A Deadly Influence is a crime thriller about Abby Mullen, a hostage negotiator assisting with a kidnapping case. Somehow, the kidnapping is linked to a cult. Abby Mullen grew up in a cult and is still haunted by the massacre that brought it to an end.
Overall, the book is fantastic—well-written, unpredictable, and somewhat logical. I don’t often read fiction about events that could actually happen.
The only issue was that the publisher used a very tiny font size to save from paper. It was painful to read. They squished a 450-page book into 300 pages.
Onyx Storm is out. Back in June, I ate books 1 and 2 of the series like ice cream on a hot summer day and rated both 4*/5. The problem is that this new book is huge, and 4/5 is not a very high rating for my blog. More like meh. Where do I draw the line when a series is interesting but flawed with plot holes bigger than TON 618?
I know that shopping isn’t supposed to be a thing that brings joy and we need a more sustainable source of dopamine, but here we are. Got a delivery with 7 gamebooks from the period 1992-1998.
Bluesky is the new Twitter with everyone seemingly moving there but not really. I want to migrate out of Twitter for some reasons:
Twitter doesn’t let me publicize my blog there
My thousands of followers there seem to be inactive and never click
Twitter seems to be filtering out content that contains outbound links
Two of these do not apply to Bluesky. My user is dzver.bsky.social. I’m not fully committed to the migration but I added Bluesky to my phone. I wouldn’t dare to do that with Twitter.
TheStoryGraph is an alternative to Goodreads. It’s worse in terms of books availability but:
It has modern charts
Their reading challenge is real
It seems to be built by people who read books for people who read books
You could not hope to see anything like that on Goodreads.
Here’s my profile. Getting 1-2 friends there will help me explore the social aspects of this service and see if I can realistically migrate out of Goodreads in the future.
Part of the reasons why I read so many books last year was that it was a shared experience, thanks to the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Several friends did it at the same time and I got inspired by their achievements. I would see people setting their annual goals, completing them, and would occasionally check their progress, motivating myself to read more.
Goodreads decided to revamp the reading challenge this year.
They removed any possibility to see other people’s reading challenge
They replaced the gallery of books with a simple list
They added a bunch of new challenges, monthly and genre-specific
ScreenshotScreenshotScreenshot
I think this series of changes highlights a common problem in software engineering, which is not seeing the product from the point of view of the people who use it:
Not seeing the friends’ challenges is not a problem if your Goodreads account has no friends who do the challenge or you don’t do it yourself. In that case other problems appear more prominent, like can we have a single address for the reading challenge? What should it be?
In case your personal challenge has some artificial data, like 3-4 books added for tests, it’s not a problem that the new list of books can only fit 4 books on desktop and is 95% white screen.
The artificial test account with 3 books would also only have 2-3 of the visible 7 months where we are challenged to read one book per month. It would look great, some challenges accomplished, other not accomplished. Less adequate if you read 5 or 10 books per month and have been consistent over a period of many years.
I’m not yet sure an alternative to my usage of Goodreads exists. Tried Storygraph but it needs time to import my data. Also tried Bookwyrm but it didn’t quite work for me.
Part of what makes Goodreads great is the community – lots of librarians maintain the various editions. It might be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
Veselin.blog 