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

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

the thread for the next book is rebooted here.

i had to take a bit of a break on this yesterday to get some stuff done for the lava challenge but i'm in chapter 16 now i think and hoping to finish it tonight sometime.

i agree that we should probably just use the planning sheet until we get the majority of the words complete. i'm sure a lot of the letters will be able to shuffle around. not sure if we want to do hardest letters first or just kind of go at it at random? just make sure to mark it on the sheet if you start one of the more uncommon letters like Y V or X so we're not doubling up on those.

@Cathy yeah i would not necessarily say i'm offended by it here because the characters went on to develop other characteristics besides just 'is hot' or 'wants to sleep with main character' but it's always something i'm aware of when starting a new series or reading something by a new author because i don't know them or their writing style yet and i don't know if it's just going to be a fairly innocent thing or the precursor to something a lot worse that WILL end up making me angry.

i've even heard it about the cal leandros series, and not later in the series when she started including her female characters less but even right from the start. one person reading it complained that the first two female characters introduced were a 'slutty' bartender and then their mother who is an abusive alcoholic and of course both die fairly early on. and while i totally get where that criticism is coming from it wasn't something that bothered me in that series just because i liked everything else so much.

yeah we are making good time and once we complete stage 2 we won't have to worry about when we finish a book because all the rest will be for the same stage. i think the timing for the first few parts is really the trickiest part

ok i just filled in our last countdown book on the sheet so we are good to start reading for stage 2!

my book is over 400 pages so i will at least 24 hours from now to complete it, possibly more depending on how life goes lol. and i see christine is reading 2 and and nicole is reading 1. don't forget that we can start books for stage 3 spell it out now but we cannot finish them until all four of the stage 2 books have been completed!

@Nicole don't start until i post on here that i've finished my book or we will get burnt feet lol

ok guys looks like we are now just waiting for me to finish the novella for task 3 then we can move on to the next stage. i'm about to head to work but i can generally get some reading done there if it's not too busy so hopefully will have it done within 2-4 hours depending

yeah i can go ahead and do that. i'll request this one for next monday and octobe daye for the day after it comes out!

also the oberon voice IS a bit weird but like ...idk, you've gotta do voices for all the characters and 'excitable talking dog' is not the easiest one to nail down. but it's all good because oberon is hilarious so i can ignore his slightly weird voice.

i do agree that maybe i should be looking through a print copy as i listen to this though. i'm not completely lost because i am tangentially familiar with original irish mythology but also if you put a gun to my head and asked me to spell some of these words i could not do it lol

i think one of my 'problems' with atticus is not him really but kind of how the author has chosen to introduce some of the characters around him. i'm in chapter 15 now and oberon just joked that he's been 'kissed by 3 goddesses in the last 3 days' and i'm like YEAH THAT IS A BIT RIDICULOUS ISN'T IT. and when one of them basically just showed up to sleep with him because reasons i did the biggest eye roll lol.

not that i would consider this book sexist by any stretch, it does have a lot of interesting female characters so far [love his old lady neighbor who gets drunk before she goes to church lol], but like the first woman introduced just randomly gets naked in front of him to prove a point then the next one who shows up sleeps with him immediately, then i think the next one to show up was the witch woman and there were comments on the skimpy clothes she was wearing. of course all these women have more qualities so it's not like they are just there to be sexy, but whenever i'm reading an urban fantasy series by a man also with a male protag i'm always very on the lookout for like 'warning signs' at the beginning so i might nitpick things at first before i get really into the series.

also i will at least do the first dresden book with you guys as a buddy read, maybe when we get through this series because at this point i think i'll definitely want to continue with the next one, although i feel like i should brush up on my irish mythology lol

haha yeah honestly you did not miss much. if you wanted to flip through and find the scene with loki and the robin hood flashback scenes then those are the only things really worth reading imo. these are good for me for challenges bc i've read them so many times i can easily listen to them at 2x speed, but i'm sure it's not a good thing to try to read for the first time then

also @Christine, you marked your books as finished on the 12th but weren't they actually finished on the 13th? unless i'm ,messing up our time zones. i don't think it should matter since it's still in our range of days for the countdown but it would probably be best to be as accurate as possible so i can change it on the final sheet if it actually was the 13th

@Sophie mine is just over 25k words so I should be able to get it done fairly quickly depending on how busy work is today lol i'll start it now

i'm hoping sophie is working on something for task 3 but if we haven't heard from her by the time i get up in the morning i can maybe start book 1.5 of this series. i think that should count since there are two extra .5 novella books but technically 3 main ones which makes it a trilogy? i'm still a bit unclear on that task honestly.

Hi Claudia and Cathy and anyone else who might decide to read this with us! As usual I listened to way too much of this all at once lol. Not sure what chapter I'm in but I'm a little over halfway through the audio.

Definitely a very interesting cast of characters so far. I'm not head over heels for Atticus at this point but he's an interesting enough protagonist and doesn't seem to be a total douche so I'll take it lol. I love Oberon though! Adorable talking dog? Yes please. And I find it inexplicably hilarious that his lawyers are a vampire-werewolf duo so that one of them can be available at all times.

As far as the actual plot, seems to be meandering around a bit but still enjoyable. I'm surprised that I'm already more than halfway through because although a lot has actually happened it still doesn't seem like much has 'happened' ...if that makes sense.

Also I hate that Goodreads keeps telling me that I need to read Dresden now that I'm reading this. Leave me alone, recommendations! I'm planning on it eventually but I'm still not excited about it ;)

haha no problem like i said earlier i think we are still making really good time and i figured it would probably take us 3 days to do the countdown

if you're going to be done with it in the morning then i think you'd be done before i would be if i started something new anyway.

sophie, how are you doing with your last book?

actually i think Hounded was Kevin Hearne's debut novel [according to his wikipedia page] even though i didn't realize when i started it, so i'm about halfway through that and we could use it if you haven't made progress on yours

correct. looks like we are waiting on your 3 books and also 1 from sophie at this point. if you haven't made much progress in any of your books i could read something for them if you need me to. i was just going to read something short / not for the challenge otherwise. i think we're making good time regardless. we've already finished 6 books and that is about right on track with getting 40 books done in the two week period.

@sophie the reason the point values were filled in for group 2 tasks was because you had all our names filled in under the 'date read' part instead of the 'read by' part and if anything is in the date read cell it counts it as points. i figured that out last night lol, but also it's just the planning sheet so it doesn't really matter.

i agree that it seems a bit redundant to use both spreadsheets, but it might be more helpful once we get to the spell it out portion where we can note alternate letters and maybe move things around before putting them on the final one

@Nicole idk if you've started either of your books yet but i'm starting Hounded as a buddy read tomorrow and it would work for 7 for sure and possibly for 9 as well [i feel like urban fantasy always has a lot of character in it]. i was going to just not count it toward the challenge but depending on where everyone is at with their books i could use it if we wanted.

i finished 10 and 4 today and it looks like sophie finished 6. i will definitely finish my book for 8 tomorrow as it's also a short one. i probably won't always be getting done so fast but i'm just so happy to be able to read shorter books now that wheel is over lol

ok i will probably start tomorrow morning then, about to go to bed now lol