This is unrelated to the Pink Floyd song. I recently finished Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult. This was my first book from this author and I choose it because I read good things online about this book. I read a few books based on online recommendations over the past while and most are ok. No recommendation can be taken on its own, and I’ve learned that you have to look at a lot of reviews by one person (or group) before taking one seriously. Sometimes I see the other books that were suggested and I know the suggester and I are looking in different directions.
Wish You Were Here turned out to be a pretty fast read and I struggled to rate this one. The writing was pretty smooth but I did not care one bit about any of the characters, so that kind of balances. The story was up and down in a big way. The slow parts were tedious but the crescendo was quite dramatic. I’m a diligent but slow reader and a 400 page novel is 6-8 hour commitment for me. I leaned 8, but ended up giving this book a 6. It was good and I’d try this author again, but the very good did not cover the debts of the very tedious.
Another quick read I finished recently was To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. This got a 7 from me but if I gave hindsight adjustments it might get an 8. This was a sci-fi, near-future space exploration story with a different twist. Sci-fi challenges me because the balance is off; I think there’s more bad sci-fi than great sci-fi. This one was pretty good and I recommend to anyone. Among my other recent good sci-fi reads were The Martian and Project Hail Mary both by Andy Weir. Both of these were great, fun books. Both highly recommended to anyone. I thought The Martian movie was pretty good, and book was equal to or a little better than the movie. However, Andy Weir’s Artemis does not get a positive recommendation from me; it missed the mark on every measure and the best page in that book was the last page. If you are thinking about that one think again.