~ BookieWorm's Big 2016 Challenge ~

It looks like you're aiming to pin yourself down to a particular book each month? I guess I sort of do that, but I grant myself permission to go out of order if the whim takes me over the course of the year. Just listing the books and trying to knock them off regardless whatever other titles crop up is about all the straightjacket I can handle.

Welcome to the TBR challenge!

>3 BookieWorm: Well, this challenge is specifically about choosing the particular titles and being "locked in" to reading them, as it says on the group page. It isn't just about reading off the shelves in general (though of course that is the point of it).

>3 BookieWorm: But the ROOT challenge is about reading off your TBR and with no requirement to pre-select what you read. You might be interested in that challenge.

Very true, it's a good group, I was there for a couple years until I decided to downsize my groups lol.

I've been meaning to read Innocence. I look forward to seeing what you think of it.

I really enjoy reading Philippa Gregory, I need to go back to her books sometime soon. Welcome to the group!

>1 BookieWorm:

Welcome! Dean Koontz has been blowing up my automatic recommendations here* for a while now. Really need to get to more of his stuff soon.

* https://www.librarything.com/profile/artturnerjr/recommendations

I enjoy his more humorous works, personally. I read some of the "darker" more legit horror back in the 90s and I didn't dislike it but I always thought he was below King's standard, just very run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen thrillers. But I discovered a handful of years ago that he also writes a lot of books of a different style, with an amusing non-hero guy who just does the right thing because it's right and has a lot of witty snarky banter with people, and in a way they can sometimes be a little repetitious, because you're so familiar with that character already except, it's actually a different one, but since "he" is such an awesome character I don't care, they're immensely enjoyable (and the stories are of course entirely different)! (Some examples of these would be the first three Odd Thomas books, Fear Nothing (also has a sequel but I haven't read that one yet), and Life Expectancy.)

>13 .Monkey.:

Koontz seems to be a lot like King in that even though, generically speaking, he's all over the place, all his books tend to all get shoved into the horror section. I believe he actually started out as a science fiction guy, and a fairly well-regarded one - he had a story in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology, which was kind of a big deal in SF circles at the time. But publishers and booksellers don't, as a general rule, do nuance, so into the horror (or thriller, or whatever) section he goes.

Yeah, "thriller" is probably the all-encompassing umbrella genre for just about everything he does. It might have "scary" undertones or sci-fi themes or a murderer or whatever, but thriller just about always fits. I think King has much further variation in his work, aside of also doing non-fic, he goes deeper; he's written short stories & novels I definitely wouldn't dump into the "thriller" pile. Granted it's possible Koontz has done a couple that don't, I know before he did TickTock he had written something he called very dark, hence writing the "screwball comedy" to lighten his mood (I'd recommend it, it was much fun, lots of laughs!), but I think King does it far more and with various styles and themes and such.

Hmmm....this is interesting commentary on Koontz. I definitely had him pegged as the dime-a-dozen type of author, and haven't read anything by him since I was a teen, such as Lightning or Watchers. So, if I were to give him another try, what would you folks recommend? The Odd Thomas books?

If you like a thriller-mystery and thoughtful engaging witty characters, I'd suggest the first three Odd Thomas books, yeah.