Alysa’s Comments (group member since Jun 27, 2015)

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

I am almost done with Spirit Bound, and was gonna start another long book (for week 2), but I think I can squeeze in another short one before the deadline, to help get our numbers up!

I am going to finally read Shock & Awe — it’s only 108 pages so I am pretty sure I can finish it and check it in in time, before my internetless Sunday afternoon. If need be, I’ll find a WiFi hotspot 🙂

ETA: haha, it turns out I will be in a car for about 2 hours today, so I will have more reading time than I thought. Will finish both my books in good time! Yippee!

I wonder if there are teams that just so happen to comprise a bunch of fans of their matching genre. Like, if everyone on Gluttony really likes Historical Romance. They would be so lucky!

Young Adult def has it the easiest. Soooo many of us read YA, and it tends to be quick reading too.

Yaaaaaay!
Team Ira got picked to write DQs for both Wilder Girls and Save the Date!!!

Joanne wrote: "I think if we had any other sin, it would be reasonable to go for focusing on our own sin, but since both our colour cover and genre are the hardest of all the options, I don't know that it's worth..."

Yes to all that.
Only, sacrificing points in order to read a billionty books for our “sin specification” would not necessarily be the wrong thing to do if it starts to look like we are super far away from any chance of winning on points alone. Cuz it would still be nice to go for a win on some category. Hence the wait-and-see approach :)

Is anyone else also extremely curious as to when we’ll start to get Mini Challenges?
*chinhands*

Kerri wrote: "I'm marked down as readin 1.25 books a week, so I wasn't sure if I should try and read more than that or stick to it?"

If you are ever able to round that up to 2 a week, particularly without sacrificing the “Longer Books Get More Points” strategy that we are currently taking, then definitely don’t hesitate to do so.
The totals are per team; there’s no penalty for reading within 80-120% of our collective sign-up totals; and we can definitely use both the extra books and the extra points. Especially if there are times when other people are reading below their sign-up numbers for whatever reason. :D

ETA: I think the “gold standard” is basically to read Longer Books, but read them at the upper end of our 80-120% range. That won’t always be possible, I am just thinking out loud. So to speak.

@M
Can you tell us what was enraging to you in Dune?
I think we need to know for the justification...
And also cuz we just want to know :D

Allison Ann wrote: "I was just rereading the Sin Specifications and realized that Wrath allows for a hateful character. Now I can pretty much find a hateful character in any book I read, so do we want to aim for high ..."

Re aiming for more Wrath or aiming for more color covers & Top Shelves (for more points), we haven’t decided yet if that is a wise course of action.
Re colors&shelves: On the one hand, more points could be better and even a little bit at a time can really add up, but on the other, we don’t know yet what our point totals will be like compared to other teams.
Re Wrath: on the one hand, if it looks like we cannot get a high ranking via points, we might want to concentrate on our Wrath sin alignment instead, but on the other, that “most effort at sin alignment” prize category might also be easier for other teams who have easier ones.

So at least for this week, we are going for more points, and taking a wait-and-see approach. Does that make sense? If other people have opinions about this stuff, please do tell. :)

@Everybody currently reading Gideon the Ninth:
Do you think you will
A) finish the book during Week 1?
B) finish answering at least 3 sets of DQs during Week 1?

It’s okay if you don’t! I’m just trying to get a better idea of where people are at vis-a-vis the main Vs BOM tab info in our spreadsheets.

Also, @Frankie, you got us 40 points for writing DQs but if you answer at least two more sets (which can include your own questions, lol), you get 20 more, for a total of 60. 🙂

M wrote: "Somewhat of a bonus to being home sick. I can read as much as I want to. Book #2 finished and added to sheet"

Aw, sorry you are under the weather, but yay for reading!
That happened to me a few weeks ago during Lava challenge, but I didn’t end up reading much extra because I was passed out on the sofa. 😴

Jessi wrote: "Wrath Tower - Obvs we want to build it lol but this would be a case of 'I would rather the couple extra points if we can get them'... So for instance if it has a yellow cover but it made you feel wrathful about something we will use it for the cover color.

For now, I agree! It would be a lot harder for us to get “most sin align” compared to the other teams unless we do the “enraging” thing for like every book. Which would mean fewer general points anyway.
For Allison’s Bleak House, whether we do 600+ pages or enraging, it’s the same # of points.
But for my The House, we get a tiny bit more by using Top Shelf :)

I will be offline for a while now. Good evening everyone!

Similarly
@Jessi, if you want to change my book The House to the Wrath sin specification, that's absolutely fine. Maybe we can take a wait-and-see approach to some of those switches until toward the end of Week 1 though and see what Team Ira wantsta do. :)

Great, thanks! If Jessi wants us to grow the Wrath Tower it'd be great if there's also something enraging in there, but don't sweat it if there isn't.

So... about that...
The Mods have just decided, after much abuse of the "what color is this?" voting system in Caps Group, that we're not allowed to bring Color Cover questions to the whole Caps Group anymore as of the end of Week 1.

If we can't come to an easy consensus within our own teams (or possibly making a deal with like one other team), we can't use a book for color cover.

I don't know if Jessi agrees with me, but I'm on record with the opinion that Allison's book is a prime example of exactly the sort of "in-between" aqua/cyan/teal/turquoise color that nobody should be using for color cover criteria. Not even Wikipedia defines this shade as specifically blue or green, and neither should we. Causes too many arguments.

Therefore, @Allison: Can you come up with some sin specification ideas instead? Anything enrage you, for example? ;D

@Suzanne, another question:
Ah, when did you actually start reading ?
On your shelf it has a start date of 3 Oct, which means we cannot use it. Challenge started on 7 Oct AEST.
:/

ETA: Can you check dates on your other book too? You don't have a start date except for in 2016.

Haha, it has to be YOU who is enraged by something in the book.
Anything work?

Also a question: do you have the correct editions shelved? If you did audio, for example, you are supposed to shelve the audio.
(Then we just put the page count of the "default" edition in the spreadsheet)

The Evanovich is most definitely blue, like a nice sky blue.
The other one... not sure it's enough pink. We can use it for Contemporary instead. Or.. maybe something in it made Suzanne wrathful/enraged? ;)

I just finished my short book too. About to go shelve it.

I'm nearly done with a short book that I originally thought I could squeeze in for Lava but my Interlibrary Loan quite didn't arrive in time.


Anyone else ever heard of this series? It's pretty great if you like Southern Gothic.

Also went ahead and started Spirit Bound, green cover. I should have a lot of reading time tonight to read a bunch more of it.

I won't be online all that much between this afternoon and Sunday night. Family road trip!

These covers are LOVE.

Re stasis pod escape... that is a good theory. I've finished the book so I know stuff. But I had also been thinking from the very beginning that in a world that has reanimated corpses and such, would there be any rule that says Reanimated people cannot procreate?

ETA: Ah, point stands, but I realize it doesn't wholly address the point YOU were making. Which was that "current" Gideon would have to have been conceived like 10k years ago. Which... maybe if someone was pregnant when they died, and then got reanimated and carried baby for 10k years?
*shudders to think*
and also
*book has no internal logic*

Judith wrote: "I'm wondering if Gideon is actually her father's name and the congrats is on the birth of his child? "

After other revelations, I also wonder if it could be something like this. There's some stuff that has bothered me a lot, but that I suspect will be resolved in the next book(s).