Dev’s Comments (group member since Sep 09, 2017)

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

i should be able to finish all three that i am working on right now so hopefully that will cover some of the distance we are behind

Day 6- Chapters 34 to the end

22. In chapter 3 we get the first of the big reveals. Were you surprised by the actual dynamic between the twins? And were you as creeped out as I was by Ianthe's little speech about the place between life and death..."where the things are that eat us."?
i guess i was surprised by the reveal about the twins in that i didn't see it coming, but also 'surprised' would indicate that i cared at all and i don't really see how it mattered much in the end i guess. don't remember ianthe's speech.

23. There have been many types of necromancy and magic and science talked about and demonstrated in this story. In sci-fi and fantasy books, I often find myself wishing that some of the science or magic was real. Are there any aspects of this world that you wish was real, or that intrigues you?
not really, it seems like most of their magic/technology causes more problems than actually fixes anything or makes anything better. necromancy is intriguing in fiction but i don't actually think there is much to gain from reanimating corpses or skeletons or anything like that.

24. The second big reveal gave us the name of the big bad. I personally did not find clues to this littered throughout the story, so I was surprised. Did you find this reveal satisfying? Surprising? Did you enjoy the fight at the end?
again, surprised would indicate that i cared at all by this point but i think that the big bad pretty much HAD to be that person because (view spoiler)[dulcinea was the only person besides gideon and harrow that i felt any page time was devoted to at all and it became apparently fairly early that it was not really for love triangle reasons. so if it wasn't her it would have been someone who was like on the sidelines which would have been very 'wait, what?'. i mean i didn't see it coming that it was really someone else in dulcinea's body although i guess maybe i should have considering that this is a necromancy book lol (hide spoiler)]

25. Was anyone else waiting for a sex scene? Why use the term "lesbian necromancers" in the description? Who cares if they are heterosexual or gay if it really doesn't come into the story? Marketing? Or do you think it was an important story point that the main character liked girls?
i don't know if i was necessarily waiting for a sex scene but i would have liked the lesbian thing to be a bit more prominent. i mean on the one hand an lgbt character should just be able to exist and make jokes and say how hot ladies are without it being a bit deal / the entire plot of the book / having to 'justify' them being queer ...but also queer dark fantasy 'love' stories are kind of My Thing TM so i was hoping for a bit more of that here.

26. Will Gideon's and Camilla's bodies or selves be recovered? Will you read the next book to find out? Did you like the book?
i honestly don't know. part of me thinks 'well it's a necromancy series so obviously they're gonna have to bring gideon back in the sequel somehow', but i was so confused and bored by this book that i don't really want to read the next one to find out. also even if gideon does come back it looks like it is going to be harrow-centric and will probably be in her POV and i didn't like her at all so i don't really want to read that. there were some things i liked in this book but i really just ended up frustrated with the whole thing. this might be partly because i had such high expectations though. again, i was kind of hoping for 'dark queer romance' and ended up with 'murder mystery with 20 characters i can't tell apart' so ...that's quite a different thing lol

THIS BOOK WAS READ BY MARY, NOT ME. I'm just adding it for her since she is having internet problems



The Resurrectionist of Caligoby Wendy Trimboli
Date: 10/12/19
Pages: 360
Sin: Vanity
Criteria: cover is 62% violet [purple]

i'll add it to the books read thread for you

to me the cover of the one she used looks absolutely lime green. like i was absolutely amazed when i ran it through tineye and it called it yellow. i thought someone said they approved perks in the captain's group though?

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kröger
Date: 10/11
Pages: 352
Sin: Envy
Criteria: cover is 79.8% green per tineye
28.0 % Sulu (Green), 18.1 % Hippie Green (Green), 18.1 % Gossip (Green), 7.3 % Viridian (Green), 4.5 % Ming (Green), 2.6 % Gum Leaf (Green), 1.2 % Hint Of Green (Green)

i think you should probably go with purple since that is what you get if you put the actual full size image into tin eye on a laptop without doing a screenshot and all the stuff you have to do to get tineye to work on a phone apparently. but i think we can all agree it doesn't look red lol

i think the difference is that i was using the enlarged image and i assume you were using the thumbnail version. either way i wouldn't call it pink though unfortunately

i thought it looked purple and when i put the image for the edition you linked to into tineye it says aka purple so not sure why it showed up red for you? did you use a different image than the one on goodreads? it doesn't really look pink to me htough

i'll finish the two i'm working on now and probably another one depending on how it goes. might even try to find a few short ones to squeeze in before the deadline

i agree that audio was probably not the best medium for this one but also i feel like if i had read it on kindle i would have still gotten fed up halfway through and cranked up the speed on word-runner to 'skim' it lol and probably would have processed even less of the information that way. i definitely feel like this book could have been better with a few more rounds with the editor [for content, not grammar]

if tineye says brown for the first one then i think we can go with that, even though i agree that it doesn't necessarily scream brown when you look at it.

