Yoyogod's 2019 Reading Extravaganza

I guess I might as well get the new list set up. I managed just a bit over 180 books in 2018. I'm hoping to read at least 200 this year, which I haven't done since 2015. Who knows if I can.

Welcome back, Nathan!

Happy reading in 2019, Nathan!

Happy New Year!

>2 drneutron: >3 FAMeulstee: >4 The_Hibernator: Thanks Everybody

I have my first book read:

1) Lost Highways ed. by D. Alexander Ward

This is a collection of horror short stories with a theme of roads. It's a pretty good collection with my favorite being "Back Seat," by Bracken Macleod in which a young homeless girl who is sent by her father to break into cars at nigh discovers a dead baby in the backseat of one. My least favorite by far was "Requital," by Richard Thomas, which even after reading I still have no idea what it was about.

2) The Devil Is a Part-Timer, vol. 5 by Satoshi Wagahara

In this volume, the devil and his minions buy a television, the hero discovers that her father is alive, and some angels hurt Chiho (who is friends with the devil and the hero) causing everyone to go and kick their butts. I didn't think this wast he best volume of the series, but it's still good.

Happy 2019
A year full of books
A year full of friends
A year full of all your wishes realised

I look forward to keeping up with you, Nathan, this year.

>7 PaulCranswick: Thanks

3) Durarara!!, Vol. 11 by Ryohgo Narita

And this is the 11th volume of another light novel seires. I found this one to be afairly weak entry in the series that mostly seems just to serve as the setup for volume 12.

4) Temporary Humans by Craig Shaw Gardner

I have now finished the thirs (and I suppose final) volume of the Temporary Magic series. In this volume a race of underground beings attempts to conquer the surface world by forcing everyone to live as if they were part of television programs.

5) Werewolf By Night: The Complete Collection Vol. 2

And I also continue with Marvel's 70s era werewolf horror comic.

6) True Tenchi Muyo!, Vol. 2: Yosho by Yousuke Kuroda & Masaki Kajishima

This is another light novel. This one is set in the universe of the anime series Tenchi Muyo, and tells the story of how Tenchi's grandfather ended up living on Earth instead of the planet Jurai. I thought it had a few too many loose ends. The book's afterword says that these will be tied up in future volumes, but there's only one more book in the series (which is 20 years old and only just translated into English) and that volume tells the backstory of another character, Washu.

7) Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey

This is the third Felix Castor novel, and is mostly about a bunch of undead gangsters.

8) Bordertown by Robert Ford

This is a horror novella about a tourist trap run by crazy people who murder any many who stay there and kidnap any women.

9) The Bog by Michael Talbot

This is a horror novel from the 80s about an archaeologist who specializes in bog bodies. He and his family move to a small, backwater village so he can study some recently discovered bog bodies. It turns out that the bodies were killed by an unknown creature, and not surprisingly (for a horror novel) the creature is still around. It's not a bad book, though I found it a bit too slow paced and a dated.

10) The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs

I picked this up when the audiobook version was on sale a few weeks ago. It's the sort of kid's fantasy novel that served as a precursor to Harry Potter. It's a bit dated, which isn't surprising as it's older than I am and is set in a time before my parents were even born. While I didn't actually dislike the book, I will say that it really didn't do much for me.

Hi, Nathan. I also picked up >13 yoyogod: a few weeks ago. I'm actually not surprised at your thoughts, which is probably why I've been putting off starting it!

>14 rretzler: It's probably still worth giving a shot as it's at least short.

Wow, I've really been slacking on updating my list.

11) The Defenders Epic Collection: The New Defenders

This is the last of the Defenders Epic Collections so far, which is a shame since there are enough issues after it for at least one more collection. It's also my least favorite of the series as this marks the point when all of the original members (Dr. Strange, Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and Silver Surfer) leave the series permanently and marks the end of the Defenders as an un-team where pretty much anybody can show up and be a Defender for a few issues. Also the storylines at this point seem to have become less crazy than the earlier ones, which also makes them more boring.

12) Crucible by James Rollins

This is the 14th book in the Sigma force thriller series. This one is about the hunt for a super advanced AI that has been stolen by a group of religious fanatics who want to use it to destroy civilization. It's a fun book, and my only real complaint is that unlike in other books in the series there's no hunting for an artifact from the historical record that has something to do with the current problem.

13) To Hold the Bridge by Garth Nix

I mostly got this short story collection because the title story is set in Nix's Old Kingdom series, which I love. I enjoyed that story, though I thought it was a bit short and wish he would expand it into a novel. The rest of the stories were good, except "A Sidekick of Mars," which was set in the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels and I thought was just kind of boring.

14) Storm Glass by Jeff Wheeler

I picked up this fantasy series on audiobook and thought it was pretty good, except for the narrator who was pretty awful. It's about two girls about 12 years old. One has strange powers and lived in the slums until being rescued by a nobleman. The other is a princess with a fiery spirit (figuratively not an an actual flaming ghost) who is kept isolated by her family until her father goes mad with power and a lawyer helps her find freedom.

15) Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets

this is an Audible exclusive audiobook that reads like a series of podcast episodes on naughty bits of Victorian history. It was fairly entertaining.

16) A Certain Magical Index, Vol. 8 by Kazuma Kamachi

This is a different sort of book in the Index series in which instead of focusing on Touma Kamijou we focus on a secondary character, Kuroko Shirai. Shirai is a member of Judgement, the student branch of Academy City's law enforcement, and she is tasked with tracking down a stolen suitcase. This leads to all sorts of fights. It's pretty good.

17) Black Lotus Kiss by Jason Ridler

This is the 2nd Brimstone Files novel, which is an occult detective series that's set in the 70s and emulates the style of pulp mystery from that era. I liked the first novel, but this time around not so much. The hero, James Brimstone, just came off as an unlikeable jerk for way too much of this book, and the "plot" seemed to mostly consist of him randomly wandering from one place to another and coincidentally stumbling across clues. Then there's the book's MacGuffin, the Black Lotus, which is a mystical flower, lost since prehistory, which is used as a drug that seems seems to randomly either turn you into a berserker, kills you, acts a super steroid, or heals you depending on the needs of the plot. This one put me off so much that if there's a third one, I'll probably pass on it.

18) Bring Her Back by Jeff Strand

This is a disturbing and humorous tale of love, murder, and revenge. It's a really great bit of horror.

19) Operation: Amazon by William Meikle

This is the fourth book in the S-Squad series, which is a pulp adventure horror series about a British special forces unit that gets sent to handle weird stuff. Based off of the cover, which shows a soldier shooting a giant snake, I thought this would be the S-Squad version of Anaconda, but it's not. this features a lost temple filled with were-snakes. It's a fun adventure story.

20) So I'm a Spider, So what?, Vol. 2 by Okina Baba

I enjoyed the first volume of this light novel series enough that I decided to order volume 2 almost right away. It's a really fun series about a Japanese girl who is reincarnated as a spider monster in a dungeon in a world that operates like an RPG. In this volume, the spider finds herself trapped in a level of the dungeon that's full of monsters that are way too strong for her, and the only way back to the safer levels is through a fiery zone (and spiders are weak against fire). It was a fast fun book that I pretty much read in one sitting, and my only complaint was that the book and her former classmates, who also reincarnated into this world, and I really didn't care about the classmates all that much.

21) One Bad Week by James A. Moore

I really love James A. Moore's character Jonathan Crowley, and when I heard he had a new novel featuring the character coming in April, I immediately checked to see if I could preorder it. I couldn't, but while looking, I discovered this collection of short stories featuring the character that I had somehow missed. Naturally I immediately ordered it despite it having the creepiest cover of any book in my library (seriously, coulrophobes DO NOT look at this cover). It's a good collection of stories featuring Crowley battling ghosts, demons, and an evil clown.

22) Whimsy and Soda by Matthew David Brozik

I knew this wasn't going to be good before I read it, but I didn't think it would be this bad. It's a collection of P. G. Wodehouse pastiches in which Jeeves and/or Bertie Wooster encounter literary or pop culture figures or get involved in situations based off of literary works (the first story is a nod to The Metamorphosis in which Bertie transforms into a parakeet and there's a Scandal in Bohemia story that pretty much just changes the names and setting). Don't make the mistake of thinking any of these stories will be funny or clever. They aren't, and some of them barely even qualify as stories as nothing much happens in them except an encounter with some other famous character.

23) Beatrice Beecham's Ship of Shadows by Dave Jeffery

I didn't care for this one as much as the rest of the series.

24) So I'm a Spider, so what?, Vol. 3 by Okina Baba
25) So, I'm a Spider, So What?, vol. 4 by Okina Baba

I decided to order the next 2 volumes of this series when I ordered another book and read them right away. These books see the spidery hero get stronger, beat some dragons, beat her spider mother, and get her butt decisively kicked by the demon lord. It's also when I finally realized that the parts of the story are taking place years before the parts of the story featuring human protagonists. Now I just have to wait for volume 5 to be released next month.

26) The Forensic Certified Public Accountant and the Cremated 64-SQUARES Financial Statements by Dwight David Thrash

One podcast I really enjoy is 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, hosted by Michael J. Nelson and Conor Lastowka, in which the hosts read a book that they expect they will not like. I decided to read along this time. What a mistake. This is the worst book I have ever read. The book stars Titus Uno, Certified Public Accountant, Forensic Certified Public Accountant, and Chartered Global Management Accountant (and every time he mentions his name he includes ALL of those titles). He is investigation a crime committed by the "cat burglar terrorist" who blew up the 64-SQUARES building. The first 16 chapters of the book serve as introductions to every character in the book and are full of extraneous and boring information as well as pointless repetition (seriously I don't need to be told that CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer every time the CEO's name is mentioned). The next five chapters consist of us being told at length and again with much repetition and extraneous detail what information needs to be discovered to solve the case. Then the next chapter is the court trial, which contains the only action taken by the protagonist throughout the whole book--giving a one paragraph statement during the trial--as well as a brief summary of the people involved in the crime, which makes no sense. Then the final chapter gives a summation of the book and explains the motives of the crime in greater detail though not enough detail to really make sense.

Essentially, this is a mystery in which the main character does almost nothing, almost nothing happens, and nothing is really explained very well.

27) The Curse of the Silver Pharaoh by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

This is the first volume of a YA series that is spun off of The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences steampunk series, which I read the first 3 volumes of and abandoned due to volume 4 being ridiculously overpriced in the kindle format. (seriously why would any sane person set the price for an ebook higher than the cost of a new paperback version of the same book?) This book is about the Ministry Seven, a group of street kids similar to the Baker Street Irregulars in the Sherlock Holmes stories. They are asked to go undercover at a school to help find a kidnapped Egyptologist. It was a good book though I did have some problems with the plot.

