Sheri’s Comments (group member since Jul 25, 2016)

Sheri’s comments from the EPBOT Readers group.

I have so many series I love! Mercedeys Lackey's Valedemar series, her 500 Kingdoms, the Elemental Masters books. Anne McCaffery's dragonriders series. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. Simon R Green's Nightside. Patricia Brigg's Mercedes Thompson books. Seanan McGuire's October Daye books. I could go on =p

I kept meaning to answer your question, Stephanie, but I kept being on a phone and didn't want to mess with trying to copy and paste quotes! Night Circus is one of my favorite books, and it has so many great ones. But I particularly love “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

also “You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus.
You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”

Of course Harry Potter also has some great ones, such as Dumbledore's "Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

But I always love the opening of Sorcerer's Stone, just because it's the start of everything. "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense."

Hi everyone!

Can't believe it's approaching December already. Hope everyone had a good reading week!

Since it was Thanksgiving here, I actually didn't have a ton of reading time, in spite of the long weekend. Was running around seeing a lot of family, and decorating the house for Christmas, and trying to do the final yard work for pick up.

I finished Crazy Rich Asians and China Rich Girlfriend which are two books in the crazy rich series. I liked them, although very soap-opera like with the drama. I still had a good time with them. Kind of relieved to take a break before the third though, they got pretty over the top.

Currently I'm reading The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, just in time for the holidays. just started it so no real opinion yet, but I like Christopher Moore.

How's everyone's reading going?

Alexa, probably the author. I liked the book over all but part of my issue with it was that it was disjointed. I read it thought, not listen

Hi everyone! Happy thanksgiving to fellow Americans!

Late check in today, been passed out on the couch most the afternoon.

I had a slow reading week due to working on my aunts cards in my free time. Wanted to hand them off this weekend.

I finished Fire in Her Blood this was ok. I like the idea of it, and the world. I got annoyed that I guessed the mystery a quarter through while the main character, a detective, was stumped. Also didn’t like how there were two random characters perspectives shoved in amongst the regular main character persosctive. It was jarring and messed with the flow.

Sandry's Book I liked this, but it was a bit slow to go anywhere. Also felt weird that it was called Sandrys book but if felt pretty ex’s my split between all four.

Not sure what’s up next. Probably some comics.

How’s everyone else doing?

Yeah I’m planning on reading it next year for the challenge:D

Clean Room, Vol. 3: Waiting for the Stars to FallHi everyone!

Hope everyone's reading is going well!! Getting down to the wire for any reading challenges still going on.

I had a pretty good reading week this week.

I read:

Etiquette & Espionage - finished this up, it was a fun read. I'll probably continue the series later.

The Dark Prophecy - Continuing on with the Trials of Apollo. I like the series ok, but I prefer his series where the perspective changes. The Heroes of Olympus is my favorite, it switches between all the heroes in the party. The Kane Chronicles also alternate between the two siblings. I get that Apollo is supposed to be an arrogant god getting humbled, but it got old. Getting some chapters from Meg's perspective would be a welcome break.

Clean Room, Vol. 1: Immaculate Conception, Clean Room, Vol. 2: Exile - tore through these in a day, it was a great series. Gail Simone is a compelling writer, and the art was fantastic if troubling. Super creepy and weird but really good.

The Dark Side of the Road - Hadn't read Simon R Green in a few years, it was good to get back. For his series, he tends to pick a genre and do a sort of sci-fi/horror/dark fantasy take on it. This one is sort of a riff of Agatha Christie style mystery, but darker and scifi/horror.

Cruel Beauty - This was a fairytale retelling of Beauty and the Beast, with some greek and a little Celtic mythology mixed in. I'd read another retelling by her that I didn't love, so I'd been sitting on this one for a while. Wish I'd started with this one, I really liked it! I really liked that the main character was really flawed. So many times in fairytales and fairy tale retellings, the heroine is perfect. Or if not perfect, at least very good, does the right thing, innocent, etc. I think they gave the Beauty of the story some disagreeable traits to counter the good ones. That was really the theme of the story, balancing the good with the bad. I enjoyed it. It did mean i mentally yelled at her a lot, but it really kept me invested.

