60:100 In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Elliot is the nerdy, unlikable, smartass, totally obnoxious 13yr old kid is in his class.  His mother left him and his father when he was young and his father has paid almost no attention to him ever since.  Today, he is on a field trip with his school to some place he is sure will be boring and he couldn't be more wrong.  They are in a field when he sees a wall that none of his classmates can see and when he goes to climb it (as that seems like the most logical thing to do), he finds himself in the Borderlands, a world where technology doesn't work and is populated by all the creatures out of our fantasies including, to Elliot, mermaids.  He's not so sure about the rest of the world though since it seems that the human guards that he would be entering into is mostly about weapons and fighting which are definitely not to Elliot's taste but then he meets Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elf and the most loveliest creature he has ever set eyes on.  Right then, he decides to stay and his life turns upside down. 

Honestly, I really wanted to like this book.  I thought the premise was great and was looking forward to it despite how obnoxious Elliot was because I was figuring we would see character growth and development and he would turn into, if not a fully likable character, at least one that didn't just make me want to slap the crap out of him constantly.  That never happened.  He was always an obnoxious, insufferable character with moments of not being that but then he would revert back to form.  Add in the fact that we constantly have to hear about his supposed superior intellect but yet he speaks in small words and repetitive phrases constantly!  My 13yr old had a larger and more imaginative vocabulary when he was 8yr.  The other characters had more character growth but it still wasn't great and I found the over-the-top sexism of the elves horrendous as well.  The world building was solid but the characters populating it made it a slog to read.


Page count: 432p/16,976p ytd/325,671p lifetime

59:100 Stone Dead by Stefon Mears

A robbery gone wrong and now Stone and Karlsson are on the run but before getting the hell out of the city, they turn on each other to try and see who screwed it up.  But in cases like these, there's always more than one person selling everyone else out.

Written well but just not something that I typically find that interesting.


Page count: 21p/16,544p ytd/325,239p lifetime

58:100 Computer Concepts published by Parsons

A decent enough overview of the basics of computer concepts. Just could have done with a lot less (and I do mean a LOT less) of the "Go try to find some of this ancient technology and see just how primitive it was" when those were the toys I played with when I was young.  Gee, thanks for making me feel freaking ancient.  This book must have been written by early 30-somethings.

Page count: 632p/16,523p ytd/325,218p lifetime

57:100 Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Where Hercule Poirot goes murder seems to follow.  This time he is on a train from Istanbul heading home (or to his next case as he gets a telegram on the train) when one of the passengers has been murdered, stabbed to death many times over but luck is with him as this happened on the night when the train has been stuck in a snow storm and no way for the murderer to escape so Poirot waxes his mustache and sets to work to find out whose done it.

This was my first Agatha Christie novel and I don't know if it's because at this point it's not a novel ending or because so much of what Poirot lays out at the end is not really revealed through the course of the investigation.  You can't go back and go, gee, of course that is how it all fits together, and that type of "mystery" doesn't really appeal to me.  I'm not sure if her other books all follow this same thing but I'll probably give another one a try at some point to find out.


Page count: 265p/15,891p ytd/324,586p lifetime

56:100 Microsoft Office 365: Excel 2016 Comprehensive by Freund, Starks, & Schmieder

A decent enough textbook that went over a lot of the different things you can do with Excel.  My main issues were that this is a bit outdated so a few things didn't work correctly in the newest version of Excel which I was running, it didn't do enough to explain some of the error messages that could come up and why that might be so you could have a better idea of how to fix it, and my biggest complaint is that there was a lot "Just go do this" step by step for more complex things but without any actual explanation of what you were doing or why which makes it harder to then apply to your own material.


Page count: 816p/15,626p ytd/324,321p lifetime

55:100 Lost Souls by Kelley Armstrong

A man driving on a lonely stretch of highway sees a woman in white in need of a lift who directs him to her friend's house that is just a patch of forest in the middle of nowhere and then vanishes.  It's a familiar enough tale but something is odd this time so Patrick brings it to Gabriel to investigate hoping that Gabriel will use it as an excuse to try and patch things up with Liv since she loves a good mystery and weird ones even more.  But this case will have Gabriel facing more than white specter who gets people lost in the woods. He will have to realize and face how lost he has become.

Read this one out of order, not that it matters much.  It was an interesting tale and always fun to get more insights into these characters.

Page count: 190p/14,810p ytd/323,505p lifetime

54:100 Cruel Fate by Kelley Armstrong

Olivia is finally getting what she has wanted since she found out the truth about her past, her father's release from prison.  Unfortunately, not everyone is so happy to see Todd freed and while he was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison for the last 20 years, he does have one murder on his hands, the one that kicked off everything that came about afterwards and someone is laying the clues out for him to go back to jail with no possibility of being found innocent this time.  Liv is hovering over her father like a nervous mother hen and when she starts hearing about this trail, she will do everything in her power to make it go away including using her position as Matilda as well as calling in her Arwen and Gwynn. 

My biggest disappointment is that this is the last planned novella for this series and I would love to continue reading all about Liv, Gabriel, and Ricky.  This was a good note to end on with the wrapping up of Todd's story and how things got started so many years ago.

Page count: 200p/14,620p ytd/323,315p lifetime