I read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History for my book club. Yet another book that could have been a long, interesting article. Instead, it’s a long, repetitive book. And a bit alarmist. Even if what you’re saying is true, if you say it in a way where it sounds so extreme, i am more likely to write you off than to listen. It’s better to make your point in a way I can digest and in a way I feel like I can do something about it.

Maybe it’s unnecessarily harsh of me. This book is interesting. It makes some legitimate and scary points. But I would have preferred to read the article version instead.

I read All the Bright Places for my Young Adult book club. It was so sad. So so so sad. But also such a good read. I read it all in one breath. And I really enjoyed it.

After all the dystopian YA novels, now there seems to be a slew of “terribly sad” YA about mental and emotional challenges of teenagers. In fairness, these issues are likely more realistic. They deserve attention and thought. They are more likely to happen than the Maze Runner scenario.

But that’s also why they are so much harder to take.

I read The Girl on the Train because there was a lot of hype around it. Amazon recommended it. It was supposed to be like Gone Girl but much better. I am not sure why that convinced me since I hated Gone Girl so much.

But I picked it up anyway. I read it really fast. I liked it better than Gone Girl. Partly because the ending wasn’t such a twist ending for me. But I still don’t think it was a good book. I am so done with books where all the characters are unlikeable. What’s the point? What does it teach me about life?

Meh.

Not recommended.

I read Grasshopper Jungle for my Young Adult book club and man oh man was it insane. It was incredibly painful to even make it through this book. There is a ton of creepy, weird, gross stuff in this book and I am not even sure I get the point of the book.

It was my first Andrew Smith book and I’m told his others are different. But I don’t think I’ll be reading any more of him for a while.

I read The Martian because it was on the top of the list for 2014. I read it all the way back in January and it was one of the best books I read. The audiobook was fantastic. I promptly recommended it to both Jake and David (both of whom loved it, too.)

I then recommended it to everyone I know.

At this point, the book is super famous thanks in part to the movie, of course. (Which is also wonderful.) This is more of a science book as opposed to science fiction. But it’s also funny. It reads easily and quickly. One of my favorites from the year.

Highly recommended.

I read Unspoken because a friend recommended it and it sounded interesting. However, I read it almost a year ago and now that I am sitting down to write about it, I can’t remember much of anything. I feel like that’s significant right there. I remember it being okay enough to go through but not so great that I wanted to read the others. I think part of the problem is that I’ve spent a bunch of time reading a lot of Young Adult books and now that I have read enough, new ones don’t impress me as much as the old ones used to. So my bar is higher.

And while this wasn’t disappointing, it also didn’t really pass the bar enough to make me read the next books in the series.