 Okay, so, by this point I think most of y'all understand this format. It's a bunch of books that I don't really have enough to say about them to each give them their own individual review, so I'm just putting them all together. And this one doesn't really have a theme or anything, but let's go for it. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Up first on the chopping block is Prey by Michael Crichton. Now, this one is a techno thriller by Michael Crichton. So you already kind of know, if you've read any of his books, you already kind of know exactly what this is going to be like. This one's about nanomachines. There's a factory out in the middle of the Nevada desert that's been making them, and luckily it's far from anybody because a swarm of them got out and it's no longer under control and it's reproducing on its own, so that's not good. And then they bring in the main character, Jack, to try and help them find out a way to stop the swarm before it gets out of control, kills more people and animals. And from there, well, like I said, it's a Michael Crichton story, so it goes into a lot of depth about the machinery, how it works, how it was built, and that's all fascinating, don't can be wrong. Like in this, I'm not sure if it's really a spoiler, but the way that they create the nanomachines is really interesting and involves the use of bacteria and stuff. And when you see how it was able to get out of control, that also ties into it's programming, so it talks about computer programming and stuff, which I'm not all that well-versed in, so I can't really say if it was accurate or not, but knowing Crichton it definitely is. And the thing is, you kind of know if you've read any of his books, whether you'll like this one or not. If you've read Sphere or Jurassic Park or Timeline or anything like that, you kind of know, yeah, okay, this one is gonna be talking about this super advanced technology, it's gonna be a bit of a cautionary tale about how, hey, sometimes shit gets out of control, it's going to be filled with a bunch of cool action scenes, there'll be one or two good characters, but a lot of them will be either bland or they'll just be kind of assholes. And this one is the same. The only real difference I can think that it has is that it's told from first person POV, like it's from the perspective of a guy named Jack. And the first almost 100 pages or over 100 pages is mostly about his domestic life, because his wife is one of the people that's working on the nanomachines, they're initially made as a piece of medical equipment basically, so they're supposed to be injected into the bloodstream and then they can look around in your heart and stuff for cardiovascular issues and that's really cool. But yeah, we see his wife and how they're having marital problems and how he's lost his job so he's a stay-at-home dad for a while, and while we do still get hints about what's going to happen and how some shit's going south, I did find myself wanting the story to hurry up and pick up and once it does pick up it gets a lot better, trust me. But the fact that I was ever sitting there going, okay, come on, let's do this, let's hurry up, let's get the plot moving, that is unusual for a Michael Crichton book. But once it does get going, really good, really solid adventure, nothing mind-blowing I don't think, but if you're a fan of his other stuff then definitely check this one out. Okay, so this next one is actually a did not finish, but I had had it on my to read list for a very long time and then once I actually got to reading it, it was, I guess a word is disappointing, but it's praxis, the dread empire's fault. Now I'm a big fan of space operas, you know that, I rarely find any that are, that I like all that much, but that's just because I'm kind of picky. But this one had an amazing setup, basically what it is is there's this gigantic galactic empire ruled by these immortal beings called the Shah, and the Shah, like I said, they live forever, but they can still die if they get shot or catch disease or anything, and they've had this massive empire where they're ruling over a bunch of other races including humans, because this is a couple hundred years after humans were taken over, and the Shah have been slowly one by one committing suicide, and by the time, we don't know exactly why, it's just they feel that nothing should last forever or something like that, but they are leaving instructions for after they're gone how to run the empire, and by the time the book starts there's only one left, and so when I heard that, that immediately drew me, and I was like, yes, let's have some shit happen, let's go, and then it immediately goes to the life and times of the main character, Gareth Martinez, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a little bit of time before everything gets started to get us into the world and get us into the main character's lives and what they're like, but my god, this one was, I got over halfway through the book, so it was, I think I got around 250 pages, and nothing had happened, like the summary of the book, at least on Goodreads, literally says that Gareth uncovers a plot from the Naxids, who were another alien race who were ruled over by the Shah, the Naxids were apparently planning to take over the empire, and over halfway through the book there had not even been a whisper of that going on, like there's a slow pace and then there's nothing happening, and this one is the second very much, so maybe you've read it, maybe it turns into an amazing space opera, like 10 pages after I stopped, but the fact that it has that high of a barrier to entry is a massive problem, and I don't think I can really recommend this one to anyone, even if you are a big fan of space operas. Next up we have The Darkest Minds, now this one, this one kind of got