for city of girls my first thought is purple but i don't know if it's enough to say it's majority purple

i like it because it does seem like there is always that team that somehow reads twice as much as everyone else despite what they said when they signed up, but it's unfortunate that it's weekly since like half our team was gone this week lol

@Cat i knoooow. i just kept waiting for it all to make sense and i was still like ??????? normally i would think it was just me being me but a lot of people seem to be having issues

Day 5 - Chapters 27 - 33

18. We get a lot of thanalogical (??) science theory chat in the section, with the exchanges between Palamedes and Harrow, which seems to confuse them at least as much as it did me! Did you enjoy the science chat and reveals, or did it get in the way of the action?
i appear to have mostly blocked it out only 3 days later so i guess it's safe to say it wasn't for me. maybe if it had come along earlier in the book as part of the worldbuilding or something? i think by this point i was just mostly checked out though.

19. We see other sides to a couple of the Houses during this section: the
Do you like the shifting understanding of the characters? Have your favourites / least despised changed over the course of the book?
as i said before the only person i really 'liked' in this whole novel was gideon and even she was pretty two dimensional most of the time i felt, also she didn't really change that much in my opinion but i guess an argument could be made she changed in small ways.

20. Speaking of changes: MASSIVE emotional reveal between Harrow & Gideon. I loved the line "she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream", which is just SO Ninth House. How does this information make you re-evaluate Harrow & Gideon's relationship?
i don't know really. i mean harrow has not been great to gideon overall and just because someone is dealing with some awful shit themselves doesn't really mean they get to be awful to other people so ... ???? it's obviously a complicated situation but i just never really got onboard the gideon/harrow train.

21. Something a bit lighter: in the midst of the blood and death and bone-key making and such, there are still some moments that made me snigger. one that I particularly enjoyed was "Hm," said Camilla neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organised Palamedes's and her socks by colour and genre."
The little blips of humour have definitely helped me whilst reading the book. Do they work for you?
i do like those moments and i definitely wish there were more of them. i think there's a way to make a super dark world like this but that also has more of those little moments of fun and maybe would make more of the characters more relatable / memorable as well. most of the sarcasm / humor came from gideon and while i appreciated it i also thought a lot of it was kind of awkward / clunky in how it read.

haha i've actually read song of achilles twice because i was wondering what i was missing the first time and then this group did it as a BoM a few months ago. hopefully you like it better than i did but i definitely don't want to read it again.

final girls and last time i lied are both really good but i don't think i'd really want to reread them, i feel like they would probably be less thrilling since i already know whodunnit

Monster of the Week by F.T. Lukens
Date: 10/10
Pages: 304
Sin: Sloth
Criteria: cover is 72.4% Sapphire (Blue)

well i don't know if you are to this part but (view spoiler)[she actually kept back a few when the govt confiscated them so i think maybe she was making a lot so that they would think they got all of them? (hide spoiler)] and then even later it's revealed that (view spoiler)[the fbi gave them to their people and it's already being spread via sex so i think also maybe she figured they would use it if they took it and then it will spread faster. (hide spoiler)] or at least that's how i viewed it but maybe i'm giving her too much credit?

i also meant to read gideon along with the schedule but ended up listening to the whole thing in one day lol. basically i was at the point where i knew i wasn't really enjoying it that much and just needed to finish it before i lost interest entirely though. and i already had no idea what was going on, if i had put it down for a few days i would have been even more like ???????

Warriors by C. Gockel
Date: 10/10
Pages: 301
Sin: Envy
Criteria: Cathy M from team Avarice read with me as a buddy read

i would argue that if she actually read then that looks green to me even if tineye disagrees, but even if we have to use it just for cover color as yellow then that's still 5 points.

for the perks of being a wallflower book in the books read thread i think even the cover for the more greenish looking version shows up yellow on tineye - i vaguely remember looking it up back when i was planning for this and being disappointed - so i think you would probably have to use the movie version of the cover for it to be green, although i didn't check that version but it looks 'greener' than the other two

also i've just been going by what tineye says as to what color a book is or isn't, even if i sometimes wouldn't necessarily agree with it. are we allowed to use a book even if tineye disagrees with us or is it kind of a 'at your own risk' kind of thing?