Beth’s Comments (group member since Aug 12, 2014)

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

Maritza wrote: "Sorry guys couldn't finish book yesterday, had company over."

Maritza, no problem!

In general, especially at the end, let's talk about what's in doubt, because it's better to get points for smaller words than to lose all the points for incompletes. I hate leaving points on the table! But I didn't want to move your stuff around without hearing from you. The deadline in the middle of the night for most of us is sure inconvenient.

I've started my audio and print books for Round 2!

Looking ahead, I can't see anything that would work for Stage 2 next week. I have a feeling we will skip that one again.

Finished my U book. Chava, I couldn't get your link to resolve so I re-did it with the book from your comment.

Chafic, are you still there? The last time I thought I heard from you it was actually Chava. Do you have a U book?

I found a U book Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

If no one else has read a U book by tonight I'll try to get it in.

Are we trying for FOUR? I'll finish the F but we need the rest. Or to set our sights a little smaller:

Can someone do an O? We could turn it into OF. (Task 3)

I don't see anyone signing up for the R or U, but OF is a good enough word.

Is anyone going to claim more tasks for Round 2? So far I only see me and Chava on the spreadsheet. Is the spreadsheet hard to see? I don't mind updating it for people but I like to use it to see what we are doing since it's not a moving target like the discussion thread.

I went ahead and put FOUR on the spreadsheet. Let's try to keep that updated. I'll check in on Sunday and see if I need to change to a different word or whatever depending on what we do over the weekend.

Also, I'm zooming through a mystery series on audio, so I've had a bunch of books this week. Next week I run out of kids to drive to college, so my audio consumption will drop back down to one or two a month.

I put down the two books I'll start on Monday for the next round. I'll read a science fiction book and listen to a detective book as I drive back home.

I just got the right click thing to work so I'm excited. But I think the link is all the mods need.

Can you put it on the spreadsheet with the I for SIX?

I should finish my Sanderson book by tomorrow, or Saturday. I have a long drive to make on Sunday so I could maybe listen to my next audio A Fool and His Honey.

Chafic is reading an R book.

Can we also get an O and a U book by the deadline? That would spell out FOUR for a bunch of points.

If we can't get O and U, can anyone read something else that uses my Dead Over Heels and Chafic's Runaway? Let me know and I'll put the letters in the spreadsheet. In the worst case my book makes the word "A" from Task 10.

WOOt Maritza! Who can do an "I"? I'm going to put SIX on the spreadsheet.

Chafic, you can access the spreadsheet, right? If you still are having trouble, PM either one of us or the moderators with a link to the spreadsheet and your email address and we can invite you directly. I think that has worked so far.

Words with higher point letters:

CARNIVOROUS (V is 40 points, U is 50)
COVER (V is 40 points)
AUTHOR (U is 50 points)
PUBLISHED (U is 50 points)
SEVEN (V is 40 points)
SIX (I is 40, X is 50)
AUDIO
FOUR

and more. Basically if anyone is going to read an "X" book we should go for SIX. And if you have an "I" book there are at least two uses of "Is" so that's also a good target.

For Group III we can spell out words used in the Countdown Stage tasks. The rules say we can use the letters at the start of the title, author names, or main character in our spelling.

So I listed the letters we'd get from the books I'll finish so we could figure out what words we can make. We have to completely finish a word to get points for the letters.

So with Chava's book by Harlan Coban and my Dead over Heels starring Aurora Teagarden and my Sanderson book we could announce we were spelling out HAS from task 8 "Has a carnivorous animal". Then as long as we both finished and filled out the spreadsheet we'd get the points.

If Chava's book has a main character named Wally, we could use W instead and make WAS (Task 5 "was first published"), because W is a 40 point letter instead of the usual 30.

If we had a few other books to play with and also had access to letters C H A R A C T E R S we could spell out CHARACTER and get 270 points. But we'd have to finish all of them. But we can change our minds at the last minute if we see we aren't getting them and go back to HAS. Or "A" (Task 8 "has a carnivorous animal").

Does that make sense? I was hoping that someone was good with anagram type things and could come up with more sophisticated options than HAS because I'm not very good at this stuff. But ideally every book we read through the end of this week gets stuffed into a word.

I think we are officially giving up on Group II, right?

Unless we come up with plans for the rest of Stage 2 by tomorrow I think we should see if we can finish any words in Stage 3.

I can probably finish:

* Dead Over Heels
A, T, D, C, H

* Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds
L, B, S,

So if anyone is finishing something that has spells out W, A, or S we could spell out HAS or WAS. Can we get bigger? There's a list of how much point each letter is on the side of the spreadsheet.

Next round (five days away or so) list is up on our spreadsheet:



10 with a title that starts with O
9 set in Canada
8 tagged MPG Sci-Fi
7 that is more than 50% black (use tin eye to confirm)
6 from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die List. For this task, you can use books that would otherwise not be allowable for the challenge (e.g. due to wordcount or genre)
5 that has one of the 50 states of the USA in the title
4 that is more than 400 pages
3 that has the letters C-A-T in the title (in any order)
2 written by an African American author
1 from the NPR List

Chava wrote: "I put the link in, but it's not hyperlinked, so not sure what to do. Link is there though."

To make a hyperlink, you put it in:
=HYPERLINK("www.goodreads.com/whatever_the_link_i...", "My Book Name")


I added the =HYPERLINK stuff to your current link.

Chava, can you put the link and completion in on the spreadsheet for your L book? Or is it giving you trouble again? (I just did mine for the BOM book)

Everyone, try not to FINISH anything until we get the V book in to complete Group 1.

And this is the time to see if we want to attempt Group 2 or work on finding words to spell out in group three. As I said, I have a book I could use for 2-iii, Chafic has something for 2-i, but we'd still need ii (red cover, H-O-T in author, and iv (something hot on cover, L-A-V-A in author name).

If that's too hard, we just take everything we finish AFTER the V book is submitted and try to make words from it. These words have to be in the countdown tasks somewhere.

Did I get that right?

Oh, the mods gave us back my debut book!

Maritza, you were on the "V". Can anyone get a V book in the next few days? I've got one I could finish by Friday (maybe sooner if its really good) but I hope someone can do better.

Can everyone access the spreadsheet?