28) The Ghost Hunters: Three Occult Detectives by Allen Upward, Harold Begbie, & Rose Champion de Crespigny

This is an omnibus edition of three early occult detective story collections. The first is Begbie's The Dreams of Andrew Latter, which is about a man who learns to use lucid dreaming to solve crimes by seeing them happen in his dreams. The second is a collection of stories by Upward which feature a house-agent and his secretary who specialize in buying haunted houses, exorcising the ghosts, and selling the homes for a profit. The third is Champion de Crespigny's The Casebook of Norton Vyse about a psychic who uses his abilities to deal with a variety of supernatural situations. Of the lot, I found Upward's stories to be the most interesting.

29) The coming Storm by Michael Lewis

This is a rather short audiobook on America's National Weather Service, all of their data, and the evils of AccuWeather. It's fairly interesting.

30) Chapelwood by Cherie Priest

This book is the sequel to Maplecroft, and as such it is a cosmic horror novel featuring Lizzie Borden. I didn't care for this one as much as the first one, but it was still pretty good.

31) Fair Haven by Red Lagoe

This is an ebook I picked up a few weeks ago, when the author was giving it away for free to celebrate Women in Horror Month. It's a zombie novel of the "disease turns people into murderous psychopaths" sort instead of the traditional undead sort. The plot follows a standard apocalyptic fiction formula of rescue loved one then head off to a cabin in the woods to wait things out. The main problem is the characters are all pretty much stereotypes.

32) Thomas Wildus and the Book of Sorrows by J M Bergen

This is a YA novel about a Harry Potter wannabe. While I didn't think the book was bad, I didn't think it was particularly good either. It's a fairly exciting story, and the characters are likable and believable enough. I did have a couple of problems though.

The first, and lesser problem was the extracts from the fictional book called The Book of Sorrows that the main character, Thomas Wildus, spends the first half of the book reading. These are quite frankly bad. They're boring, and are written in an annoying pseudo-old timey format full of words like thinkest, and cometh, and yae.

The other main problem is the pacing. It takes nearly two thirds of the book until Thomas gets his "You're a wizard, Harry" moment and finally starts to learn magic. This made me wonder if this was going to be the first volume in a series and if Thomas wasn't going to get to fight the book's baddy until volume two. Nope. He got a couple of days of training before being plunged into the final battle. All of this led to the first 2/3 of the book being too slow paced and the last 1/3 being too fast paced.

Overall, I still liked the book, and people who like Harry Potter types of books will probably enjoy it.

33) Cradle: Foundation by Will Wright

This is an omnibus edition of the first three volumes of a fantasy series called Cradle. It's about a young man born into a world where everyone has magical power. The protagonist is an unsouled, who is born far weaker than ordinary people in his valley, and is not allowed to train his power, so he leaves home and with a lot of hard work works on becoming stronger. I really enjoyed this and will be reading the rest of the series.

34) The House on the Moor by William Meikle

This is a spooky little haunted house story about a man who wants to write a book about his famous grandfather's mysterious death.

35) The Pole Vault Championship of the Entire Universe by Conor Lastowka

This is a very funny sci-fi story. It's all about a teenage girl who meets her grandfather, who her parents have always told her was dead, when he returns to reclaim an old mascot costume that looks like something out of a horror movie. The pair head off to his home in the micronation of Hawall, which seems to be inspired by real-life the micronation Sealand and existsto make money by tricking people into thinking they're going to Hawaii. Hawall is currently hosting the Olympics as part of a complicated scam to get itself recognized by the UN. Meanwhile a group of extraterrestrial garbage collectors have decided they no longer wish to collect garbage, and instead want to rise to glory, and that the best way to do so is to dominate the Olympics. It's a wacky, crazy plot, and it's made even better in the audiobook version, which features a full cast narration from some very funny people including Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, comedy musician "Weird Al" Yankovic, and quite a few other people.

36) Mori and Mugi, the Sumo stable cats

This is probably the oddest book I've bought recently. It's a book of photographs of Mori and Mugi, who are the cats of the Arashio-Beya Sumo Stable. It's also got brief snippets of text in Japanese and English telling about the lives of the cats ans the stable's sumo wrestlers.

37) The Cult Files by Chris Mikul

This is an interesting book of brief article about various cults of the sort that go around murdering people or commit mass suicide. Though I was a bit skeptical of the book as it started out with thuggee, which modern scholars dispute whether or not it was an actual cult.

38) Skysworn by Will Wright

This was a decent continuation of the Cradle series. I didn't like it as much as the first three due to the fact that the first three were all about the character getting stronger and essentially levelling up, but in this one all the characters were still at the same level at the end as they were at the beginning.

39) Ferocious by Jeff Strand

Jeff Strand's latest horror novel is about a man and his teenage niece, who he raised since she was orphaned as a baby, who have to escape from a forest filled with zombie animals. It's got the witty banter and gore I expect in a Jeff Strand novel and is one of the better zombie novels I've read lately.

40) That time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, vol. 3

This was a decent book, but I didn't like it quite as much as the previous two. This book involves the main character allying with a nation of dwarves, meeting a friendly demon lord, and battling a monster called Charybdis, which is loosely based off the one from Greek myths.

41) Ghostwater by Will Wright
42) Underlord by Will Wright

I really like this Cradle series. Now I've read the first six and have to wait for book seven to be finished.

43) The Tick People by Carlton Mellick III

This was a very strange and very disgusting book.

44) Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson

This was also kind of strange. It's a sort of thriller about a man who hallucinates extra personalities who are experts in various fields and can use their knowledge to solve cases. It was surprisingly good.

Yup, #44 is definitely weird, but I really liked it!

45) Dark Moons Rising on a Starless Night by Mame Bougouma Diene

This is a pretty good collection of horror short stories set in Afric and written by an Franco-Senegalese-American author.

46) Chain of Fools by Anthony Newton

This is one of the first books I bought when I first got a Kindle seven years ago and I purchased a bunch of random stuff just because it was free. Free is the only price I'd recommend paying for this book. It's not terrible, but it reads like something a moderately talented student wrote for a creative writing class. It's a collection of short stories about a character named the Fool, who was a magical being created by Merlin, and his descendants, who seem to mostly be super heroes. Other than a 17th century tale in which a friend of the fool falls in love with a selkie and a WWII in which that era's fool is kidnapped onboard a Nazi submarine, are so lacking in plot that they are more like a scene from a story than a story itself.

47) Undead Island by Hideyuki Kikuchi

This is the 25th Vampire hunter D novel. This time D goes to an island on which some vampires have recently revived and kidnapped the inhabitants of a local fishing village. It's a pretty good story that mostly focuses on a teenaged girl who is the only person who escaped the fishing village and who is determined to rescue her family.

48) The Monster of Frankenstein

This is a collection of bronze age Marvel comics featuring the Frankenstein Monster. It's fairly interesting, but suffers badly from frequent changes in tone and characterization every few issues and ends with a cliffhanger due to the series series getting cancelled mid-story.

49) On This, the Day of the Pig by Josh Malerman

This is the first book by Malerman that I've read, though I have seen the film adaptation of Bird Box. It's a decidedly creepy book about an intelligent, telepathic pig who causes a lot of death and mayhem after he decides to revolt against humanity.

50) Crota by Owl Goingback

this is a fun little horror novel involving a small town, an ancient monster, and Native American magic.

51) Omega the Unknown: Classic by Steve Gerber

This is one of Steve Gerber's less weird comics. It's about an alien who comes to Earth after his planet is destroyed by robots. There's a young boy on earth who looks a lot like the alien and seems to have similar abilities. Then there's a lot of stories with Omega fighting B list villains before the series is abruptly cancelled, and we get a twist conclusion in the pages of The Defenders.

52) Folsom Untold by Danny Robins

I mostly got this because it was free from Audible. It tells the story behind Johnny Cash's Live at Folsom Prison album. It's an interesting story.

53) The Elephant of Surprise by Joe R. Lansdale

This is the 12th Hap and Leonard novel. This time, the pair find a woman who's had her tongue nearly cut out while driving home one night. When they try to help her, the guys who attacked her show up to try and finish the job. It's a really good book, though I did feel that the longer chapters dragged a little bit.

54) So I'm a Spider, So What?, vol. 5 by Okina Baba

I wasn't too sure of this one at first, since it spent far more time on special chapters dealing with secondary characters than it did with the spider protagonist, but the special chapters actually became more interesting as the book went on, and there was a surprise plot twist that I actually didn't see coming (and another one that I did). I really enjoy this series and am eagerly awaiting volume 6 in another 4 months.

55) Scratchman by Tom Baker

This is a book that was literally decades in the making as it got its start as a proposed Doctor Who feature film back in the 70's. It's a fun, and scary, Doctor Who novel in the style of 70's era Doctor Who that involves killer scarecrows, the devil, and a giant pinball game.

56) Goldenhand by Garth Nix

This is the 5th Abhorsen novel, which effectively ties up all the loose threads of the previous 4. It was mostly enjoyable, but the ending felt a bit rushed.

57) The Defenders: The Best Defense

I saw this when I stopped in my local comic shop yesterday and instantly picked it up, as it's a new graphic novel featuring the original version of the Defenders. Of course, these Defenders have changed a lot from their 70's/early 80's incarnations that i'm familiar with: Hulk is intelligent and possessed by an evil spirit, Doctor Strange is a ghost from an alternate future, Namor is trying to conquer the surface world to prevent environmental collapse in the oceans, and Silver surfer is working for Galactus. The plot revolves around the future Doctor Strange returning to the present to prevent the Earth from being destroyed by a cosmic train that burns planets for fuel. It's a surprisingly good story that features the return of one of the classic Defenders recurring villains.

58) Durarara!!, Volume 12 by Ryohgo Narita

This is the penultimate volume in the series. I don't have much to say as it pretty much just continues the plot from volume 11 with no real resolution and mainly seems to have a lot of events pushing toward a climax.

59) Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

This is the sort of urban fantasy that I don't really like. It started off as a monster hunt and degenerated into a story about the badd-ass heroine trying to choose between the pretty boy and the bad boy. Besides that, I just found the plot far too rambling for my tastes. The main pluses to the story were its fairly unique setting and the fact that there aren't a lot of books of this sort with Native American protagonists. Even so, I'm not going to continue the series.

