★☆☆☆☆ I've had enough

Fifty Shades of Grey

EL James

Here I'm breaking one of my rules: "Don't rate books you didn't finish." I have that rule because uninformed opinions are not valuable. I read this in the first place because of another general rule of mine: anything that a lot of people like is worth a look. I am not saying that everything popular is good, but once again, uninformed opinions are not valuable, so if you want to say something popular is trash, you should at least take a look at it.

Made it halfway through the first book, which was further than I expected to get, but it is a perversion of the process of reading, which ought to be a pleasure. The guy is a colossal jerk and the sex scenes are achingly tedious.

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★★★☆☆ There was never going to be an HEA

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★★★★☆ Fictional autobiography of Rome's fourth Emperor

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★★★☆☆ Peggy Carter sans Steve Rogers

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★★★☆☆ Minimal surreal magic school story

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★★★☆☆ Informative but annoyingly tendentious

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★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

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★★★★☆ A broken mindship and lost children

In the Shadow of the Ship Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's In the Shadow of the Ship is a novella set in her Xuya Universe . Like many Xuya stories, this one takes place aboard a mindship. This particular mindship is called Nightjar and was damaged escaping from the collapsing Empire. (Exactly which Empire this was I am not sure -- there is more than one in the Xuya Universe .) At any rate, Nightjar is not a healthy place. She escaped carrying some of her family. They still live aboard and afford her the loyalty she expects, mostly. Nightjar demands tribute in the form of children whom she lures into her dead zones, from which they never emerge. When Khuyên was a child she was invited to the dead zones by her cousin Anh, but she refused. Later she did the unthinkable: she left Nightjar for the broken Empire, where she rose to the post of Magistrate. Now Khuyên has returned to Nightjar for her grandmother's funeral, where she is met with a complex mixture of disdain

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