Should I finish these?

[cahn]

Inspired partially by sophia_sol (but I might have done this anyway), I'm incorporating a very liberal attitude towards not finishing my Hugo reading.

The Kaiju Preservation Society (Scalzi) - DNF. I'm not actually asking about this one as I've decided I'm not going to finish this. It's not bad, it's light and frothy and fun, but I think I am willing to deal with light and frothy and fun when it's tropes I'm interested in (galactic empires in The Last Emperox) and not when it's not (kaiju).

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Moreno-Garcia) - Is there a payoff here for someone who hasn't read Island of Doctor Moreau? I didn't dislike it and am willing to read more if there is a payoff, but I'm worried that it will only be a payoff if you know something about the original. Also, independently of this book, should I read Island? (That is to say, I wouldn't read it just to read Daughter, but if I read it I might read Daughter afterwards.)

A Mirror Mended (Harrow) - is this worth finishing? I read and liked the first of these but I guess I'm not super convinced there's enough more to say in this multiverse... is there? I got far enough in this one to be aware of what the gimmick is likely to be, but I also think I am near saturation on reversed fairy tales. Tanith Lee probably did it better anyway

Comments

Re: (K)

[cahn]

There is rather... a lot... of horror and violence. I don't know if you would find it spectacular enough to make up for it? (I mean, I clearly did! I just don't actually know for you. I'd be very interested to see, if you do end up trying it out!) It's definitely got a LOT of narrative drive and also a LOT of over-the-top loyalty :D But if you're going to try it out, you should try out at least a couple of chapters past where they get out of the Ninth House; I found the Ninth House bits almost unbearable, but the story becomes rather different after that.

The stylistic part that I really had trouble with at the start was actually sort of the opposite of Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which, btw, I still remember you handing to me and telling me I had to read it, after I'd struck out hard with Stranger in a Strange Land). I was brought up to read SF in a way where word choice is worldbuilding (which is exactly the case in Moon), whereas Muir's got a writing aesthetic where she does not care a whole lot about this (see also here) -- although it does turn out that one can make implicit inferences from the third book that there is more internal logic to the way Muir has set up everything than it seemed in the first book.