My 40+ Book Unhaul: Part 1

This month I am unhauling more than forty physical books and I am very happy about it. I thought about making a blog post series on why I unhauled these books.

Trigger Warning: Here are my reviews of the first ten books I unhauled, they are mostly not very positive; so if you get triggered by negative reviews of books you own and like don’t read this blog post.

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Rating: No rating because I DNFed it. Sometimes I read outside my favorite genres and with that I discover a great read. This wasn’t unfortunately the case here, but it could be due to Horror not really being a genre I enjoy most of the time. I do have some exceptions to this but this was not the case here. I started this book due to all the good reviews on Booktube, but found it too confusing and at a certain point I stopped caring about the characters and plot and DNFed the book. So I won’t rate it, only quit it.

Zodiac (Zodiac #1) by Romina Russell

Rating: 2 stars.
This wasn’t for me. It felt like I was reading the protagonist’s thoughts over and over again and one of my pet peeves is books without plot where you get stuck in the character’s head most of the time. After a while it got very repetitive. I won’t continue this series.

Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman

Rating: 3 stars.
This was well recommended but not at all for me. Someone else will enjoy this book more than me so it will be sent away to a new adventure. 🙂

Axiom’s End (Noumena #1) by Lindsay Ellis
Rating: 3 stars.
Actually I could not put this down, it was a really entertaining contemporary sci-fi. But it isn’t a book I plan on rereading at all so why keep it, right?

Tantalize (Tantalize #1) by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Rating: 3 stars.
This was an entertaining, page-turner, first book of a series. Only the end was a bit rushed up. On a second note, the end of this book was quite tragic too. To me the main character and her caretaker uncle seemed to be emotionally lost people. Spoiler alert: Especially the main character was a very lonely teen without proper guidance and support from anyone in her life, so she just started to lean on the seductive new chef which was slowly turning her into a vampire. This fictional vampirism could be compared to real life problems of teen girls who get drug addicted or too attached to bad people due to lack of parental support. I considered the end tragic for this reason, but was intrigued by the plot’s thematic layers that turned a girl becoming a vampire not to a romantic thing, as many other YA books, but rather to a Machiavellian murder.
I have been mostly losing interest in paranormal fantasy books lately so this isn’t a series I plan on continuing for now at least. I also don’t plan on rereading this book, so away it goes.

Blood Rights (House of Comarré #1) by Kristen Painter

Rating: 1 star.
This had some interesting story world ideas but the romance (and quite a ‘meh’ romance on top of that) took over the very slow plot. All the characters were also so undeveloped, unlikable and one-layered that I stopped caring after seeing I wouldn’t get any real backstory to explain who they were and why they were hanging out together. I think the most interesting character was the villain with her pet snake but I did not get enough backstory to show all her layers. After setting the book aside I did made an effort to read the end of the story where everything was quite set up for you to go on reading the series, but after this slow beginning I’ll let it go.

The Dreaming Void (Void #1) by Peter F. Hamilton

Rating: No rating because I DNFed it.
In the first chapter I already found something that makes this book dated imo. In the previous books often the author meant that women who went through the rejuvenation procedures could do that and look mid-twenties even if they were centuries old, but that “one could notice” they were older and as such not as desirable as the real young girls of twenty or under twenty. In one of those previous books the author had even two characters, a guy who was happy because he had a young lover who was under 20/30, and not one of the rejuvenated women and his other characters who were male and rejuvenated millionaires always were married or had a harem of “really young girls and not rejuvenated ones” and so on.
I noticed a pattern here of ageism specifically directed towards women and this was the one thing I really didn’t like in the two previous books. It goes on in this book with the “centuries old woman who looks like mid-twenties” asking the guy if he wants to sleep with her out of nowhere and he declining and showing no interest in her. If the author is stating his own prejudices, the prejudices of his characters, or both, I can’t say, but it is quite annoying to see these prejudices repeated in the two first books and in this third one as well. Especially because not in any moment the author mentions that rejuvenated men aren’t as desirable as younger men. I will continue this book for now because I’m interested in the plot, but I had to mention this very outdated part. This was published in 2008 so it does not have an excuse for misogyny and ageism as a book in the 50s or 60s would have.
Later in the week I continued it, but the constant changing of POVs and slow plot development kept me distant and uninterested. I’ll set this aside because it isn’t for me.

Kushiel’s Dart (Phèdre’s Trilogy #1) by Jacqueline Carey

Rating: No rating because I DNFed it.
The story world was interesting but there were certain elements of it I didn’t like. The pacing was meandering slow and repetitive, and I didn’t like the book enough to finish, setting it aside at page 97.

Mage’s Blood (The Moontide Quartet #1) by David Hair

Rating: No rating because I DNFed it.
I gave this a good try, and listened to one hundred pages of the audiobook. I checked at which point the audiobook was on my physical copy before deciding to set it aside. The story world has a lot of information but I am not interested enough to continue the book or the series.

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Rating: 3 stars.
The characters and the story were interesting but the plot advancement was really slow and the melodramatic narrative style was not my cup of tea. I hope it gets more love on someone else’s shelf.

This was Part One of my Spring 2023’s Book Unhaul. Keep tuned for the next chapters in this series.