Currently reading: Fire in Her Blood (which is written by someone in FoE!) It's the second book of the series. I like it alright. Fun paranormal mystery. Has an interesting take on witchcraft that I've not seen before.

The exciting part is that Cruel Beauty completed my personal goodreads challenge of 150 books! A lot of them are comic trades, which is partially why I set it so high. But still, I'm pretty proud!

How is everyone else doing? Think you'll make it? What are you reading?

Hi Sara!

Maybe you could do a combination? Decide how many books you want to challenge yourself with. Half of them pick prompts that you are excited about/think are easy. The other half pick ones you think are more challenging or harder to fill. I don't think there's any reason you HAVE to pick ones you dread, just leave those out. Then if you finish those earlier than you expect, you can always add more!

Hi everyone!

Chilly week here in Michigan but I was glad to see the sun!

Finished this week: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women I really loved this, overall. It was tragic, but it was really great to hear about the stories of the girls and women affected, not just as a footnote but as what their lives were like and how the radium destroyed them. However i was having a pretty bummy weekend and it made for really grim reading. Library holds don't wait for moods though, I had to finish by Monday morning or mess with turning wifi off and trying to finish before a new book came in.

After that read I needed some comfort reading, so I re-read The Masterharper of Pern which is an old favorite I've read more times than I can count.

Binti - This was a fast read, less than 100 pages. Probably a novella then? I forget where the cut off was. It is really good, but I felt like I was missing a lot of world building. Not sure if there's another series in the universe that expands more, or she just didn't focus on that. I had to just guess a lot of stuff based on context. Still was good, will try to find more by her.

currently reading: Etiquette & Espionage which I got on sale recently. I'd been meaning to check it out, i like Gail Carriger. It's fun so far, fast read. Will probably finish by tonight or early tomorrow.

How's everyone else doing? Excited for next year's challenge? I admit to eyeing my TBR pile and considering what I want to round out the year with, based on whether it fits in next year's challenge, and how hard it'd be to find something else I want to read if I read it now. I put one title on suspension at the library, just to try to make sure I don't get it this year. I have 4 people ahead of me, if everyone takes 2 weeks that puts me right at the end of the year. But if anyone skips it, returns early, etc. I'd get it too soon. But it's for a prompt that I feel like might be tricky to fill with something that interests me, so I'd rather wait.

Stephanie,

I read Dark Matter, I didn't love it. The premise was kind of interesting but the author did a lot of the "and that was the last time he ever saw her" heavy handed foreshadowing that I decided I don't like. I also didn't like how he wrote the one woman in the book. I thought the ending was kind of weak too. Not the worst thing I've read, but I expected to enjoy it more.

I like True Blood way more than the novels. I didn't really care for them, and I only got maybe 6 in before I stopped reading. I thought that the show made the side characters way more interesting, and took focus of Sookie who I find to be kind of tiresome. I still don't love her in the show, but she's balanced out with Lafayette, Jason, Tara, Eric etc.

I HATED Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I only finished the book because the 2015 book challenge had a prompt "book you started reading but stopped" . However the BBC miniseries was excellent! I devoured it! They fixed everything that annoyed me about the book. (Too much long winded descriptions of imaginary books, terrible pacing, read like the driest history)

So it does happen!

Hi everyone!

I put up the check in late last week, so I dont have tons of progres this week.

I finished The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye which was alright. I found it a bit predictable and some of the storylines felt pretty forced together. But it did seem to set up for the next book, so maybe they'd get resolved better later.

Currently I'm reading The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women it's alright so far. It reads a bit like Hidden Figures but more tragic.

Did everyone see that popsugar posted the new reading list for 2018? https://www.popsugar.com/entertainmen...