60) The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas

This is the first book in the Paperbacks from Hell series, which reprints horror novels originally published during the horror boom of the 70s and 80s. This particular novel is all about mutant cockroaches eating people on a small island off the coast of New England. It's entertaining and very violent, gory pulp.

61) The Walking Wounded by Michael Avallone

The 31st volume of the Ed Noon detective series has finally been released, and it really wasn't worth the wait. This is far from the worst book in the series, but it really isn't very good either. The plot revolves around the son of the antagonist from the first Ed Noon novel, The Tall Dolores, coming after Ed for revenge. Unfortunately, the book feels very insubstantial to the point where it almost could have been done a short story and been better off. The first chapter is mostly taken up by Ed reading a play that retells the first chapter of The Tall Dolores. The second chapter is mostly Ed and a friend grousing about how the pop culture of the 70s, when the book is set, is inferior to the pop culture of their youth, though it does end with a nice murder. Besides that, about half the book is a flashback from the POV of the bad guy, and is generally rambling and boring. There's not a lot of action, and no real detection, but on the plus side, Melissa Mercer, Ed's secretary/love interest who was last mentioned in book 27 when Ed proposed to her gets a few passing mentions so that we know she hasn't been erased from existence. While I didn't enjoy this one very much, I will continue to read the series, if more books are released, in the hope that we will eventually get to the last three books in the series, which supposedly feature an elderly Ed Noon battling an alien invasion and sound absolutely insane.

62) Boomtown by James A. Moore

I really loved this book. It's one of the best horror novels I've read this year, though it's probably not for everybody due to the (thankfully off camera) rapes of women and children committed by the human villains of the book.

The book features the return of my favorite of Moore's characters, Jonathan Crowley, who is an immortal monster hunter. This time Crowley is in the old west, exploring America for the first time when he is killed by bandits. He soon comes back to life due to the presence of supernatural evil in the form of skinwalkers. Besides all that, Albert Miles, who was the villain of the Serenity Falls trilogy, in which Crowley first appeared, is also hanging around in the background.

It all makes for a gruesome and violent thrill ride.

See your reading is whizzing along as per normal, Nathan.

Have a lovely weekend.

>56 PaulCranswick: thanks

63) The Necroscope Bundle by Brian Lumley

This is an omnibus edition of the books Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer and Necroscope: The Mobius Murders. They're a pair of reasonably fun horror novella featuring one of my favorite horror series characters.

64) The Diary: Book One of Cursed by S. L. Weiss

This wasn't very good. It wasn't terrible, but it definitely wasn't good. The worst part was the dialogue, which was ridiculously wooden and unrealistic. The plot of the book was very much like a watered down version of the manga series Death Note, though in fairness I doubt the author is familiar with Death Note.

65) True Techi Muyo!, Vol. 3: Washu by Yousuke Kuroda & Masaki Kajishima

This is the 3rd and sadly final volume of the light novel series that's based off of the Techi Muyo anime series, and it deals with the early days of the series oldest character. It's my facorite volume of the light novel series.

66) Spice & Wolf, vol. 1 by Isuna Hasekura

This is another Japanese light novel. It's different from the other light novels that I've read, or indeed most of what I read, in that it's pretty much a fantasy romance. It's about Lawrence, a trader, who after passing through a village, discovers the local harvest goddess, Holo the Wisewolf, stowed away inside his cart. The pair travel around doing merchant things and seem to be falling in love, though they never so much as kiss in this book. The only action comes when Holo is kidnapped by a rival merchant company. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the story.

67) The Son of Satan Classic by Gary Friedrich

This is another collection of 70s era comics. This time featuring The Son of Satan. It couldn't decide if wanted to be a horror comic or a super hero comic, and it just ended with no real resolution. Personally, I thought the character was better in the pages of The Defenders.

68) Obake : Ghost Stories in Hawai'i by Glen Grant

This is a collection of ghost stories containing both folkloric accounts and straight up fiction. I thought it was fairly well written, and mostly enjoyable, except for the two detective stories with supernatural elements, which I didn't like despite the fact that I usually enjoy that sort of thing.

69) The Demon Next Door by Bryan Burroughs

This was a short audiobook that I got for free. It's about a real-life, small town, serial killer named Daniel Lee Corwin.

70) Marvel Masterworks: Spider-Man, Vol. 1

Some really great stories that comprise the earliest adventures of Spidey.

71) Mouse Trap by Carlton Mellick III

Carlton Mellick has managed to write another really weird, and weirdly good book in this one. This is the story of Emily, a fifth grade girl who, along with the few remaining children from her school, has been sheltering in her school gymnasium until one day the sole remaining teacher takes the students to "Disneyland." Unfortunately, the amusement park is full of deadly booby traps , and the teacher is soon killed. Even worse, the children soon encounter a group of eight graders who are more interested in sending the younger kids ahead to set off any traps to increase their own chances of survival. in the end it makes for a compelling story about a young girl learning to do what it takes to survive without sacrificing her own humanity.

72) Inside the Asylum by Mary SanGiovanni

Mary SanGiovanni is one of my favorite horror writers. I really love her style of cosmic horror, and this is no exception. This particular novel is set in an insane asylum (for the criminally insane no less) and is about a patient whose imaginary friends aren't as imaginary as other people would like to believe. Not only are the imaginary friends becoming real, they're trying to make the entire imaginary world they came from real as well, and in the process they're filling the asylum with monsters and corpses. It's a quick, enjoyable book with plenty of grotesque monsters and a few gruesome killings.

Looks like I have hit 75.

73) Operation: Loch Ness by William Meikle

This is the 5th book in the S-Squad series, about a group of British soldiers that get tasked with dealing with weird stuff. As you can probably guess from the title, this time around the weird stuff is the Loch Ness monster. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he didn't go with the standard plesiosaur version of the monster.

74) Odd Adventures with Your other Father by Norman Prentiss

I was actually a bit surprised by how much I liked this book. It's about a gay man telling his daughter stories about the adventures he had with her other father, who died when she was four, with a wrap-around story about the girl trying to find out more about her deceased father by reconnecting with her estranged grandparents. The whole thing ended up not being the horror novel I was expecting, but was actually a rather heart-warming story about love.

75) Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest, Vol. 1 by Ryo Shirakome

This is yet another light novel about someone from earth who gets transported to an RPG-like universe where despite starting out weak, they end up ridiculously strong. It was a fun novel, and I'll probably get the rest of the series at some point.

Congrats!

Congratulations on reaching 75, Nathan!

>66 drneutron: & >67 FAMeulstee:> Thanks

76) Monster Girl Doctor, vol. 1 by Yoshino Origuchi

This was a bit different. It's about a young, human doctor in a world where monsters exist. These monsters seem to mostly be the humanoid and half-human types, i.e. lamias, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids, etc. This doctor specialized in treating monsters, and seems to keep ending up treating pretty, young female monsters who fall in love with him, though he's a bit too naive to notice. It's surprisingly good, despite being a bit pervy in spots (especially the artwork).

77) A Portion of Dragon and Chips by Simon Haynes

Well this was interesting. The author of one of my favorite sci-fi/comedy series decided to try a fantasy/comedy series that features Clunk, the robot from his sci-fi series, crashing on a planet that is pretty much a stereotypical fantasy kingdom. After reading volume one of the trilogy, I'm not sure if Clunk has somehow ended up in an alternate reality, or if there will be some technobabble explanation as to why magic works on this planet, or what. I generally enjoyed the book. It was a funny parody of the stereotypical fantasy. However the puns were a bit too much.

78) Tales of Japan

This was a collection of Japanese folk tales drawn from the writings of Lafcadio Hearn and Yei Theodora Ozaki. Each of the stories has an illustration from Kotaro Chiba, which makes it a very beautiful book even with some of the stories and their illustrations being somewhat ghastly in nature.

79) Lafayette in the Somewhat United Staes by Sarah Vowell

I've read and enjoyed several of Vowell's books, but this one I didn't like as much. I suspect that this was because it was an audiobook narrated by the author, and Vowell has a voice that isn't very well-suited to narration.

80) The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 by Carlton Mellick III

This is another very strange book by Mellick. It's essentially a precursor to the LitRPG subgenre about a group of adventurers who come to realize that they are characters in an RPG being played by a group of horny teenage nerds and that their DM is completely incompetent. It manages to be both a pervy story with characters who are frequently raped and a heartwarming tale of characters striving to break free from their cruel overlords.

81) An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris

I've never read any of Charlaine Harris's books before asi i generally prefer horror vampires over urban fantasy vampires, but I randomly got this. This is an alternate history fantasy set in a world where the US collapsed after the assassination of FDR. It's all about Gunnie Rose, a young, female gunslinger who is hired to protect a pair of Russian wizards as they search for a descendant of Rasputin. It was really entertaining.

82) Nightmare House by Douglas Clegg

This was a good, if a bit odd, haunted house story.

83) A Penny for Your Thoughts by Robert Ford & Matt Hayward

This is a new horror novel that I greatly enjoyed. It's about an ex-con who finds a jar while hiking in the woods. Inside the jar are pieces of paper with a child's wishes written on them with each one wrapped around an old penny. He quickly discovers that if he takes a wish from the jar, unwraps it, and reads it, then the wish comes true. Some of the wishes aren't particularly good wishes, and some work out in a Monkey's Paw sort of way and the hero quickly comes to suspect that there may be more to the cost for these wishes than just a penny.

84) Operation Syria by William Meikle

This would be the 6th S-Squad novel. This time S-squad is sent to Syria to rescue some archaeologists who are caught in a war zone. Unfortunately, it turns out that not only are rebel forces menacing the area, there are also giant spiders. It's a fun, pulpy adventure/horror novel, and my only regret is that Meikle didn't manage to work in a single Lord of the Rings reference.

85) The Reaping by Bernard Taylor

This is the 3rd book in Valancourt Books' Paperbacks From Hell reprint series. I didn't like it as much a the gory, cockroach-filled The Nest, which was book 1, but I liked it more than When Darkness Loves Us, book 2, which I abandoned halfway through.

This is a book with a frankly, rather silly plot about an artist who is hired to supposedly paint the portrait of an heiress, but is actually supposed to get her pregnant as he is a seventh son who already has six sons and they need a seventh son of a seventh son to use in a ritual to make an old woman young again, and the old woman was secretly the artist's girlfriend who had appeared to be a young woman only a short time ago.

