Tag: Books

Goodreads Reading Challenge 2026

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I set my annual reading goal to be 71 books. I picked 71 because it is a prime number and is also right below 72, which is 6 books per month. 6 is a good number of books to read per month. It won’t stress me out and will let me finish some of the thicker books on my shelves. I have plenty.

Goodreads, despite being less buggy with the Reading Challenge this year, doesn’t have a good estimation for how ahead of schedule I am. Their two screens argue that I’m either 2 or 3 books ahead. The mobile app also thinks it’s 3.

15.96 days have passed, and 15.96/(365/71) = 3.1. That’s the number of books I should have read by now. Since I’ve read five, I’m 1.9 books ahead. And 1.9 books is not quite two or three books. It’s not that bad, compared to last year, when it announced I’m 70 books behind schedule on day 1.

A good reminder about the old truth that are only 2 hard problems in programming – naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments

My expectations for this book weren’t very high. I bought it because it has a hole in the cover and I’d never seen a book with such a cover before. However, it pleasantly surprised me, turning out to be a fresh and optimistic page-turner. It was great, a clear 5*, and gets the honors to be the first review for the year on my blog.

The world is destroyed and turned into a giant maze, where the last living humans are forced to play a video game. It’s like Diablo but with living humans. That could’ve been an apocalypse of epic proportions, but despite the billions of dead, the game can be won. Carl is the right person for it – he has experience. The problems? He’s with his cat who suddenly started talking, has no shoes or pants, and and elderly lady keeps showing up with no intention to level up in the game. And of course, the game is full of exceptionally difficult mobs who want to complain about their existence.

I got a signed copy from the publisher, although there was no book signing, so I didn’t get to meet the author. Kudos to Pro Book for the cover, not sure who came up with the idea but it works very well.

A great find. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

2025 in Books

~ Veselin ~ 15 Comments

Okay! The moment I’ve been waiting for, the 2025 awards for best books on Veselin.blog 😀 These are not written in 2025, only read this year, but who cares?

Best Thriller

  • Frieda McFadden’s The Housemaid – first exposure to Frieda McFadden was a shock to me. Being stuck with Lee Child-like characters for so long created space for this pleasant surprise. Looking forward to seeing the movie.

Best Apocalypse & Sci-Fi

Best Non-Fiction

Best Fantasy and Best Author

  • The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin. The thrid part is not translated yet but the first two were both best books I read in the months I finished them. Nora Jemisin was the best author I encountered this year with four five-star books out of four. It was a close call with Nicci French but they had some disappointing books.

Best Series

Best Sci-Fi and Best Book

Overall, I finished 91 books, according to Goodreads (a few more because not all books are on Goodreads). It was a good year for reading.

December in Books

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

December will be remembered for the book fair, not the books I read. I bought more than ten and finished seven real ones and one unreal, leaving my pile of unread books growing.

Best

  • Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine – 5/5. If there’s one book that stood out, it was this one. An intense serial-killer thriller and the first in a series. I would have bought the second immediately if it had been available in Bulgarian.
  • The Detective by Matthew Reilly – 5/5. This was not a sci-fi, who could’ve imagined. Matthew Reilly didn’t disappoint despite that.
  • Where the Evil Dwells by Clifford D. Simak – 5/5. The Roman world turned into a fantasy world after an evil invasion. Features a troll who lost his bridge and bloodthirsty unicorns.
  • The OC by D.P. Lyle – 4/5. Another intense serial-killer thriller. However, less intense than the other one.
  • The Last Days of Kira Mulan by Nicci French – 4/5. The Nicci French duo wrote an activist thriller, where the main character was not Detective Maud O’Conner. Still a good story, but a bit heavy.

Worst

  • The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne – 3.5/5. A nice fantasy world with some cool characters shuffling around on a map and engaging in pointless battles. The second part of the series didn’t add much to the story and could’ve been skipped.
  • Ninja by David Walters – 4/5 but objectively, worse than the previous one. A prequel to the Way of the Tiger series that fit well with the series as a feeling, but not as well as a story.
  • Murder on Mars-4 by Snejana Tasheva – a short story gamebook. It has 20-ish episodes, 1 or 2 actual choices that didn’t impact the outcome, and a hidden episode. I didn’t enjoy the AI use, the story, the size, and the price, and only completed it because it was very short. 1/5.

This concludes my year in books, as the two books I’m currently reading aren’t even halfway through.

Happy New Year! 🍾 🥂

The Detective by Matthew Reilly

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A private investigator reopens a cold case involving a serial killer who has been abducting victims for over 150 years.

I’m a fan of Matthew Reilly and his wildly unrealistic thrillers. Based on the description of this one, I was expecting at the very least aliens. It turned out to be far less extraordinary than that, but still very much in the right style and grandiosity. An easy, fast read. 5/5, although you should not expect depth of characters or anything like that. Despite the heavy topic, it’s mostly a bubble gum thriller.

The book below is The Hunger of the Gods, for scale and color.