Week 1, Book 1 The Geek With the Cat Tattoo

I sat down this morning because the most orderly way to read 52 books in 52 weeks is to check in weekly with a freshly finished book.  Instead of having a book to write about with my coffee I realized that I am a total spaz.  It's either hyper focus or no focus at all with me.  At 7 am, I hadn’t finished a book during the first 7 days of the year because I have SEVEN books in progress.  I am reading a contemporary romance, a historical romance, a paranormal non-romance, a contemporary mystery, a horror novel, a memoir and a religious book.

I haven’t finished a knitting project in the first 7 days of the year because I have SEVEN things in progress!  I am knitting a cape (for my niece), a hat for a friend, a scarf for gifting, 2 shawls for myself, a pair of socks for myself and a pair of slippers for myself.  The slippers are about my 4^th start at slippers.  I keep not liking the patterns I pick, so the slippers should count as seven projects on their own, as many times as I’ve started them and ripped it all out.

Clearly, I need to get my shit together and finish some stuff. I sat down to read at lunch and whipped out the last 70 pages or so of The Geek With the Cat Tattoo by Theresa Weir.  I bought this because it was a $0.99 book on kindle and I'd enjoyed the first book in the series.  TGWTCT is the print equivalent of 162 pages.  For comparison, The Shining is 466 pages.  (It's also the horror book I'm reading). 

The first book in the series is a contemporary romance with a little suspense action thrown in.   I was disappointed that this one was not a suspense hybrid.  The Geek of the title is Emerson, who builds and repairs guitars, and is afraid to talk to girls like Lola, who's a free spirit musician with a recent bad boyfriend experience.  The Cat, is a magical cat, named Sam, who has the ability sort of mentally push humans around.  JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER CAT.  EVER.  

I found a lot of the conflict manufactured in this, what with Lola not being bright enough to figure out if Emerson was shy or just a jerk, and Emerson being all insecure and shy. There was a significant amount of navel gazing by the characters.  It's also always weird to me in a book when characters care what their siblings think of their boyfriends.  Do adults do that?  I never cared. Anyhow, I think it's probably a lot harder to plot a romance in a novella than in a full length novel, and it showed in this book.  I would probably give it a C- if it was more expensive, but at the current bargain price, it was a C.

I read it on the kindle app on my phone or on my nook HD+ tablet.  I don't care for the weird way that Kindle tracks your progress by percentage.  However, I do find it pretty crazy the way it tracks your reading speed and then tells you how much longer you have to read the book.  It's pretty gratifying for people who read fast.