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

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

awesome! i think i should finish the two i am working on sometime tomorrow. if you've got the V book then it looks like the only unclaimed one now is the last R

Aw, I hope you feel better soon :(

yeah there seem to be a LOT of teams for this and i think most of them are also playing as well so i'm sure they're very busy. i am interested to see what the new countdown tasks are though!

cool, i guess maybe they don't comment on our thread if everything is okay then?

idk if you guys are getting started today but i just started and i'm dying at atticus trying to teach lief [sp?] how to ~talk modern~. when he was like 'well life was harder in those days' i immediately though of what we do in the shadows when he says he was 16 and then goes 'of course in those days life was very hard for a 16 year old'.

i'm listening to the UK version for this one and i'm not sure which one i like better but just wanted to say that oberon's voice is ridiculous in both of them. i guess you just can't do a talking dog voice without making it sound that way

no problem, i think we are in a good enough position that we can easily have some MIA days. ;) i spent most of yesterday getting drunk on the river so i only finished a book because i just had a few chapters left lol

i should finish home today and then will move onto hexed and caitlin ross and the commute from hell. if no one has anything they want to read for the other V i can listen to a jules verne book on audio but probably wouldn't start it until thursday. looks like we are also going to need 3 more R's.

i think the mods are going through and checking our countdown books today so i'm anxious to see how that goes too!

yeah i was wondering when they were planning on announcing the new tasks. i didn't want to ask since we weren't even halfway through yet but i definitely want to plan lol

haha i would have figured the 'prize' would have ended up being drunk at some point anyway ;) but yeah probably good not to drive after that

and we're doing really good with the spell it out so far. we're already over halfway done with our books for the week and we've still got about 22 hours to go until we're at the official halfway point. at this point we'll finish a few days early and have a few days off before the next round starts!

i yeah i looked at the mod comments on the higher teams that had to be finished by now and i think almost all of them ended up with singed hair or burnt feet. i think we are good as far as reading order but hopefully they accept all of our actual books to fit the tasks!

i will hopefully finished both of my spell it out books that i am working on today. one of them was rather long and the other was on audio so it's taking awhile. still think we're pretty on task though. i'm going to listen to the 2nd binti book next i think and the author's last name starts with O so that will be helpful!

have fun at your ~mysterious gathering~ lol. i have to work for a few hours in the morning then am probably going to sew or play video games while listening to audio books. i am truly a wild woman ;)

ah i meant is THIS series over, not jane yellowrock. although that is interesting about her literally having another consciousness inside her. maybe i will try it on audio. i first tried it back before i started listening to audio. even if it is a bit confusing there are books that i know i would not get through if i didn't listen to them on audio lol. which is not to say i don't enjoy them in some way, just that i am fine passively listening but would probably be bored actively reading.

anyway i looked at book 9 for this though and it does say it's finished, and also mentioned ragnarok and loki so like ...i am probably in this for the long haul lol. but yeah we can see how the next buddy read goes. i will probably end up finishing this series [eventually at least] but i'm sure it would get old for you if you really love them and me and claudia remain just okay about it though.

i mean i never thought that i would be contemplating whether or not a dog orgy could be considered entirely consensual when i started this book AND YET lol. i don't know what my brain is doing half the time.

i think i read maybe like one chapter of the first jane yellowrock book and i remember it being very 'my wolf this' and 'my wolf that' and for some reason that just drives me up the wall so i didn't continue with it.

is this series completed or is he still writing them?

awesome! should be pretty straightforward from this point, unless the chimpunks are plotting something lol. i would think they would at least let us have a boring first round though ;)

Kraken by China Miéville

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.

All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

Let's get spooky for October!



The Girl from the Wellby Rin Chupeco

You may think me biased, being murdered myself. But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night.

A dead girl walks the streets.

She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.

And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.

Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out.

The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge", based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.

i agree that as of now it seems like something that could be very light hearted and fun but not necessarily something that i will ~obsess~ over like october daye or cal leandros. but sometimes i just need a book to listen to on audio where i AM enjoying it but also not super invested either and this was pretty much that for me.

also i just downloaded a huge torrent with all the audiobooks in it and it looks like there are two different versions for each of them read by two different narrators? the one i listened to for book 1 was luke daniels i think but it looks like there is also christopher ragland version. i wonder why there are two versions and how different the two narrators are. maybe i will try the other guy for the next book. i didn't mind daniels' narration but now i'm curious.

[edit] i googled it and apparently the answer is publishing rights are bizarre. still, might try the UK version for book 2 just to see how it is lol

i was contemplated 3.5 stars but ultimately went with just 3, mostly i think because of the~every woman wants to sleep with him~ thing and also because i found the part at the end where he basically pimped his dog out to be actually really weird instead of funny like how i guess it was supposed to be.

i mean i know i'm thinking about it WAY too much but like if oberon has human intelligence does that mean ALL animals do but most of them just can't speak to us? or does his intelligence come from his bond with atticus? because that puts him in a weird spot sex-wise if he has sentience and he's just having sex with 'normal' dogs ...god, i can't believe this book had made me contemplate weird dog orgies this much. anyway, still weird to me to pimp your dog out no matter what soooo

i do like atticus overall although i feel like we did not get very in-depth with his character in this book, just kind of a who's who of everyone he knows really and then some background info. i do agree that it seems like he might be a bit too strong. i think introducing the characters was more the point here rather than the big fight at the end but also i never really feel like he struggled that much and i was never like 'oh how is he going to get out of this!'. i mean he DID get shot but even that was way less serious than you would have thought.

the whole thing with granuaile could definitely be interesting but also if he sleeps with her i am going to THROW something. i'm almost afraid to ask cathy if that happens but ...does it?

i definitely think i need to take a look at the print copy of the book or else just find a character list because i have no idea how to spell half these people's names. just copy and past them from when you mention them in the discussion lol

also wondering if the werewolves are going to be a large part of this story and what the 'rules' are on werewolves in this universe. i was worried that this was going to be one of those ~no female werewolves~ universes but he mentioned that one of them was a woman towards the end. still, it could be one where there are very few of them and that always makes me roll my eyes a bit as well.

overall i'm not totally in love with it yet but i did enjoy it enough to want to read the next one, which is becoming more rare with urban fantasy for me just because the market is so over-saturated and it's hard to find something halfway original. i like that this one seems to be using more traditional celtic mythology and figures though as i said before it does make it hard to do with the audio lol

ok i finished my book for stage 2! will probably start on something for the spell it out later tonight

also also [lol] i should have my stage 2 book finished in the next eh ...4ish hours probably so then we'll just be waiting on christine's

i was the one who said i had the X taken care of before, not sure if christine also had one?

also i don't have anything for U unless i find a random U character in another book i happen to read so unfortunately i'm no help there