swept up in the, you know, young adult dystopia craze that was happening after The Hunger Games got big, and I think that's kind of a shame because this one, while it isn't perfect and while it's not that different really, it does definitely go out of its way to try and be a little bit different, because this one is all about this girl named Ruby, and she lives in the United States when this plague goes around that only affects children, and most of the kids who catch it die, and a small percentage of those that catch it get powers, get superpowers, you know, some of them get telekinesis, some of them get mind control powers, some of them get, can shoot electricity out, it's it's a, okay, it's kind of stupid, yeah, I'll admit, especially because they admit later that only the United States was hit, like every other country has only had small outbreaks, and that's just, okay, that's that's kind of dumb, in fact that's really dumb, but other than that, I liked this setup because all the kids with powers wind up going to these concentration camps, and Ruby is there for literal years, and she has to hide her powers, because she actually is what's known as an orange, which is, because they give color coding to all the people that have powers, and she's an orange who is someone that can control minds, which is super dangerous, so they usually get wind up getting a euthanized, or I don't know if euthanized would be the right word, but they kill them, and so she has to hide that, and eventually after she's been in there for years, she manages to escape, and after that it's just her going on a journey with some friends that she meets, and trying to, well, trying to not die, trying to not get caught by the government and the people who want to send her back to the camp. Now, as I said, this book doesn't do a whole lot that's new, but it did intrigue me, you know, there is a totalitarian government that is running everything, at least running everything in the eastern part of the US, because they mention that on the western coast there is a different government that is not abiding by the rule of the eastern government, so that's probably going to come up later in the series, but they mention that their world has not completely been destroyed, but huge sections of the country have been abandoned because, you know, a bunch of people died, and there's been a lot of fighting and rioting and terrorism and stuff that's happened, the economy has collapsed, so people have mostly left the smaller towns and gone to bigger cities, and I kind of liked that, because rather than being, you know, dozens or hundreds of years after an apocalypse, it's we're kind of in the middle of an apocalypse, and that's not something you see a lot, so I thought that was really interesting. I liked Ruby as a character, you know, she was really scared most of the time, but she still did what she felt needed to be done, and she still had a moral compass and stuff, so I liked that, and her friends were also all perfectly fine characters. She has, you know, a romantic relationship in this, obviously, but it's actually, well, there's actual chemistry there, you know, it's kind of weird that that's rare enough that I have to mention it, but yeah, her and the dude, his name is Liam, they form a genuine relationship, they actually like each other, they aren't just constantly arguing and being at each other's throats, you can actually tell that, yeah, this is why these people would like each other, and I'm not gonna give it away, but the end of the book is really heartbreaking for what it does to them and their relationship, and they don't go too quickly and just drop the L-bomb, you know, they've only known each other for a couple of weeks by the end of the book, and so it makes sense that they wouldn't just come out and say, I love you, and they don't do that, so I was super grateful for that, and this one, it is kind of shaping up to be a standard dystopian young adult thing, where they rebel against an oppressive government, and we'll see if that changes at all in the next books, but I am actually pretty excited for them, and I will probably read them at some point. So then after that we have A Darkness Forged in Fire, which is book one of the Iron Elves. Now this one, I was intrigued by this one because I saw it at a used bookstore and I had never heard of it before, and I like doing stuff like that, I like going through like old cheap paperbacks and finding stuff that I've never heard of, that no one's ever read, and then just picking it up, because a lot of times, yeah, there's a reason no one's ever heard of it, it's because it's crap, and other times it's, you can find a little hidden gem, and I have found hidden gems before, but this time, yeah, this time I found crap, so A Darkness Forged in Fire, this one, I'll admit I also didn't finish this one, but I did get over 180 pages in, and the whole time just, I was kind of waiting for things to start happening, and I was like, okay, can something start happening now? Can something start happening now? And then I realized I was 180 pages in, and I realized, you know, I'm just a little, I'm not looking forward to reading this anymore, you know, I have to kind of force myself to do it, so this one I might get back to one day, but yeah, I wasn't a fan of it, and the plot of it is basically just that there's this big, you know, Empire that rules over stuff, and the main character Kanawa is an elf who was a commander in the Imperial Army, he killed the viceroy of the Empire for reasons that were not made super clear by the time I stopped reading, and so he was thrown out, but then they need him to complete another mission, because this powerful spirit being called the Shadow Monarch is waking up, and so they reform his regiment, and they're supposed to go off and stop