Wednesday, June 25, 2025

May 2025 and June 2025 Book Clubs: Monster Menu by Terrell Garrett, and Starter Villain by John Scalzi

The books that got picked for the last couple of books clubs have been pretty bad in my opinion. I ended up not even caring to finish either one of them. 

 

 May-

  

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre:  Sci-fi, Fantasy, Satire
Content: Strong Language

 

An LA taco truck chef is transported to a fantasy realm where bad reviews are the least of her worries in this cozy culinary LitRPG adventure.

For Renee “Nay” Favreau, food is life. She’s the owner of a Los Angeles taco truck who dreams of becoming a respected chef and expanding her fleet, and whose greatest enemy is an unhappy food critic. Always hunting for her next great dish, the search eventually leads her to a near-fatal encounter with an interdimensional spider.

Awaking in a strange world where words appear before her eyes, a talking tentacle befriends her, and people are trying to kill her, Nay learns she has the ability to become an one of the special chefs who prepare the magical meals that power the enigmatic Marrow Eaters.

Soon, Nay is working in a remote village, where she wins the hearts—and stomachs—of the locals. But when evil threatens to destroy the place, she’ll have to employ all her wit and newfound skills to survive and save her new friends . . .
 

 

DNF @64%

I read this for book club. I'm not a fan of this genre but even so, I feel like this one was worse than most. I didn't like the main character and I found the story to be pretty boring. On the plus side, there were lots of book related food items to serve at book club.
 Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos.

 

 

 

 June-

  

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre:  Sci-fi, Fantasy, Satire
Content: Lots of F bombs

 

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.

Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.

 

 

 DNF @57%.


One of my least favorite things I've read so far this year. I liked the cats but that's about it. The main character is not very bright, and comes across as kind of a loser. We have to follow along as everything gets explained to him. It was like he was floating around in the middle of everything that was happening but made no real difference to the story himself. I guess that makes sense since he seemed incapable of making any real difference in his own life.

One of the things that annoyed me most about this book was the way the dead uncle's assistant tried to rationalize said uncle's villainy. The main character's uncle was not less villainous than the other villains in this book. His tax payer funded villainy is just as bad, and saying he didn't care about money because he only kept 5 million of his trillions liquid is disingenuous.

It seems this was trying be some sort of satire or humorous commentary on capitalism but in my opinion it failed miserably. The whole thing felt juvenile, like something a 12 year old boy would find funny, which is exactly what I thought about the other book I tried to read by this author, The Android's Dream. This book had me bored and repeatedly rolling my eyes at the stupidity.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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