Tag: Books

A Deadly Influence by Mike Omer, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

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.

5*/5.

Onyx Storm: should I do this to myself?

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

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?

Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments

Prisoner of Tehran is an autobiography by Marina Nemat about the abrupt end of her childhood. She was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard at the age of 16, imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death without trial. Some of her friends and schoolmates were executed and she escaped death by accepting a forced marriage to her interrogator.

Marina is quite calm and angelic in the book. She tries to do what’s best to never hurt anyone other than herself. What happens to her and her friends, however, triggers more rage than the top five X influencers combined.

I rated it 5*/5 despite the anger the book induces. Knowledge sometimes hurts. This book is a painful read. I need a book by Janet Evanovich next to flush my brain, to forgive and forget.

New Social Media Accounts

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I’m now on Bluesky and TheStoryGraph.

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.