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

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

Mary wrote: ""Number One Chinese Restaurant" by Lillian Li - it has a duck on the cover.
This could also fill the prompt for an orange book, a person of a different race than myself, and at a stretch, a book by..."

I've found that I am usually not the audience for Women's Prize books. :-/

Cheryl wrote: "I recently read City of the Soul: A Walk in Rome which also had a map -- although it was missing a lot of the sites that the book talked about, which was disappointing."

That is disappointing!

Mary wrote: ""I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou"

I have had the audiobook on my TBR for years now. I really need to give it a listen.

Mary wrote: "I read "Whistling for Elephants" by Sandi Toksvig with a gloriously orange cover. It just so happens, this is a BookCrossing book that has been sitting on a shelf for A Very Long Time. It could als..."

That sounds like a fun read!

Lindsay wrote: "Just completed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Multiple maps in there and completely unlike anything I’ve read. LOVED it!"

I'd forgotten that there were maps in that book.

Cheryl wrote: "When I picked up Night Over the Solomons by Louis L'Amour, I was thinking it would be a quick read and fulfill the Prolific Author prompt for GenreLand. About halfway through it dawned on me that t..."

Nice!!

I read Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike for the Sirens challenge. I didn't understand it at all, but some of the art was really cool.

I decided to count Slice of Cherry for this. It's a little over 500 pages, so it counts for Tome Topple, and it was about the 3rd largest book on my March TBR.

I thought this looked pretty summery:

I listened to Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, the Seamus Heaney translation from about 20 years ago.

I read Take a Hint, Dani Brown in March and have Act Your Age, Eve Brown on hold at the library. I'm hoping to get it in time to read it this month.

I went to the fundraiser premiere/Q&A of The Neil Gaiman at the End of the Universe by Arvind Ethan David. It's a clever short production.

Mary wrote: "I think I will read "The Whale Rider" for this one."

I read that one last year and watched the movie as well. Both very well done, I thought.

Cheryl wrote: "Query -- does this apply to Victorian era (time period) or Victorian England/Great Britiain/British Empire?
In particular, I notice that the time period encompasses the US Civil War and I once had ..."

The intent of the original Victober prompt was for it to be written by somebody from/in Great Britain, or at least the British Empire. I'm going to try to do that, but if you want to interpret it as the Victorian era in general, I'm not going to quibble. I almost tried to make a case for a Poe story for one of the other Victober prompts, so I have no room to talk.

I ended up reading Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, which is a middle grade murder mystery. It's a great intro to the world of detective fiction, and the setting is inspired by the Stanley Hotel, so you know there will be ghosts.

I finally got around to reading Ύπνος: Εννέα ζωγραφιές και ένα διήγημα, which was a gift from one of my Greek BookCrossing friends. (He's not *much* older than me, but it still counts.) It is a bilingual edition (English title: Hypnos) with a concertina binding, and I had looked through the paintings on one side but not actually sat down and read the story on the other side. This is a super-neat volume and one I hope to re-visit regularly.

One of my First Reads books in January was Sadie Sprocket Builds a Rocket, and Sadie includes a map of her trip to Mars, so I counted it for this prompt.

I read The Deep by Rivers Solomon. It was inspired by a song commissioned for an episode of This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/623/...

If you are looking for a book to fill an Afrofuturism reading prompt, this one fits that.

Mary wrote: "I just read "Troy" by Stephen Fry, and at 496 pages, it would fit. I'm going to try to count a book to just one prompt, though. :)"

Yeah, I'm trying not to double-dip as well. There is a round of Tome Topple later this month, and the Literally Dead Book Club is reading House of Leaves this month, so maybe I will actually succeed at that and knock off another prompt. For this prompt I read Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, which is 512 pages.

I read Bannerless, a murder mystery set in a sort of post-apocalyptic world of scattered settlements. It's not dystopian, but it isn't quite utopian, either. You can definitely tell that the author is a SCAdian. :-)