Lexi’s Comments (group member since Jul 27, 2016)

Lexi’s comments from the Nothing But Reading Challenges group.

Also, it looks like I have to get all the way to Chapter 6 for the cattle and ponies, which is why I wanted to read this book.

DQs Day 1: Part 1
Introduction and Chapter 1

1. Why did you want to read this book? Are you familiar with some of the books that it quotes, such as Wendell Berry?

2. This book focuses on re-wilding as compared to ecological farming or balancing crops and conservation, as is mentioned in the first chapter from other farmers. What are your thoughts on the idea and how it fits in the context in England? Did you know England had such biodiversity loss and low protected land?

3. Giant oaks. What is your experience with them and do you want to visit any now that you have read this chapter?

I will post a few questions tonight, but I have not got all 100 pages read yet. I agreed to help read some international applications, and I thought they were 2-3 pages each and not 50.

The Gameshouse by Claire North

The World Fantasy Award-winning author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August presents a mesmerizing tale of a gambling house whose deadly games of chance and skill control the fate of empires.
Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets...

It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost through chess, backgammon - every game under the sun.
But those whom fortune favors may be invited to compete in the higher league... a league where the games played are of politics and empires, of economics and kings. It is a league where Capture the Castle involves real castles, where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent.

Among those worthy of competing in the higher league, three unusually talented contestants play for the highest stakes of all...
This novel was originally published as three digital-only novellas: The Serpent, The Thief, and The Master.

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

From the bestselling author of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water comes an inventive, high-concept murder mystery: an ingenious puzzle, an extraordinary backdrop, and an audacious solution.

Solve the murder to save what's left of the world.

Outside the island there is nothing: the world was destroyed by a fog that swept the planet, killing anyone it touched.

On the island: it is idyllic. One hundred and twenty-two villagers and three scientists, living in peaceful harmony. The villagers are content to fish, farm and feast, to obey their nightly curfew, to do what they're told by the scientists.

Until, to the horror of the islanders, one of their beloved scientists is found brutally stabbed to death. And then they learn that the murder has triggered a lowering of the security system around the island, the only thing that was keeping the fog at bay. If the murder isn't solved within 107 hours, the fog will smother the island—and everyone on it.

But the security system has also wiped everyone's memories of exactly what happened the night before, which means that someone on the island is a murderer—and they don't even know it.

I'm back in the US and have a copy. I can do the first day.

Am E or I doing day five? I’m phone only and forgot how hard it is to answers questions but I can try.

Great, thank you. I finished Hot Prof if someone wants to spin a new one. I’m phone only for the rest of March.

Judith, since it’s your task, would you accept for MC cries a lot, MC used to cry a lot as a child if it is plot revalent?

Our towers don't tend to directly attack each other but you probably could do a tower defense game with books

Sammy wrote: "Nice one Jenny!

I tend to do the same Sophie.

I blame team challenges not being compatible with my tbr 😂"

I am barely over the line. I was hoping to try for this strategy too, Sophie, but I seem to be going with the barely making it strategy instead.

For 99 cents, I am in as well. I thought I would miss it because my library does not even seem to know the book exists. I can also help with DQs, E, if you can't find a copy for the last day.

I don't think we've read this one as a BOM

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A lone astronaut.
An impossible mission.
An ally he never imagined.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery-and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible.

Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home.

Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

Featuring an unforgettable Holmes-and-Watson style pairing, a gloriously labyrinthine plot, and a haunting and wholly original fantasy world, The Tainted Cup brilliantly reinvents the classic mystery tale.

New one from Judith's Bad Romance wheel:

Mr. Big and Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City
500 to 650
MC is a journalist
takes place in New York City
MC is selfish (your interpretation)
core friend group central to story

I finished my dino book just the other day, but it was quite good for anyone still reading the Wayward children series -

#6-
This was a four star book but the murder rate in this book alone covers 50-75% of the actual Shetlands last 50 year murder rate. I enjoyed the characters. I'll probably continue but there is quite a bit of suspension of disbelief on the death rate. Also, don't put something in the summary that doesn't happen until almost 50% of the way through the book.

#5 -

My second 2 star book from 2018. Clearly I had bad taste in books so far from 2018. I would have DNF'd, but it works for almost every category for the UNO mini challenge. It reads like someone sarcastically summarized Wikipedia articles, and there are no citations anywhere, not even a half hearted list of sources in the back, and there are direct quotes in this non-fiction book.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

'The remarkable story of an astounding transformation' George Monbiot

Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp in West Sussex was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over. Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer – proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain – the 3,500 acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.

Once-common species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself.

This recovery has taken place against a backdrop of catastrophic loss elsewhere. According to the 2016 ‘State of Nature’ report, the UK is ranked 29th in the world for biodiversity loss: 56% of species in the UK are in decline and 15% are threatened with extinction. We are living in a desert, compared with our gloriously wild past.

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’ and what it reveals of the ways in which we might regain that wilder, richer country. It shows how rewilding works across Europe; that it has multiple benefits for the land; that it can generate economic activity and employment; how it can benefit both nature and us – and that all of this can happen astonishingly quickly. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.