Stina’s Comments (group member since Dec 11, 2016)

Stina’s comments from the Challenges from Exploding Steamboats group.

I have a 5.0-rated book on my set-asides shelf (Bold Girls Speak: Girls of the Bible Come Alive Today) and one on my obtained shelf (Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror), so we'll just see which one I get to first.

::Sigh:: I want to like Instagram. But it just makes me feel old. I don't want to go back, so I'm going to go with a book I remember bookstagrammers talking about at author events. Probably Vengeful or Perfectly Undone.

ARCs are advance reader copies, those pre-release versions provided to booksellers, librarians, and reviewers to (hopefully) create early buzz. Sometimes they'll be handed out at genre cons as well. My oldest is Right as Rain, which I got at a Bouchercon not quite 20 years ago.

If you don't have any ARCs, check with your bookseller and librarian friends. My favorite local indie bookstore will give them away to pretty much anybody who asks. Another option is NetGalley, a site that lets you request eARCs with the expectation that you will then review the book online in a timely manner.

Any recommendations? I will probably read something by Liane Moriarty.

If you're double-dipping and don't like the violence that appears in most true crime books, here you can (metaphorically) kill two birds with one stone. I'm going with The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World.

This is getting to be a hugely popular genre. Surprisingly, I'm not super into it. But I have a few on my shelves. I've never actually finished Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, so that's a prime candidate.

The exact meaning of this prompt was the subject of much debate in the Goodreads Summer Reading Challenge threads. I finally decided to go with a purist interpretation, which restricts the pool of possible reads mostly to geography textbooks. And Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente. Guess what I picked.

Another perennial prompt. I know many have come to hate it. That's fair. I don't mind it, though, perhaps in part because I belong to a books-to-movies book club. Sometime when I'm more awake, I will try to track down some lists of anticipated 2020 screen adaptations and post links here. If somebody beats me to it, I won't complain.

Ugh. This one pops up somewhere every. damn. year. I hate it. Like I even know anybody who has a single TBR "pile." My entire house is a TBR pile. And my garage is another one. Seriously, f*** this prompt. Read whatever you want.

I interpret this to mean a novel, but I guess you could make a case for creative nonfiction. I've been meaning to read Burial Rites for years now, so maybe I will finally do that. But I might count that for my Australian author instead.

I will probably go with Daphne du Maurier. I even borrowed a copy of it from the library last year but didn't have time to read it.

I know some people hate reading short stories, but I'm a fan. I expect I'll finish at least one Christie collection this year, and I have several other collections I'm wanting to read.

This can be interpreted pretty broadly, but I'll probably use this for QuickBooks For Dummies ,which I've just put on hold at the library. What skills are you reading about this year?

I just baked New Year Pogacha from a Bulgarian cookbook, so I'll go with that!

I'm not sure if I have any plays coming up soon in my challenge to (re-)read the Christie oeuvre in (more-or-less) publication order. If not, maybe I'll finally slog my way through The Crucible.

I get so intimidated by doorstop tomes! Maybe this is the year I'll actually read one of them.

I've started Tales of a Severed Head, but I haven't read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and feel like I should read it first. Poetry craft books work for this prompt, too, so maybe I'll read that one my friend gave me last month.

It's a big place, so surely I can find something on my shelves. Oh. Pachinko. It's turning out to be quite the slog. I guess here's my incentive to get through it.

Traditional, contemporary, weird...whatever! I haven't read any Craig Johnson or C.J. Box in a while, so maybe one of theirs. If you want to give weird west a try, I highly recommend Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen.

Wheee! One of my favorites! Again, probably a seasonal prompt where I simply ran out of time.