86) Black Moon: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume Five by Seabury Quinn

And I have now completed the Jules de Grandine books about a French doctor/occult detective. There were some very good horror/adventure type stories in the collection, but as with the previous volumes (and much other pulp era weird fiction) it suffers from some pretty unpleasant racism, particularly in the story the volume is named after, which nearly caused me to throw the book across the room, and only the fact that I didn't want to damage my Kindle stopped me.

87) Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage

This was interesting, but not quite what I thought it would be. I assumed it would be more of a memoir, but it's mostly a guide for makers. As I'm kind of lazy and not particularly hand, this book really wasn't for me, but I suspect it would be useful to people who enjoying building/crafting things.

88) Restaurant to Another World, Vol. 1 by Junpei Inuzuka

I picked this up because I enjoyed Restaurant to Another World's 2017 anime adaptation. Despite that, I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed the book as there's not much of an actual story in it. It's set in the Western Cuisine Nakoya, a small restaurant in Japan, and on every Saturday, for reasons that aren't really explained, its door becomes a magical portal to various places in a fantasy world. The book consists of a series of stories wherein denizens of the fantasy world visit the restaurant (some being regulars and some first-timers who stumble across an entrance) and eat the food, which they then gush over. I'm not a foodie, and I normally prefer stories with a bit more plot, but I found this book delightful.

89) Dagger of the Martyrs by Steven Savile & William Meikle

This is a historical fantasy novel about the end of the Templars. The main characters are twins, a boy and a girl. The boy is raised by his father in the order of the Templars. The girl and her mother were abandoned by her father as the Templars fled the Holy Land, and after her mother and the other villagers are slaughtered by Crusaders , the girl begins training to get revenge. It's a rally exciting book, and my only complaint is that despite not being listed as such on Amazon, it's the first volume of a series and there is no resolution to the story at the end of this volume. Even so, I'll pick up book 2 when it comes out.

90) Kingdom Level One by Adam Drake

Since I like Japanese light novels that use the same theme, I thought I'd try reading some western-style LitRPG and decided to start out by picking one of the freebies from Amazon's Kindle store. This is about a janitor who is summoned to a fantasy kingdom to become king. The book is mostly about him completing a bunch of videogame-style quests. It wasn't terrible, but clearly isn't the best of the genre.

91) They Rise by Hunter Shea

This is a horror novel that's very much in the style of a made for SyFy movie about global warming releasing giant, prehistoric Chimaera fish that go on a rampage.

92) Dungeon Born by Dakota Krout

This was an interesting concept. It's set in an RPG like world in which dungeons are sentient beings that can expand themselves by feeding off of magical energy that is released when creatures or people die inside them. While I really liked the concept and the plot, the characterization was ridiculously inconsistent and the dialogue used way too much modern slang, which made it feel out of place in a fantasy novel set in a pseudo-medieval world. That said, I really enjoyed it and have already purchased the second book in the series.

93) Dungeon Madness by Dakota Krout

I decided to go ahead and get the 2nd volume of this series right away. Despite it sharing the same problems as Dungeon Born, I still enjoyed it a lot. I'll definitely read the rest of the series, but I'll have to hold off on it as for some reason volumes 3+ cost twice as much as vol. 2 on Kindle, so since it's part of Kindle Unlimited, I'll wait for my monthly free amazon Prime ebook to reset next month before I continue.

94) They Thirst by Robert R. McCammon

This was a pretty good early 80's vampire novel. It's all about a vampire king taking over Los Angeles and turning most of the city to vampires in a matter of days. I really enjoyed it, except the ending was pretty much a literal deus ex machina, with the heroes only managing to win because the city sinks into the sea because of a massive earthquake just after the marines evacuate the few remaining humans. All of which is strongly hinted to have occurred because God decided to smite the city.

95) Dungeon Calamity by Dakota Krout

I think I liked this 3rd book in the series more than the first 2, especially with the plot twist involving a temporal paradox that I didn't see coming.

96) The League of Regrettable Sidekicks by Jon Morris

Frankly, I don't think this one was as good as The League of Regrettable Superheroes or The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains. The author clearly didn't have as much material to work with as he not only had to toss in several groups of villainous minions, but also used several sidekicks that are really not very regrettable (like Frobisher).

97) Malamander by Thomas Taylor

This was a fun, weird, little book written at the middle grade level. It's set in the British coastal town of Eerie-on-Sea. It's the sort of place where all kinds of weird things happen, and I couldn't help but wonder if the author was at least partly inspired by the short lived 90's TV series Eerie, Indiana. The book features a young boy who runs an unusual lost and found office in the local hotel and a young girl who gets his help to find her lost parents. On top of that, there's a sea monster, an undying ship's captain, a talking cat, a mechanical mermonkey that recommends books, and quite a bit of other weirdness.All in all, it's a great book for kids who enjoy reading strange stories.

98) And Go Like This by John Crowley

Well, this really wasn't very good. If it wasn't an Early Reviewer book and a short story collection, I probably would have abandoned it part way through. I mostly request this book because I am familiar with Connely as a SF and Fantasy writer, but hardly any of the stories in the collection are SFF. The big problem is that almost all of the stories are really dull and mostly seem to consist of a Baby Boomer's ruminations on the past, which I (a Gen Xer) am completely uninterested in. I suspect people from even younger generations will be even less interested.

The book starts with "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines," a story about two teens who are helping at a Shakespeare festival in (I believe) the early 60s, and nothing much happens in the story for 40 pages until the couple becomes some of the last people in the US to contract polio. The stories don't really get much better from there, with the only ones that captured my interest at all being "Spring Break," a sci-fi tale in the near future that's mostly grumbling about how the kids these days don't read, and the final story "Anosognosia," which is mostly a mid-life crisis wrapped in a Twilight Zone episode. Definitely not recommended.

Happy 4th July, Nathan

87> thanks. Sadly, I had to spend the day at work, but since it was ridiculously slow, I got a lot of reading done.

99) Machine Smile by Gina Ranalli

This is a sci-fi novella set in a future where androids have taken over the world and beleive humans to be a myth, and what few humans who remain live in the wilderness at a level only a few steps above cavemen. The story is about an android who crashlands in the wilderness and meets members of a human tribe. The whole thing ends up taking a very dark turn, but I really liked it.

100) Fortune Box by Madeleine Swann

This is another rather short book. This one is a collection of stories about people who receive mysterious "surprise boxes" in the mail. The boxes all contain weird things that make strange, and often disturbing, events happen to the recipient. This was also pretty good.

101) Ritualist by Dakota Krout

I've become rather fond of the LitRPG genre, so when Amazon notified me that this book, by the author of the Divine Dungeon series that I've been enjoying, was on sale, I snatched it up. It's about a former army medic who is paralyzed in an attack by insurgents. A friend offers him the opportunity to take part in a new virtual RPG game where the protagonist ends up becoming a super secret (and kind of OP) class called Ritualist. I was totally entraced, and could barely put the book down.

I seem to have gone on a bit of a LitRPG spree over the weekend:

102) The Land Founding by Aleron Kong

This is one of the more highly recommended LitRPG novels on various lists I came across. It's premise is that a guy is magically transported to the world of his favorite MMO as part of an evil plot to destroy the world so the evil beings trapped there can be set free. That's not really important to the plot though, as it's mainly about the protagonist getting stronger, making allies, and founding a village. It's a nice, fast paced adventure.

103) Awaken Online: Catharsis by Travis Bagwell

This is another frequently recommended book. It's protagonist is a fairy standard trope of the high school student whose parents are never there, is bullied by pretty much everyone at school (including teachers and staff), except for his goofy idiot friend and the pretty girl he likes who is nice to him but is dating the bully. After being expelled, the hero starts playing a new VR MMO game and quickly becomes super good at it due to an unorthodox playing style. This one was also pretty fun, but I found the chapters dealing with the real world to be very dull.

104) The Luckless by A. M. Sohma

This is one I stumbled across and thought looked interesting. It's about a woman who is pranked by her cousin, and her MMO character is replaced by an ultra weak elf dancer when the AI controlling the game goes haywire and everyone is trapped in the game with the only way to escape being to beat the ultimate boss. While this wasn't bad, it was my least favorite of the books read as the lack of strategy elements in leveling up aren't present in this novel, and that's something I actually like in these books.

105) Regicide by Dakota Krout

This is the sequel to Ritualist. I really like this series.

and my LitRPG frenzy continues.

106) Life Reset by Shemer Kuznits

I like this one a lot. It reminded my of some the stuff I liked best about The Land: Founding and So I'm a Spider, So What?. This is about a guy in an MMORPG who is betrayed by people who he thought were friends. They cast a bugged spell that forces him to start the game over as a level 1 goblin. He refuses to give up, which causes another bug that traps him in the game, and the only way for him to get out is to make his goblin village as strong as possible so he can become a level 4 boss monster.

107) The Land: Forging by Aleron Kong

This is the second book in the Land series. It focuses on the main character getting stronger by first fighting off a bugbear invasion and then going on a dungeon run.

108) Rexus by Dakota Krout

This book is labeled as a sidequest in the Completionist Chronicles series ( the first 2 of which were Ritualist and Regicide, which I greatly enjoyed). I wasn't to sure about this one at first as it focuses on the secondary character of Jaxon, who is a creepy chiropractor and kind of annoying. Once I started reading it, I discovered that this book is really funny.

109) Dungeon Desolation by Dakota Krout

I comyinue with the saga of the Divine dungeon. This book moves into dark territory with lots of bad stuff happening, and the dungeon (and everyone else) trying to stop a madman with godlike powers from destroying the planet. It was good, and made it pretty clear that, as I suspected, this series and Krout's other series, The Completionist Chronicles, are in fact tied together.

110) Operation Norway by William Meikle

And i also have continued with the S-squad series, which this time features the squad going up against trolls. It's good pulpy fun.

111) Dungeon Eternium by Dakota Krout

This is the finale of the Divine dungeon series. It's all about trying to survive an apocalypse.

112) Life Reset: EvP by Shemer Kuznits

This is the second volume of the Life Reset series. This one is about the goblin main character fighting off attacks by human players while continuing to build up his village.

113) The Land: Alliances by Aleron Kong

This is the third volume of the series. It is also about someone building a village . While I do like the series, the main character is kind of a jerk and the constant pop culture references are really annoying.

114) Life Reset: Hobnobbing by Shemer Kuznits

A generally enjoyable continuation of the Life Reset books. This time it's about the main character forming a trading alliance with a hobgoblin city, striking out against his human enemies, and helping an AI ally's plan come to fruition. Sadly, this is the most recent book in the series and in an afterword the author mentions he's taking a break from this series to work on something else, so it looks like it will be a while until I can continue reading more of the series.

