Don't bother

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I picked this book out at the library as the one to read to complete my goal of reading a book during my four weeks off between jobs.  I wandered the shelves looking for books that looked like sci-fi (somehow it seems like one can pick them out pretty easily by the title, font, and imagery on the spine...I can't quite explain it) and found this one, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it won Hugo and Nebula awards.  Should be a good one!

Unfortunately I did not enjoy it and stopped in the middle of chapter six.  This is where you final get the reveal that the book is about old gods versus new gods.  I had been dragging myself through the book up to hear and at this point I realized it was not going to be interesting.  As a final check I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and even that was boring.

Learning about the House on the Rocks in Wisconsin was very interesting, and I plan to try to find a list of other interesting locations like that which are mentioned in the book.  IIRC the intro alluded to people doing road trips tracing the characters' travels so there must be a few other good destinations.

The version I had was the one with annotations by Leslie S. Klinger.  I did enjoy the presence of the annotations even though they slowed down my pace of reading, and would readily read another annotated book.

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Terraria

I tried to play this for about an hour but I just couldn't figure it out (on mobile).  It is like a joke to control this kind of game with a touchscreen, and that was a sufficient obstacle to figuring out how to build a house that I just gave up.

Maybe five years ago I played Terraria some on PC, maybe 10 hours?  From memory I would rate it OK.  Not sure why I expected it to be better on mobile.  I guess I should try with a controller of some sort.

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The Nagasaki Vector by L. Neil Smith

Very irritating dialog for the main character. For example, "we had miles t'make, no surplus of daylight t'do it in." Apostrophes everywhere...it may be a small issue but this was my main issue with the book.

I did not find the plot that interesting, and also a little hard to follow. So I gave up about 2/3 of the way in. There are better books waiting for me.

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