Book Lovers’ Memes (Set 11)

Usage: Rifle vs. Riffle

The difference isn’t a firearm vs. looking through stuff. You can actually both rifle and riffle through belongings. The difference is in your method.

To riffle is to flip through something like a book or shuffle a deck of cards. It’s basically a blend of ripple and shuffle.

As a noun, a rifle is a gun with a long barrel with grooves called rifling. As a verb, to rifle is to ransack. You can rifle through a drawer or suitcase, for example.

Tip to Remember
A burglar may bring a rifle to rifle through your stuff.
You may riffle by gently shuffling.

Review: Exit Strategy

Exit Strategy by Charlton Pettus

☆☆☆
Fiction — Thriller

This wasn’t bad but could have been a lot better. My biggest issue was the weak characters. Jordan and Stephanie Parrish are the two heroes of the story yet neither has a personality. They are incredibly generic and therefore impossible to connect with. I don’t know why they care about each other; I don’t get a sense of motivation from them.

The bad guys don’t have much personality, either. Our main villain engages in sexual and animal torture. I guess this is to show how bad he really is, but there’s no point to this behavior other than to compensate for a lack of personality. His motives are never explained.

The plot relies on the bad guys making some big mistakes and the good guys making just a few little ones. I get annoyed when either side is perfect, but it should be more balanced. I really enjoyed the chase/escape scenes.

There is a lot of jumping around. A scene will be a paragraph and then jump to another POV for another paragraph. (There are 88 chapters plus an epilogue and prologue in 406 pages.) Sometimes these are flashbacks, so at times I didn’t know who or when or where I was. And who the heck is Natalie??

Some plot threads didn’t seem to wrap up. What did the end mean, “folding”? Jordan and Stephanie were supposed to have a strained marriage at the beginning. Then they’re perfectly happy together. No talking it out? No counseling? I still have a few questions about Alex and Sam. Maybe I’m just dense.



The writing is fine but utilitarian — no thoughtful prose or literary qualities; just the straight facts. The writer also doesn’t know what bemused means. (Hint: not amused ) But I think any true thriller fan will enjoy this.

Content Warning:
Consistent strong language that just felt gratuitous
Explicit sexual content, including abuse and torture
Some gory medical details and graphic violence
Deliberate harm to animals

Usage: Fortuitous

Fortuitous has come to mean fortunate, lucky, but that is not its actual definition. It actually means random, happened by chance — subject to the whims of fortune. So it could refer to something that happened that was lucky or unlucky.

So if you are a traditionalist — or about to be judged by one — remember that it does not mean by happy chance; it only means by chance.

Book Lovers’ Memes (Set 10)

Spelling: Defuse vs. Diffuse

These words have become popular lately, and they get mixed up frequently.

Defuse is what you do with bombs to stop them exploding. This includes metaphorical bombs, like tense situations and quick tempers.

Diffuse is a chemistry term. It’s what happens when you add dye to water and it spreads out, for example. Metaphorically, it would be used when talking about something just sort of petering out or slowly affecting everything.

Trick to Remember
Defuse is what you do to things with fuses. 

Diffuse –> Diffffffffuse. See the f’s spreading out.

Review: Medusa Uploaded

Medusa Uploaded (The Medusa Cycle #1) by Emily Devenport

I haven’t read many generation-ship books yet, though I like the idea. This book has a lot of interesting ideas, and the writing is solid and shows real talent. But I think it could have used another revision.

I was confused a lot of the time. There are zero descriptions in this book. It’s as if the author was so afraid of info-dumping that she avoided exposition completely. I don’t know what the ship(s) looked like, what they were made of, how big they were, how big the hallways were, what color anything was. I still don’t get how the servants’ clothes worked. I can extrapolate a full visual image from just a little information, but I need that foundation. It’s like I was expected to explore this world blindfolded, but I failed at that.



Medusa is one of many androids that you wear. Again, without any descriptions, this was difficult to visualize. The Medusa androids can be worn like suits yet they are their own AI persons. I really don’t know how this works.

The society is broken into Executives — an aristocracy — and Worms, the servants. Oichi is a Worm. (I thought this meant she was a non-corporeal AI at first; again, no descriptions or explanations.) This society is waaaaaayy too airlock-happy. The ship appears to have about 200 airlocks. (Why so many??) They are used almost every day for executions, murders, and suicides. They are never monitored, guarded, or locked, apparently.



As a music teacher, I appreciated Oichi’s dedication to music. It WILL make kids’ brains smarter.



But I never knew what her goals were beyond sharing music with everyone else. Social equality? General knowledge? It just felt like she was meandering around, collecting other outcasts and getting tossed out of airlocks repeatedly. Also, the author doesn’t know what reticent and disinterested actually mean. A decent editor should have fixed that.

Nice audio performance.
Reader’s Choice Nominee, Summer 2019