Possibly another do not finish book

I’m now 57% through the first Expanse book, but feeling no wish to keep reading. I’m going to put it to one side for now, because I may change my mind in the coming weeks. But I suspect it’s likely to go on my unfinished Goodreads shelf eventually.

Although I’m not generally a big fan of hard scifi I do read scifi of all kinds at times, and was wanting to read this. I like the world building and the plot and mystery, but I can’t get over my problems with how half the book is written. This was bad enough when it was alternating plot lines, but now the two main characters are together I’m getting often the same scenes repeated from two sides (which is somewhat interesting, but also infuriating at the same time), and I’m still disliking the Miller chapters. The writing style in them just jars for me constantly. I have been skim reading big chunks, but it’s getting silly doing this, and not much fun.

Martin was a bit shocked when I told him how the book was structured. He’s just seen the TV series. I’m surprised this constantly alternating two POVs isn’t discussed more in book reviews. Admittedly it’s particularly problematic for me, given how bad I’m finding one strand’s writing. But it seems an incredibly rigid and inflexible structure, which is really straining now we have the two characters together, but still that forced format, leading to repetition and superfluousness. The book is co written by two authors, and my working assumption after starting to read has been that they’ve taken one strand each, so one author writing the Holden chapters and the other author writing the Miller ones.

I would probably be happier with the TV version, but don’t have enough awake time to watch that. I would like to know what happens in the book, but may end up reading the Wikipedia plot summary!

For now it’s in a maybe will finish but probably not status. And I will start up the Edinburgh occult fantasy book in the meantime, alongside Wheel of Time book 3, which I’m enjoying a lot.

Pocket

Just managed to get my count of unread articles saved to Pocket down under 7,000 again. Pocket is one of a number of ways of storing articles you see but can’t read there and then but want to keep to read later. Not long ago my count was almost 8,000 unread. A few years ago it was almost 10,000 and then I had 2 very ill years, when I saved even more and couldn’t read them often. But it’s dropping well now I’m more awake again. Masses yet to read! But next up - or down! - I’m aiming for the 5000s. This is a huge range of saved articles, many newspaper or online. I shake up the reading by searching for articles that mention specific words or subjects and bingeing them. Martin has about 1,250 unread articles at the moment and is slightly alarmed at that. I give him a look 😜 Note my huge count isn’t any bad mark against Pocket or sign that it isn’t effective. I’m just heavily sedated from my neuro illness and end up saving more articles to read later than I can get through promptly. But it does work for me. I use the Pocket app on my iPad and iPod touch, and it’s easiest to save via the iOS share button to read later. Pocket can also integrate well with web browsers on computers. I find it a great way of managing delayed reading. Now if only I was more awake ...