115) The Land: Catacombs by Aleron Kong
116) The Land: Swarm by Aleron Kong

I enjoyed these books too, though I am a bit miffed the Catacombs did not involve catacombs and Swarm did not involve a swarm, so I have no idea why they were titled that way. I still dislike the main character as well as his constant pop culture references are annoying and he keeps acting like a particularly douchey frat boy.

117) Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller by Chet Williamson

This was a 1995 adaptation of a 1995 point and click video game. It's set in a dystopian future where Hell is real and America has been taken over by a theocratic dictator. The plot follows a pair of government agents who barely escape assassination by their own government and subsequently discover that almost nothing they thought they new was reasly what it seemed. It's not one of the best books I've read, but it's not bad.

118) The Land: Raiders by Aleron Kong
119) The Land: Predators by Aleron Kong

These books continue the Land series. I still dislike the MC a lot, but I also still love the books. Predators, which is the most recent in the series, is ridiculously long, and has some really nasty (even by my standards) scenes in the middle of the book when the MC confronts a serial killer who goes on and on about the horrible rapes and tortures he's committed while torturing the MC. I'll still read the next volume when it gets released.

120) The Crafter's Dungeon by Jonathan Brooks

This book was about a young woman with an interest in crafting who is reborn as a dungeon after being murdered. The author seems to have written quite a few books about sentient dungeons, and I suspect I'll be reading some of his other books.

121) Ascend Online by Luke Chimilenko

This was another LitRPG novel. The author definitely could have used an editor, and while the book isn't bad, it isn't really all that great either. I may read the rest of the series at some point.

122) Operation Mongolia by William Meikle

This is the most recent volume of the S-Squad series, and features the squad fighting Mongolian Death Worms. It involves the squad escorting a pair of paleontologists through the Gobi Desert on camel after the scientists' truck breaks down. It's a decent story, but as it stars with the squad at the dig site, it leaves a major plot hole of how did the squad get to the site and why didn't they just use whatever transport brought them in to leave.

123) Occultist by Oliver Mayes

This is another LitRPG novel. It's about a kid who's trying to win money in a streaming contest in a VR game to pay for his mom's artificial heart. In the process he ends up on the run from the law (in the real world) and involved in a war against a powerful guild (in the game). It's not a bad story, but I think I prefer LitRPG that focuses on game world stuff, and this has way too much real world drama for my taste.

124) Bone Dungeon by Jonathan Smidt

This is another story about a dungeon. Thematically, it's very similar to the others I've read as they all feature a murdered person who is brought back to life as an RPG style dungeon with a fairy (or fairy-like creature) to assist them. Like the last one I read, I enjoyed it, and will probably read the sequel when it's published.

125) Limitless Lands: Book 1: The Commander's Tale
126) Limitless Lands Book 2: Conquest
127) Limitless Lands Book 3: Retribution all by Dean Henegar

This is yet another LitRPG series. This one is set in a distant future where all war is now fought by drones and the few living US combat veterans are living out their few remaining years in VA sponsored rest homes. Meanwhile a tech company has created an AI that can simultaneously run a fully immersive VR MMO and treat patients hooked up to advanced medpods. This series is about an elderly veteran whose mind has deteriorated in the real world, but with the help of the AI is able to play the role of a Roman-style military commander in the game as part of a treatment to restore his memories. It's a fun series, though like so many of these self published books, it really could have used a good editor.

128) Raze by Dakota Krout

This is the most recent book in the Completionist Chronicles series. It was good, but seemed a little light rushed to the others in the series.

129) the Dungeon Traveler by Alston Sleet

This is another one of those books about a dungeon in an RPG world. This one travels around the world through spatial magic and contains a series of challenges for anyone who enters. It's pretty good.

130) Life in the North by Tao Wong
131) Redeemer of the Dead by Tao Wong

These are the first 2 volumes of another LitRPG series. This is a bit different though, as instead of being about someone playing a game or being transported to a world that works like an RPG, it's an apocalyptic novel about what would happen if Earth was transformed into a world that operated like an RPG (but where you don't respawn after death). I really like this one.

132) Trucking Through Time by Charles E. Harris

I started reading this back in April when the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast, which is dedicated to discussing books the hosts are pretty sure they won't like, first mentioned it as a book they were considering reading. I was reading a chapter here and there for a few months and finally buckled down to try and finish it when they actually started discussing it on the podcast earlier this month. The book is about a pair of truck drivers who might as well be clones of each other that get mysteriously transported back in time to the early 19th century while on a run to San Fransisco. The pair save a young Native American boy, one of them falls in love with a Native American woman, and they all manage to stop a racist general from attacking the tribe by sending a telegram to Washington. Frankly, the writing is awful, the time travel is the least unbelievable part of thee plot, and the whole thing is a bit racist in a vaguely patronizing way.

133) The Cost of Survival by Tao Wong

This is the 3rd volume of the LitRPG series I'm currently reading. I still enjoyed it, but I'm really not sure I understand the main character's motivations at all, particularly why he feels so betrayed at the end of the book.

134) Citites In Chains by Tao Wong
135) Coast on Fire by Tao Wong

I continue on with volumes 4 & 5 of the System Apocalypse. These volumes deal mostly with humanity fighting back against our alien oppressors.

136) World Unbound by Tao Wong

This is volume 6 of the System Apocalypse, a series that just keeps getting worse each volume. It started out being about a man trying to survive an apocalypse that consists of monsters springing up everywhere and the world operating by the rules of an RPG. This book however is mostly about the political fight to get earth a seat on the Galactic Councils interspersed with the occasional fight scene that somehow manages to be even more boring than the political discussions. This is a very odd choice as the last volume ended with the main character being kidnapped by aliens who wanted to force him to train for an elite Paladin class. Instead of showing that training, Wong has decided to skip the story four years into the future with the MC arriving home after the training is finished. There's one more published volume in the series, and if that one isn't significantly better, I won't pick up volumes 8+ when they are finally published.

137) The Long Sleep by William Meikle

I really needed something to cleanse my brain before starting the next System Apocalypse book, and this novella about Sherlock Holmes fighting the mummy of Alexander the Great was the perfect choice. It was a fun little adventure.

138) Stars Awoken by Tao Wong

I have now read the most recent volume of the System Apocalypse series. This was a definite improvement over the previous volume. I might read the next volume when it comes out.

139) Crota by Rohan M. Vider

After finishing stars, I tried my hand at reading Welcome to Ludus, the first volume of the oddly popular Delvers LLC LitRPG series, but abandoned it halfway through as the writing was terrible, the characters were dull, and the plot was boring. After that, I randomly picked Crota, another LitRPG book, and nearly abandoned it a few chapters in due to the abysmal dialogue. Luckily the book improved after about the third chapter, though I wouldn't recommend actually buying a copy. This book is only really worth getting if you have Amazon's Kindle Unlimited as it's length is greatly padded out due to the author reprinting the MC's extremely lengthy stat sheet every other chapter.

Somehow I seem to have been forgetting to update this, and I've read quite a few books in the past week.

140) The Labyrinth by Rohan M. Vider

This was the sequel to Crota, which was the last book I mentioned here. This book suffered from the previous volumes problems of being padded out by way too many stat sheets, but was still pretty good. I'll probably read volume 3 in the series whenever it's published.

141) Video Game Plotline Tester
142) Stay on the Wing
143) A Trap for the Potentate
144) Finding a Body all four by Michael Atamanov

This is the complete run of another LitRPG series. This time it's one that originated in Russia. It's about a guy who gets a job as a plotline tester for a big RPG company and is assigned to play ad a Goblin Herbalist. Somehow he manages to get into all sorts of trouble in both the game world and the real world. It was mostly good, but like a lot of these books, it spends way too much time on the real world plotline, which I tend to find boring and usually just end up skimming.

145) SumoKitty by David Biedrzycki

I almost feel bad about listing this one, since it's a very short children's picture book about a cat that takes up sumo. I mostly picked it up because it's new and several of the sumo people I follow on Twitter and Youtube have been hyping it. It's a cute book that could serve to teach young children a bit about sumo.

146) Temple of Sorrow by Carrie Summers

This is probably the most well-written LitRPG novel I've read so far. It's about a young woman named Devon who is hired to become a professional video game player for a new immersive RPG that requires brain implants to play. Her character spawns in the middle of a jungle, and she ends up becoming the leader of a small village. There's also a real world plot involving a probably evil AI and suspicious activities by the game company that aren't fully explained as this is just book one of a series. Surprisingly, I actually liked the real world parts of the story this time. So far this is only 2nd to the Completionist Chronicles in my list of favorite LitRPG series.

147) Fortress of Shadows
148) Cavern of Spirits
149) Citadel of Smoke
150) Vault of the Magi all by Carrie Summers

These would be volumes 2-5 of the Stovehaven League LitRPG series. While I thought volume 1 was one of the most well written books I've read in the genre, as the series has gone on, I can't help but think the quality has dropped a bit. Too many of these seem to involve the main character wandering around aimless for the first half of the book and then rushing around to do the actual plot stuff in the second half. Also, as the story goes on, I have found that the real world subplot begins to grate. I really wish LitRPG authors didn't feel so compelled to include that stuff, because so far every single real world subplot I've read has sucked.

151) Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

This book has been sitting on my to read pile since its release, and the main reason I started reading it is because Reddit's r/Fantasy subreddit just started doing a monthly horror book club, and this was their first selection. It's okay. It's the coming of age story of a werewolf boy. There's really not much overarching plot, and it's mostly a bunch of disconnected memories from the boy's childhood. It's really not my sort of thing as I usually prefer my horror with more gore, a lot more action, and monsters that are monstrous and not sympathetic characters.

>104 yoyogod: Congratulations on reaching 2 x 75, Nathan!

>105 FAMeulstee: Thanks. Now I'm going to see if I can reach 3 x 75 by the end of the year.

152) So I'm a Spider, So What?, vol. 6 by Okina Baba

This is the latest translation of my favorite light novel series, which coincidentally also fits in well with my recent LitRPG spree. This volume is far less battle oriented than previous volumes, and instead is about a leisurely country journey taken by our spidery hero, two vampires, and the demon lord. I loved it.

153) They Called Us Enemy by George Takai and various others

I've been meaning to get this for a while, and when I saw a copy at my local comics shop today, I finally picked it up. It's a graphic memoir of Takai's youth in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. It's not as grim as I would have expected, but it still shines a light on one of America's sins. It makes for a timely and informative book.