Some I'm looking forward to, others less so. But it'll be fun! I'm going to enjoy a couple months of no challenge reading first.

How's everyone else doing?

Hi everyone, sorry I'm so late with my check in this week. Partially because I was really busy, partially because I had nothing to report.

I spent most of last weekend/early this week reading my comic stash. It's mostly individual issues and I don't enter them until the trade shows up on goodreads for me to add. I don't want to inflate my reading numbers with hundreds of little individual issues. I figure once it's compiled into a trade/volume it's closer to a "book".

This morning I finally finished The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. It was good, and I'm glad I read it, but it was just really depressing. So many of the fears and commentary and political climate the author references is very similar to what's going on today, if not worse. It's just depressing to see so much regression instead of progress. The good news is, I counted it as my book printed on a micropress. This compilation wasn't, obviously, but the early issues when it started were. I'm counting it because I refuse to buy a random book just to fulfill the prompt.

How's everyone doing?

I'm super looking forward to finishing out the year reading whatever I want, without having to fulfill any prompts.

I really liked the book, it was great! I refused to even see the movie, because I was so bummed that they basically took the name of the book and nothing else. I wanted it to be something like District 9, a sort of mockumentary film, maybe reworked a bit to have a recurring character narrative. I don't think you'll regret picking it :)

Sara, I found that World War Z wasn't too scary. It's set up more like a documentary, with little stories along the timeline of a zombie outbreak. So while it is zombies, and it does go into some of the aftermath of attacks and stuff like that, the way it's presented is more along the lines of say a discovery channel special on a virus outbreak. It's nothing at all like the movie.

I have a few. For one, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for magic and such, but I still need there to be rules. One of my biggest peeves with Harry Potter, as much as I love it, is that magic seems to take no energy. I mean sure they were tired because they pulled all nighters studying, or because they played quidditch. They had to study to get spells right. But there was no "they cast spells until they ran out of energy and couldn't even use lumos". Harry had to recover from his encounters with Voldemort because he was poisoned or hit by bad spells, but not because he was using magic non stop through a dungeon or because he as doing a direct duel with a more powerful wizard. Hermione didn't give herself a migraine after performing complicated charms on all the DA coins etc.

Also, sort of along the same line, the books outright stated that hogsmede was unusual being a 100% wizard village. That means most wizards live in mixed communities. How would they not have electricity, know how to drive, use muggle money, etc? The local power company just fails to hook up every wizard house? The apparate to a wizard store for groceries to avoid using muggle money? They're supposed to be a secret, kind of hard to blend in if you're wearing robes, don't drive anywhere, don't have power, never use local stores, and don't pay taxes.

I seriously love the books but there's a lot of glaring logical flaws =p

I also get bothered if characters don't react in normal ways. Like a movie involving high schoolers where all the kids are roaming a city until the wee hours of the morning and not a single parent is frantically calling and demanding they come home.

I could go on, haha

Hi everyone!

Had a bit of a lackluster reading week over here.

I only finished Broken Monsters. it was ok, didn't love it. I was reading it for the read harder prompt for book set within 100 miles of where I live. that's actually partially why I didn't like it. The author mentioned doing a lot of research about Detroit, and visiting it, but I can tell she never lived in Michigan. This might sound silly, but it's how she handled the weather. In that it was never mentioned. But the book was set in November. November is a really dicey month, weather wise. If you're lucky, it might be tolerably warm when the sun is up, but the temperatures usually plummet after sunset. Its also likely for lots of cold rain, freezing rain, and possibly snow. Lots of biting winds. Yet there's teenage girls going off and dressing cute for a party that takes place at least partially outside. Not a single mention of covering up their cute outfits with bulky winter coats, or about freezing from not wanting to cover their cute outfits with coats. Nor was there any surprise at "I cant' believe it's so warm this evening, we don't even need coats!" I kept forgetting it was set in Michigan until a specific landmark like Eastern Market was mentioned. But also there were too many subplots, and the book felt long.

