Thread: Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?
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Old 09-27-2016, 09:20 AM   #24647
Rev. Bob
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Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
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Originally Posted by Rev. Bob View Post
I'm rather at loose ends about what I feel like reading next, so I pulled up the "Reading" list on my Aura H2O - all the books that show as having been opened but not completed - for inspiration. (All of those are "opened to first page and not marked unread again, for whatever reason," as opposed to "drifted away mid-story.") The first selection turned out to be a corrupt KEPUB file, so I've made a note to download, fix formatting if needed, and reinstall it. My second choice is another book I sideloaded a while back, before I made a habit of normalizing the formatting before doing so, and... well, it needs work. The table of contents is even out of order! I expect I'll run into a lot of those, but this one's particularly eye-grating.
I fixed both of those issues, and the second book... oof. Just from what I saw while making repairs, it's the poster child for "nice idea, but seriously needs an editor." Common nouns (like "pizza") are capitalized for no apparent reason, I saw several very basic wording issues, the text TOC only had real links for four out of forty-plus chapters, and worst of all, the appendix that showed a time-traveling character's path through the story got most of the chapter numbers wrong. That said, the story itself looks like it'll be fun if I can stop facepalming at the mechanical errors long enough to get into it. As a comparison, self-pub erotica has a bad reputation for being "unedited first draft" material, but this is much worse on that front... and I've seen some spectacularly awful smut. The good news for my sense of OCD is that fixing these books and reloading them cleared the "in progress" flag, removing them from that list.

So, all things considered, I changed course and am about a quarter of the way through With the Lightnings. So far, it's okay. The main character feels a lot like Dudley Moore's Arthur in space, but not quite so useless. Given that there are several more books about him, and that the series doesn't appear to be comedy, I'm hoping that he'll change his ways before the end of the book. If that's the plan, I can accept it as necessary that we see the "before" persona as a baseline to show his growth. Still lots of pages left for story and character development, after all...
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