154) Becoming Superman by J. Michael Straczynski

I've been listening to the audiobook version of this, excellently narrated by Peter Jurasik who played Londo Mollari on Straczynski's show Babylon 5. I think it's a strong contender for my favorite book of the year.

155) Havenstar by Glenda Larke

I've read all of Larke's other novels, so I decided it was finally time to read this one, which was her first. It's good, but not her best work. My main problem is that it all gets wrapped up too easily. The story is set in a kingdom that has been under assault by the forces of chaos for centuries. Then the main character discovers the secret to make magical maps and how they can be used to fight chaos, and then the big bad guy is beaten a couple of months later.

156) Kate Crackernuts by Katherine M. Briggs

I'm trying to participate in r/Fantasy's Book bingo this year, and one of the squares is Retelling. I decided to go for something more obscure and picked this retelling of an old Scottish fairy tale largely because Briggs's Encyclopedia of Fairies is the only reference work I've ever read cover to cover. Sadly, i didn't like this one as much as the encyclopedia. It's written as a children's story with a fairly simple plot, but Briggs wrote it in a very archaic style with a lot of Scottish dialect and a great deal of historical accuracy, as far as I can tell anyway. All of this lead to a book with a plot that's a bit too simplistic to be gripping, written in a linguistic style that's confusing, and with enough references to the Cromwellian time period to be distracting.

157) Supermage by Aaron Oster

I decided to get back to my LitRPG reading kick, and unfortunately started it back off with a real stinker. The basic premise of this book was interesting enough. It's set in a world where everyone becomes either a mage or a super (warrior with magic powers) by the time they turn 16, and very rare individuals like the book's protagonist become both. Unfortunately, it all falls apart in the execution.

The main character is so overpowered that there's no real tension in any of his fights. On top of that, despite the fact that he's supposedly 16, and was raised on the streets, he knows less about sex (or women) than any male who wasn't raised in seclusion by an order of celibate monks should. There's the fact that despite being an orphan who grew up on the streets, he's the best (and seemingly only) friend of the daughter of the city's lord, but how the two ever met, let alone became best friends, is never addressed. It's also a bit of a mystery as to how he even survived on the streets as he is incredibly naive, has no money, seems to have no job, no mention is made of his being a beggar or thief, and he seems to have no friends or acquaintances beyond the lord's daughter. The worst part is that all of the villains, other than two youths who are just a bully and a sex offender, are so cartoonishly evil that you expect them to start twirling their mustaches as they let loose a sinister laugh.

This was definitely a waste of my time.

158) Mirror Gate by Jeff Wheeler

This is the sequel to Storm Glass, which i listened to in audiobook format back in January. I like the series, though I can't help but think that the character Sera was incredibly stupid in this one.

159) First Draw by Tim Moon

Another LitRPG. This one is about a soldier in a sci-fi future war against aliens who goes to a planet several light years from earth. On the way, he's in suspended animation, and his mind is playing an RPG. It's not bad, but it does suffer from two of the more prevalent sins of LitRPG: pop culture references and juvenile humor. i have no idea why the people who write these seem to think that people living a century or more in the future will be making pop culture reference to late 20th/early 21 st century pop culture. As a general rule modern people don't make references to late 19th/early 20th century pop culture, so I don't know why future people would reference ours. As far as juvenile humor goes, I didn't need to hear about how a loincloth is painful because it doesn't provide adequate testicular support, and I really didn't need the diarrhea and fart jokes.

160) The Last Christmas by F. Paul Wilson

I enjoyed this one a lot more, which isn't surprising as it's part of one of my favorite series. In fact it's part of a series that I really wasn't expecting a new volume in as it concluded years ago. This is part of the Repairman Jack series and takes place between Ground Zero (2009) and Fatal Error (2010). My only complain is that despite being set between two books written a decade ago, this book is clearly set in today as it mentions Uber and Lyft and an NYC Styrofoam ban, none of which weren't a thing back then as far as I know. Other than that, it's a great story with lots of action, weird science, and the supernatural.

161) The Spirit by Thomas Page

This was a fun little piece of 70s horror about a killer bigfoot.

162) Fated by Benedict Jacka

I started reading this one in January, and eventually had to put it aside due to the print being a bit too small for my middle aged eyes to read comfortable. I got progressive lenses back in March, but I never got around to picking this back up until a few days ago. it's an OK book. It's an occult detective story, which is something i usually like, but the main character in this one just left me a bit bored. I did feel that the book picked up a good bit near the end and might give the rest of the series a go at some point.

163) Legacy of the Fallen by Luke Chmilenko

I decided it was time to read the second book of the Ascend online series. It's not my favorite LitRPG series, but it's also far from the worst. It's generally entertaining, but I felt that it dragged a bit, which isn't too surprising as it's nearly 900 pages long.

164) Bibliomancer by Dakota Krout and James Hunter

This is the first volume in a side series set in the world of one of my favorite LitRPG series, The Completionist Chronicles. It's about a guy who starts playing the RPG as a sorcerer, but decides to repel against the mage guild, because they're jerks, and ends up becoming a bibliomancer and ultimately rebels against the human kingdom by joining with their arch-enemies, the Wolfmen. It's a fun read and there are plenty of not so subtle hints that it will tie back in with the main series later on.

165) Ball of Light: Evolution by AR Chen

this is another LitRPG story. This time it's about a guy named Steve who wakes up in a fantasy world as a sentient ball of light with no memories. Steve has to acquire lots of energy so he can evolve into something cool. The story was fairly interesting, but I thought it maybe took a bit too long to get to the evolution part, which didn't happen until the end of the book.

166) Doctor Who and the Krikkit Men by Doglas Adams and James Goss

This started as an old, Douglas Adams Doctor Who script that never got used for Doctor Who, but was later used for Life, the Universe, and Everything, and was eventually dug up and turned into a novel by James Goss. It's ok. It's definitely not some of Adams' best work. I don't know about Goss as I never read anything else by him. There were some very funny bits in the book, but overall, I just felt that the story dragged a bit.

167) Clowns vs. Spiders by Jeff Strand

This book is pretty much what the titles claims it is, a book about clowns fighting spiders. As it's a horror novel, you might assume the clowns are demons, aliens, or deranged killers, but you'd be wrong. The clowns are people who took up clowning as a profession back in the days before everybody decided that clowns are scary. Unfortunately, since these days everybody does think clowns are scary, they are let go from the circus and are forced to take a job playing scary clowns at a haunted house attraction. Then a horde of man-eating spiders attacks. As the book is by Jeff Strand, the plot is even more insane than it sounds, and there's a lot of humor.

That. Sounds. Awesome!

Gotta find that one somewhere.

>117 drneutron: Jeff Strand books are always a good read.

168) The Blind Knight by Gail Van Asten

This is a book that I picked up because I wanted to read something obscure for the r/Fantasy bingo card in their "Character with a Disability" slot. As with Kate Crackernuts, which I read for largely the same reasons, I ended up not really enjoying my choice. This is a historical fantasy set in the time of King Henry I of England. The story revolves around a young man who was born blind and an albino due to a curse placed on his father by Merlin's brother, who is a druid, because the father had raped and murdered the druid's wife. The book started off good, but turned into a sort of romance novel with a plot revolving around the hero having to tame the heart of the strong woman who "hates" him. It really wasn't my kind of thing.

169) Restaurant to Another World, vol. 2 by Junpei Inuzuka

I just love this series.

170) Mastermind by Steven Kelliher

This is yet another LitRPG novel. This time I switched things up a bit by reading one of the rare non-fantasy ones. This is a superhero LitRPG. It's set in an RPG where killing other players is frowned upon because they suffer from permadeath. That's why when the book's main character's superhero that he spent years on is "accidentally" killed by the game's top hero, he goes crazy and starts playing as a villain to get revenge. it's a decent story, but it's the first volume of a series, and when volume one ends with the death of a being with god-like abilities, I'm really not sure where you can believably go with the next volume.

171) Uncrowned by Will Wright

The latest volume in my favorite LitRPG-adjacent series was released today, and since I had the day off work I spent all day reading it. i love the series, and I really enjoyed the book, but it did have one major flaw. The book has the main character and his friends taking part in a tournament, and the book ends in the middle of the next to last round. It would have felt far more satisfying to have had the tournament end in this volume instead of dragging it out for another volume, although I can see why the author did so.

172) Bigfoot in Pennsylvania by Timothy Renner

This is a collection of newspaper accounts of bigfoot sightings in Pennsylvania from 1838 to 1921. It's interesting reading if you're interested in the subject. The only real problem with the book is that the term "bigfoot" wasn't in use when the articles were written, so most of them describe encounters with wild men (and women) or, once the 20th century rolls around, with gorillas. while it's fairly safe to assume that there weren't escaped zoo or circus gorillas roaming the wilds of Pennsylvania in the early 1900s, which means that gorilla encounters would almost certainly be reported as bigfoot encounters today, it's harder to be sure about wild men. Wild men certainly could be a description of bigfoot, or it could be a description of a hermit, escaped mental patient, or homeless person who has taken to the wilderness. Renner excluded stories where wild men were definitely human, but even some of the ones that were included were ambiguous.

173) Return to the Lost Level by Brian Keene

This is the sequel to Keene's The Lost Level. It's a fun, Lost World style sci-fi/fantasy adventure series. This volume features the protagonist, Aaron Pace, and his friends, including Ambrose Bierce, travel across the lost level to rescue their fellow villagers, who have been kidnapped by a race of telepathic lizard people. It's not the sort of thing that passes for a masterpiece of literature, but it is a neat little story.

174) Max Damage by Simon Haynes

I love the Hal Spacejock series. It's some really good sci-fi humor. This particular volume revolves around Hal getting caught up in an interplanetary war after rescuing a stranded fighter pilot.

175) The Wind in His Heart by Charles de Lint

Charles de Lint is one of my favorite writers, but sadly he doesn't seem to write very much anymore. This book is a strange story involving animal people, a Native American tribe, an aging rock star hiding in the desert, a troubled teen, and a writer. As usual with de Lint, I really enjoyed it.

176) The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is one of the many books that I have that i bought a long time ago and somehow took years to get around to reading. It's a good book, which isn't surprising as Lois McMaster Bujold is a great writer.

177) An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Like a few other books I've read lately, this is something that I got specifically because of r/Fantasy's book bingo. in this case it's to fulfill their afrofuturism square. I don't read a lot of sci-fi, and what I do read is more likely to be funny or action oriented. that said, while this rally isn't my sort of book, it's definitely a very good book. I found it a bit too depressing for my taste, which isn't surprising as it's mainly about racism (an to a lesser extent sexism, homophobia, and transphobia). I also found it a bit slow for my taste as I didn't really get into the book until about halfway through, which is also not surprising as it's not a very action-oriented book. Even so, I did like the book, and can recommend it.

