. The story of a plane crash he survived. As I started reading it, I suddenly thought to myself -- Wait! It's not that plane crash, is it? Yes, it was. I remember the incident, but honest...

The Tyranny of Shadows , Timothy S. Currey (2017) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) If you can't say something nice, say something on your personal blog that no one will see. This was a freebie on reddit in the freeEbooks directory, posted by the author asking for honest reviews. It came just as I was finishing Redshirts , so I thought I would give it a shot. I lasted through 10% of the book, and only went that far because I wanted to give it a review, which I wasn't going to do after only 3%. Who knows? Maybe it got better after a bad start, but by 10%, I hadn't felt it started, and I was breezing through a lot of superfluous language while not really knowing what was going on, if anything actually was. The main character is an assassin but he has problems approaching a nobody cook and getting him outside where he can...