I started reading Beartown but decided not to finish due to heavyhanded foreshadowing that indicated what was coming next, and i decided i didn't really need to read that. I also wasn't super enjoying it, and it was making me anxious while reading due to the excessive use of "if only they'd known...!" type foreshadowing.

currently reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For but i'm also finding it a little heavy to read. So far most of it was written in the late 80s, early 90s. It's depressing to read how similar the political issues then are to the ones we still have now. I'm tempted to take a break for a few days and just find something really light and fluffy to read.

How about everyone else? I have a headache today, I can't really think of any clever questions to ask to get the conversation going, so have at it if someone else can think of one :)

Stephanie,

Yeah Dorian Gray wasn't really what I expected either. Prior to reading it my only real knowledge was from the League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Also not terribly accurate.

I do love Dorian in Penny Dreadful, though.

I know we've had discussions about Margarate Atwood before, but I used Blind Assassin for that prompt. I had a lot of mixed feelings about the book, but that's pretty normal for her, I think.

I don't really know anything about it, but I'm pretty sure The Curious Case of Benjamin Button also applies.

I feel like i've read others, but I'm having trouble thinking of them.

You could probably get away with Stardust by Gaiman, since Tristan's birth was mentioned in the beginning, and it sort of does an epilogue at the end. Even if the main gist of the book only covers a small segment of his life.

This one's kinda tricky since most books are more focused.

Hi everyone!

Had another busy weekend going to a wedding, but still managed to get some reading done.

Seeing Red - this is for read harder's book by an author from central/south america, set in central/south america. Technically only a portion of the book took place in Chile, but I'm counting it since I found the book on a list specifically for this challenge prompt, curated by someone at book riot. It was good, if weird. It was presented as fiction, but the main character had the same name as the author, and it said it referenced her life. So I had no idea what parts were her story vs. fiction.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body - I read this for Emma Watson's feminist book club. It was a fantastic read, but pretty difficult emotionally. The things the author had gone through, both as a child and just her experiences with being fat in America were heartbreaking.

Thief of Time - I needed something lighthearted after the previous book, so decided to go for some Pratchett. I love him, but there were so many books I didn't work through his whole catalogue when I was younger. So now I'm grabbing them as i find deals and in the library, and getting caught up.

Currently reading:

Broken Monsters - this is for read harder's book set within 100 miles of your hometown. It's a story of a pretty twisted serial killer who melds the victim's bodies with animal bodies, and the investigation. The last book I read by her had a supernatural time traveling aspect to the murder mystery, so that might come into play here. I'm not too far in it yet, but hopefully it's good.

How's everyone else doing?

Just wondering how other people pick their books for the various challenges also. Just recommendations from book groups? Reading reviews? Looking it up online? Searching for specific prompts?

Sara,
Are you the one working on last year's prompt list? Just asking because i don't recognize the prompts from this year, and I remember someone mentioning they were finishing up last year's :)

A romance set in the the future is a neat prompt.

Hi Stephanie!

I'd say Dorian gray fits better under eccentric character. None of his childhood is really mentioned, if I recall. (It's been a number of years).

I tend to rate my books based on personal enjoyment/how much I got out of it. So I have plenty of pulp fiction/light reads that are rated much higher than books that are "well written".

For example, I know Wuthering Heights is a literary classic, but I thought it was a slow read full of insufferable characters so rated it low. Yet Black Swan by Mercedes Lackey is a regular fantasy novel, fairytale retelling. But it's one of my favorite books of all time. I've read it to the point of destruction, pages are falling out all over the place. So it gets 5 stars.

I don't see anything wrong with that method of rating, personally. As a reader I find it more helpful to know if a book is easy/enjoyable to read rather than by literary standards it's good. I'll do a certain amount of "because I should" reading, but overall I don't want reading to be a chore.