178) The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

This is another book I read because the 372 Pages podcast was covering it. I made the mistake of thinking that there's no way a book by the author of Dracula could possibly be that bad. I was wrong. This is by far the worst book I've read this year, and possibly the worst book I've ever read. For starters, despite being written in 1910, it uses the overly wordy style of a novel from a century earlier. In itself that's not a bad thing, but the novel is so slow paced and mainly consists of characters talking about events interspersed with talk about mongooses and kites and the occasional staring contest.

179) Rogue Dungeon by James Hunter & Eden Hudson

I was just about ready to give up on LitRPG for now as most of the books I've tried to read lately have been bad enough that I abandoned them after a few chapters. Then I gave this one a shot, and really liked it. It's got a bit of a different premise than the other books I've read, though that premise is a bit shaky. The book starts out in a more typical fantasy universe where a group of rebels is plotting against an evil king. One of them tries to assassinate the king, but fails. In an attempt to escape, he uses his magic to opens a portal, which is supposed to take him to a safe spot nearby, but instead turns him into a troll-like monster in the world of an RPG. It makes for a fun adventure, with my only complaint being that it makes little sense that the world is both a VR game and somehow a real world that a wizard can open a portal too and cause the inhabitants, who should just be chunks of code, to act in ways that should be outside their programming.

180) Don't Look Behind You: Following Ghost Roads into the Unknown by Timothy Renner

This book is a follow up to Renners' previous book Beyond the Seventh Gate, which is all about a local (to me) paranormal hotspot/urban legend zone called Toad Road. This book contains more weirdness about Toad Road that he was told about after the first book was published and has some info on another nearby abandoned road that has become a paranormal zone.

181) Just This Banjo by Patrick Costello

This is the memoir of a banjo player who is probably best known for his series of instructional how to play the banjo videos on youtube. He certainly seems to have led an interesting life, and this is pretty good book.

There was a sale on Kindle editions of DC comics "multiverse" titles, so I got some of the interesting ones:

182) DC meets Looney Tunes
183) DC meets Hanna-Barbera
184) DC meets Hanna-Barbera, Vol. 2

Not surprisingly, these were some very weird stories. The Looney Tunes one was generally better than the two Hanna-Barbera volumes, though the story where Blue Falcon and Dyno-Mutt meet Robin and Superboy was probably my favorite from the whole lot (though Elmer Fudd vs. Bat-Man was a close second).

185) The Tribe by Bari Wood

I also finished this bit of 80s era horror. It's about a group of elderly Holocaust survivors who managed to survive the camps because they knew how to make a golem. Unfortunately, decades later, they're still mentally living in the camp and are using the golem to kill anyone they perceive as a threat. Overall, it's a pretty good book with the ending being the best part.

186) Histaff by Andries Louws

This is another enjoyably LitRPG with a slightly different premise. This one is about a skeleton monster from a fantasy RPG universe that is accidentally teleported to a borderline grimdark sci-fi universe. It's a fairly amusing book where you get to see a literally and figuratively boneheaded character stumbling through a space station that's infested with killer mutants, and you get to see an RPG system designed for a low tech fantasy universe trying to adapt itself to a high tech sci-fi universe. my only real complaint is that at some point someone apparently handed the author a thesaurus and told him that writers should use obscure synonyms as much as possible, because I can't imagine any other reason why anyone would continually use the word decennia instead of just saying decades like a normal human being.

187) Galaxsec by Andries Louws

This is the sequel to Histaff. It's okay. The writer still keeps using bizarre word choices. It's still funny in parts. The main problem with this book is the opening. The skeletal hero starts off the book reduced to a skull. Then when he regenerates his body, he ends up blowing himself up and gets reduced to a skull again. This is boring.

188) The Root by Na'amen Gobert Tilahun

This is a book that I've been meaning to read for a while after hearing about it on Scalzi's blog. It's a nice urban/portal fantasy set half in our world and half in an otherworld. It turns out hat there is, secretly, a bunch of people with the blood of gods in their veins and that the government has been secretly selling them to a rival group of supernatural baddies from the otherworld, which it just so happens is under attack from a devouring darkness. It's a great book, and I'll be getting the sequel at some point.

189) Killer Hangovers: Sinful Shots of Alcohol Outrage by Joseph David Cress

This is a fairly short book about crimes (especially murders) committed by drunk people in Pennsylvania in the past. I picked this up at a local event that the author was randomly at. I had picked up several of his other books at other events in the area and enjoyed them. This one, I just found a bit boring.

190) The Crafter's Defense by Jonathan Brooks

This is the sequel to The Crafter's Dungeon, which I read a couple of months back. This one has the young dungeon who likes crafting helping some gnomes, destroying an evil reptile-based dungeon, and fighting off some hostile elves without killing them. It was pretty good.

191) Dangerous Games to Play in the Dark by Lucia Peters

This is a fun book of "games" that, even laying aside the question of whether or not evil spirits are real, I wouldn't recommend trying. Many of these games are physically dangerous and some cane pose a major fire hazard (or other types of hazard). Luckily the book has warnings about this, except for what is potentially the most dangerous game, "The Fortune Game," which involves putting on a mask and hanging around a crossroads at night to ask passing strangers to tell your fortune and seems like a good way to get robbed or murdered.

That said, I doubt I would be willing to try any of these games as I am a coward and most of them sound terrifying. It does make for a nice, spooky read for the Halloween season, and even if you aren't going to play these games, they're fun to read about. I suspect that the less dangerous games would be great fun for children at a sleepover and the more dangerous games would be fun for teens and young adults hanging out with their friends at night.

192) Where the Sun Goes to Die by James A. Moore

This is a short story collection of weird western tales featuring Jonathan Crowley, who hunts monsters, and is a followup to the novel Boomtown that was published earlier this year. It's a nice collection that has stories pitting Crowley against a ghost train, werewolves, an evil preacher, and skinwalkers.

193) 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King

r/Fantasy's horror book club chose this as their monthly read for October, so I decided to break out my copy and give it a reread. I think it's one of my favorite King novels and one of my favorite vampire novels.

194) Passages by Kelli Owen

This is a sequel to Owens' 2015 novel Wilted Lilies about a teenage girl with psychic abilities. This one takes place immediately after the previous volume and has the main character, Lily, going to a school for young people with psychic abilities. I really enjoyed the book.

195) Civil War by James Hunter and Eden Hudson

This is the sequel to Rogue dungeon, which I read a few weeks ago. I didn't like this one quite as much as the first one as I thought it spent too much time on fight scenes, which I found boring, and it's premise gets less believable with each volume.

196) Durarara!!, Volume 13 by Ryohgo Narita

Wow. This is the final volume of the Durara!! series. It brings the series to an explosive and satisfying conclusion.

197) Creep House by Andersen Prunty

So, this is a collection of short stories set in the town of Twin Springs, Ohio. Many of the stories are set in the same house, which no one stays in for more than a year. My feelings on the stories are a bit mixed. Some were good, a couple were bad, one was really bad, and most wee just okay.

198) Horrors Untold by Matt Wildasin

The author of this is one of the co-hosts on my favorite horror podcast, so I figured I'd give his fiction a shot. This is a pretty good collection of stories. My only real complaint about it is that, as is so often the case with self published books, he really should have gotten someone to copyedit it as Wilasin has some real problems with homonyms.

199) Cattywampus by Robert Ford and John Boden

This was a really grim horror novella that took some dark turns that I really didn't see coming. It starts off as a robbery gone wrong, then leads into a conspiracy involving pedophiles, and then into something even worse.

200) Limitless Lands Book 4: Opposition by Dean Henegar

Since there was a new book in this series, I decided to read it. I think this might be taking over as my favorite LitRPG series. It's main character isn't a moron who only survives by luck, ridiculously overpowered, or an unlikable jerk. It isn't loaded down with pointless pop culture references. The out of game drama is kept to a minimum. Best of all, the author actually seems to have an actual ending planned for the next book in the series instead of just dragging it out forever to milk the series for all it's worth.

201) Slimer by Harry Adam Knight

This is an 80s era creature feature type story about a group of drug smugglers who get stranded on an deserted oil rig that turns out to actually have been a secret research lab whose scientists accidentally created a monster that killed them all. It's not a terrible story, but it's essentially an inferior version of john Carpenter's The Thing with a bunch of unlikable characters, which isn't surprising as they're a bunch of spoiled rich kids who decide to make extra money by smuggling drugs on their yacht. Also, I was listening to the audiobook version, and the narrator was absolutely awful at doing American accents.

202) Aching God by Mike Shel

I picked this up because I heard it described as a book that combines cosmic horror with fantasy, and I think that is an accurate description of it's genre. It's about a retired adventurer who was part of a society that existed to loot ancient ruins. He is a broken man due to the horrific events of his last adventure, which left him the only survivor. Now after a gem stolen from an effigy of an ancient god causes a plague to spread among the members of the society, including his daughter, the adventurer is called back into service to return the gem to the ruin it came from. I actually really loved this book, and I think I'll probably start the sequel next.

203) Sin Eater by Mike Shel

This is the sequel to Aching God, and is a bit less horror-y, but still very good. This time the book's focus is split between the hero of the previous volume and his daughter. This time around they are on a quest to slay the god of chaos who has turned their country's queen into an undead monster. Along the way they learn some very unsettling things about the gods they worship.

204) Troll Nation by James Hunter & eden Hudson

This is the third and most recent volume in the Rogue dungeon series. This one didn't have as many boring fight scenes as the second volume, but I still didn't like it as much as the first. This one got a bit annoying with spending a bit too much time setting up a romance of the "These two people are obviously in love but are kind of messed up and don't want to admit it" variety.

205) The Fisherman by John Langan

This is the r/Fantasy Horror Book club pick this month. Normally I try to slow down these book club picks when I read them so they last the whole month, but I actually liked this one. It's a nice combination of cosmic horror and the fishing tall tale. It does use the story within a story format, which didn't bother me, but seems to be something that really annoys the people who don't like the book.

You got me on the Langan!

>145 drneutron: I hope you like it.

206) Essence edited by by Dakota Krout

So, Dakota Krout put together an anthology of stories set in the world of his Divine Dungeon series. The problem is, it's really mediocre. Of the eight stories I thought that , two were bad (especially the story "Splat!" which fails miserably at being funny), two were okay, and four were good. Unfortunately, all but one of the good stories felt more like the opening chapters to novels than an actual complete story, especially the last two stories of the book, which completely lacked any sort of resolution to their plots.