her, and so, you know, it sounds like pretty standard fantasy stuff, maybe a little bit modern in how dark it is and how violent it is, but it didn't really do all that much to draw me in, like, because the basic plot is decent enough, I was kind of into that, but it didn't do anything else to draw me in, you know, the world isn't super unique, the characters aren't super great or anything, it just, there was nothing new that was able to get me past all that nothingness that was happening in the plot, so yeah, this one, if you're a super big heroic or epic fantasy fan, you might be able to get into this, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone, and the last one for today is actually a super popular book that I only finished reading last night, it's called One of Us Is Lying, and this one has gotten basically nothing but praise over the past three years, since it's come out, or three or four years, something like that, and even people that normally just hate young adult and want nothing to do with it have been saying that, yeah, this one's really good, and it's a, it's a murder mystery, it has an amazing setup, I will say, and the solution to, you know, who done it is also really good, and the climax is halfway decent, it's just the way we find out who did it is really boring, because the middle section of the book has basically no investigating. The plot to this one is that there are five kids who are stuck together in detention one day at their high school, and then one of them drinks some peanut oil, seemingly by mistake, and he's allergic to peanut oil, so he has an allergic reaction and starts choking, and then his EpiPen is gone, and then it turns out all the EpiPens in the school's nurse's office are gone, and even when they call an ambulance, they're too late, and so he winds up dying, and so it looks like somebody murdered him, and the four people that are in the room with him are primary suspects, because he, they all had secrets that the kid, Simon, who died, knew about, and he was about to release, so the question comes up is okay, one of us did it most likely, so who was it? And that's, like I said, amazing setup for a murder mystery. The thing is, the story is told from first person POV from all of the characters, and it constantly switches between them, sometimes multiple times per chapter, and man, I've said it a million times, I'll say it a million more. If you can't make the narration between different characters actually feel different or sound different, then it's hard to tell them apart, and you may as well not do it. Like this one would have been much better served by being in third person, because not only is it hard to tell the characters apart in their narration, but sometimes they'll say stuff like, oh, I have a secret, but I'm not gonna reveal it to the reader quite yet, and it's just, it's kind of cheating when you do that. Like you can get away with it a little in third person, but in first person it is cheating, and it's only done so that we wonder, oh, I wonder which one of them did it, and like it just would have worked a lot better in third person. But like I said, after the initial murder investigation starts, the main characters don't really do any investigating of their own. Like they wonder, oh, I wonder who did it, and they talk about it a little bit, but they don't really go off looking for clues, they don't go lead chasing, they don't go snooping around, they're just concerned with their own personal drama, and I get, you can put that in. Okay, in fact I think most of the drama is good enough as it is, but it's just distracting from the mystery, and well the mystery is what drew me in here, it's what drew a lot of people in here, and so by the time we get to the end, the answer is kind of just given to them, and in fact a lot of the answers along the way are just given to them, so it just feels shitty. And last year I read a book called The Cheerleaders, which was also kind of similar, it was also a young adult murder mystery, and that one also focused a lot more on personal drama than it did on investigating the murder, but they did still investigate the murder there, and it was all told from one person's perspective, so it was just her investigating things, you know, she was never really a suspect, so I have to say, but one of us is lying, the fact that it's told from the perspective of four suspects feels kind of gimmicky, but anyways in The Cheerleaders we didn't have to deal with that, and even though it had its shortcomings, I was just so invested in the personal drama that I was able to kind of see past some of the weaknesses that the mystery had, so it wasn't the end of the world for me, whereas one of us is lying, it's almost entirely a murder mystery, and the murder mystery part just isn't that great, so this one, I don't want to say it's awful, because it's not, it's solidly above average I'd say, but I just don't get why all the hype was there, I really don't. So that's all for today, all five of those books, I know I didn't really sing their praises all that much, but you know, none of them were super terrible either, so yeah, please subscribe and all that. So this is the ending part where I tell you all to subscribe and everything, and I thank everyone for watching, as well as thanking my patrons, including Apo Savilane and Alex Humva, Ashley Watson, Ava Tumor, B Quinn, Brother Santotys, Christopher Quinten, Emily Miller, Evan Stigall, Joel, Johnny St. Clair, Madison Lewis Bennett, Ronnie, Tobacco Crow, Tom Beanie, Tofer Wheeler, Vacuous Silas, and Bay Victus, as well as all the other names on there, you know, you guys can read, you know how much I appreciate y'all, especially if you've come this far, and anyways, I'm rambling on a bit, so please subscribe, smash that like button, and I will see you later, bye.