207) Marvel Masterworks: Captain Marvel, Vol. 1

I've been reading this silver age comic book collection on and off for months (It was a available for free just after the Captain Marvel movie came out) and I have to say that it's really boring.

208) Doll Crimes by Karen Runge

I picked this up because it got a little extra press due to the author being brutally attacked by poachers during a hike shortly before the book's release. It's one of those books that I can't say is bad, but I can say I really didn't enjoy as it is very disturbing. It's a non-supernatural horror story about a teen girl and her mother, who had her when sh was only fifteen. As the story goes on, you realize that these two are really messed up people, and that their relationship is very disturbing, so much so that when the book ends with the mother's current boyfriend murdering her and pimping out her daughter, the girl's situation has actually improved.

209) One More Last Time
210) Heir Today, Pawn Tomorrow
211) Dungeon Mauling
212) Four: The Loot all by Eric Ugland

These are the first four volumes of the LitRPG series The Good guys about a guy who travels to an RPG-style world to escape people who are intent on killing him after a lifetime of crime, but who wants to start over and try to become a good guy. It's a fun series, and I'll be reading the next two volumes soon, but I do have to things I dislike about it. First, the main character is an idiot, and while this can be endearing at times, the fact that his constantly making stupid choices is often the driving force for the plot gets old real fast. Second, the main character is ridiculously over powered, which leads to it feeling like he's never in any real danger no matter what crazy situation his stupidity gets him into.

213) Dukes and Ladders
214) Home, Siege Home both by by Eric Ugland

With these, I have completed all of the currently published books in the Good Guys series (though the seventh volume comes out in a few weeks). I still think the main character is ridiculously OP and really stupid, but I also still enjoy the series.

215) Clownflesh by Tim Curran

I decided to read another recent clown-based horror novel. I would describe this one as being kind of like the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space if instead of being a sci-fi/horror/comedy, it was a straight up extreme horror story. Clownflesh an okay story that mostly consists of scenes of random townspeople being brutally murdered by by evil clown monsters. My only real gripe with the story is that the ending was way too abrupt.

216) The Carnelian Fox by Kay MacLeod

This is a novel set in a world modeled after the Pokemon games. It's an interesting story, but not very well written.

217) Prez: The First Teen President

I first heard about Prez Rickard from his appearance in Neil Gaiman's Sandman: World's End, which is included in this volume. The original 70s era stuff isn't very good. It's all about a teenager who becomes president. The whole thing is ridiculous and a bit patronizing and kind of racist as Prez's best friend is a Native American who dresses like something from an old western movie, lives in a teepee, and can talk to animals. The only stuff in the book that's any good are the two Vertigo comics from the 90s, Gaiman's Sandman and a one-shot comic about a teen who thinks he's Prez's son going on a road-trip to find his father.

218) Gaijin Yokozuna: A Biography of Chad Rowan by Mark Panek

This is a biography of the first non-Japanese person to achieve the rank of yokozuna in sumo. it's an interesting story, though the book is now rather dated, as in the decade and a half (or so) since the book was written the subject has gone on to have an unsuccessful career in MMA fighting and a successful career in pro wrestling before suffering a devastating heart attack.

219) Iron Garland by Jeff Wheeler

This is the third book in the Harbinger series. It was alright.

You are quickly approaching a "triple." Congratulations!

>154 thornton37814: I'm surprised. it looks like i might set a new personal "most books read in a year since I started keeping track" record.

220) Tales from the Gas Station: Volume 1 by Jack Townsend

This is a weird horror novel that apparently got its start as a creepypasta blog series. It's a bunch of connected stories told by a man who has lost the ability to sleep and is working at a 24 hour gas station where weird things keep happening. It all makes for a weird, spooky, and at times funny story.

221) A Scholar of Magics by Caroline Stevermer

For various reasons, I have several books that I started to read earlier this year, and set aside for reasons other than disliking them, and I've decided to try and finish as many of them as possible before the end of the year. This particular book was set aside at the beginning of the year when I was having trouble reading due to being badly in need of progressive lenses.

This is a fantasy novel set in the 19th century, and is a sequel to A College of Magics, which I read a few years ago. I don't have much to say about it except that I enjoyed it.

222) Beyond the Gate by Mary SanGiovanni

This is the fourth Kathy Ryan novel. This time, Kathy is hired by the Paragon Corporation, which has opened a gate to another dimension and lost two teams on the other side. Naturally, this ends up with Kathy and a team of unlikely allies being forced to explore the other dimension and fend off ancient evil beings of unimaginable power. This wasn't my favorite of the Kathy Ryan novels, but it was still an entertaining bit of cosmic horror/occult detective fiction.

223) Teeth by Kelli Owen

This is another book that I started earlier in the year and put aside. For some reason, the story just didn't click with me the first time I tried reading it, but it did when I came back to it a few days ago. This book is a very different take on vampires. This book is set in a world where instead of being monsters or supernatural beings, vampires are just another type of human and are a minority fighting for acceptance. The story is focused on a group of Lamian (vampire) teens who are going through the change, where their canines fall out and are they grow fangs in their place, and also on three adult humans, a mother who is filled with hatred against Lamians from watching too much Fox News, a serial killer who wishes he was a Lamian, and a detective who is trying to catch the killer. It's a good book.

224) Rebel Star by Tao Wong

This is the 8th volume of the System Apocalypse series, which just came out last week. i complained a bit about the more recent volumes of the series not being very good, but I was surprised to see that this one was actually much improved. This volume veers into space opera territory, and is about the main character of the series having to help defend a pirate space station from attacks by more-or-less corrupt government forces.

225) Axiom by Dennis Vanderkerken

This was one of the "short stories" in Essence that I said was obviously the opening chapters of a novel. I was slightly off as the "short story" was actually from several chapters about a quarter of the way into the novel. I actually enjoyed this book, despite the thing being very talky. The book is about an old man whose village is attacked by raiders who slaughter everyone except the children, who they take prisoner, and the old man, who they believe to be dead. He is forced to learn to use mana to rescue the children, which is supposed to be impossible at his age, and most of the book is about the process of him learning to use mana.

226) Dissolving Classroom by Junji Ito

This was a strange horror manga from Junji Ito about an evil pair of siblings. It's not his best work, but I enjoyed it.

227) Eden's gate: The Reborn by Edward Brody

This is another LitRPG. in this story, a VR game creator goes all mad scientist on the game's release and causes everyone who plays his game to die and have their brain uploaded permanently to the game. This is presented as a good thing, and the U.S. government is presented as a bunch of stupid old men for viewing it as a form of mass murder and trying to take the game offline to prevent people from committing suicide to enter the game. It's an okay book, but I'll probably pass on the rest of the series.

228) Ghosts in Irish Houses by James Reynolds

This is another book that I started earlier in the year and finally got around to finishing. In fact, it's actually a reread as I read it when I was a kid, later could only remember the plots of the first two stories in it, and only managed to track down the book's name earlier this year. It's a nice collection of Irish ghost stories from folklore, though I think the first two stories are probably the best.

Yes, Nathan, you made it to 3 x 75. Congratulations!

>162 FAMeulstee: Thanks

229) Sufficiently Advanced Magic by Andrew Rowe

I picked this up because I thought it was LitRPG, but it's more LitRPG adjacent. It's also really good. It's about a young man who is doing a sort of dungeon crawl, which will grant him a magical power. He comes from a long line of warriors, but gets a crafting ability. He also gets involved in a dangerous conspiracy and starts in at a magical school.

230) Black Jack, Vol. 6 by Osamu Tezuka

I love this manga. I had stopped reading it a while ago because it's out of print and the used copies were expensive. Now the prices seem to be going down, so it looks like I'll be continuing it.

231) 24023555::The Bare Hunt by Eric Ugland

This is new book in the Good Guys series, and it's okay. The premise of the book is supposed to be the main character going out to hunt down some bear people who have been infected by eldritch forces, but he spends 90% of the book getting distracted and then when he finally gets to the bear people, there's only one left, so the whole thing is kind of a let down.

232) Equalize by Ryan DeBruyn

This is another LitRPG. I liked it, but it is extremely derivative of Tao Wong's System Apocalypse series. Both are set on an Earth where magic suddenly returns to the world and turns it into an RPG. Both feature Canadian protagonists who are by themselves in a national park when this happens. Both heroes manage to get a more-or-less unique class and have a spirit guide. And in both stories, the traditional fantasy races are aliens. That said, I really enjoyed this one and will be reading the sequel soon.

233) Bone White by Ronald Malfi

This is another book that I had put aside earlier in the year. This time it was because I thought the book was a bit too slow paced and I just couldn't get into it. I usually love Malfi's books, but this one just didn't do it for me. Most of the time the book just didn't seem to be going anywhere, and then the ending just seemed to come out of nowhere and be way to facile.

234) Excise by Ryan DeBruyn

This is the sequel to Equalize. I really like this series, and will read book 3 when it's released.

Thank you for keeping me company in 2019.......onward to 2020.

>166 PaulCranswick: Thanks

Now I've finally gotten around to updating the books I've finished in the last few days.

235) Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Marvel Comics, Volume 3
236) Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Marvel Comics, Volume 4

I decided it was time to come back to my Marvel golden age comics collections that have been sitting on my Kindle for a while. They're fun stories, but are very simplistic and nowhere near as good as the stuff that came in the silver and bronze ages of super hero comics.

237) Tales from the Gas Station, Volume 2 by Jack Townsend

I didn't like this one quite as much as the first volume, but I did enjoy it, especially the excellent narration by Mr. Creepypasta. If there's ever a volume three, I'll probably get it.

238) League of Dragons by Naomi Novik

This is the last of the books that I put aside partway through reading earlier this year and have finally finished. It made a nice ending to the Temeraire series.

Now to see if I can get one or two more books finished by the end of the year.

239) So, I'm a Spider, So What?, Vol. 7 by Okina Baba

This is the latest volume of my favorite light novel series. This was a fairly action-packed volume, and it revealed a bit about the backstory of the world it's set in.

240) Seven Forges by James A. Moore

I managed to finish off this audiobook today, so it looks like I got to 240. I'm a fan of Moore's horror novels, but this is his foray into fantasy, and i didn't like it quite as much. This book just started off really slow, but it also had the sort of ending that makes me really want to get the rest of the series. I think I'll probably try the next book at some point.