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

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

the thing with salome in the cat carrier is so good. and cal being scarred for life by learning where not-so-little revenants come from lol

the catcher pov is definitely interesting with regards to painting some interesting parallels between him and cal

this is maybe a chapter or two ahead of where you are but one of my favorite parts probably in the whole series is when delilah shows up and says that cal is 'like a mormon with the dirty talk' because i am like robin in that i am like REALLY CAL? although he's right really, it is totally different than all the regular cussing her does and he IS rather repressed but like ...still. cal. come on ;)

also the whole ish/robin and monogamy thing is the best. i'm always sitting here like come on robin, you looooooooove him

yeah i was like ...surely her sales could not have dropped THAT much between one book and the next, like throw us a bone and at least let it finish up

i think that is the real problem with cliffhangers - what if the series gets cancelled. there was one series i liked and every single book was a standalone then she decided books 10 and 11 needed to be a two parter and it got cancelled after the first part so now i'll NEVER know how that ends lol

i started three books this morning and added them to the planning sheet lol i always read way too many books at the same time

@Eldarwen i was actually pretty happy with the first book, but the second book i just felt like NOTHING was achieved and then i kept staring at the third one in dread and i was like omg just delete it lol. but you might still enjoy it!

@Lexi i think i am definitely in the minority with the raven cycle so you might really enjoy the whole thing. i think a lot of my issues with it come with all the fighting that happened between the readers themselves and also the readers and the author 5 or 6 years ago so i just have bad associations with it for the most part

unfortunately i don't generally end up reading the BOMs just because i am so picky, but i guess we'll see what gets picked for august. i did put in a nomination so fingers crossed lol

haha i don't remember which book in the raven cycle had a cliffhanger, but that whole series is such a love hate relationship for me. my basic stance on it at this point is 'the dream thieves is weird for a standalone novel but i still love it' ;) and also generally pretend the fandom and author don't exist -_-;

@Laurie very true! i do understand if a first book is a little bit slow because the author needs to do a lot of world building for whatever reason, but if it seems like they are moving at a snail's pace just to pad things out then i quickly lose interest.

@Sandy agree with this too! sometimes cliffhangers are appropriate but it does seem like a lot of authors use it to try to make you read the next one and i'm like look i'm either interested or i'm not lol if i'm not interested i don't CARE what happens next so a cliffhanger is not gonna grab me

well these are by no means all of my adventure books, just the ones from the 30 or so books that i had on my tbr for the rest of the month so i was planning on trying to get them done this month anyway and if we get beige again later then i'll have a new pool of books to pull from [since i'm assuming if we get beige two weeks in a row we will probably use one of our respins lol] but i had forgotten that we only got points for the first 10 so good to get a reminder! i might save wicked gentlemen in case we get walnut next week, but the rest i will probably try to do anyway since they are all authors i know i like.

ok awesome, i will definitely listen to hogfather then and we can stick it wherever we want.

here is my tentative TBR list for the upcoming week, although really just options since there's way more than i will actuall get through. i think i can probably do 7 of them though. if you've read any of them and know of any other letters then let me know, these are just what i see from title/author/summary/narrators

Roadkill - adventure tag, B, I, G,
Aurora Rising - adventure tag, G & E [audio narrators]
Hogfather - adventure tag, ALL LETTERS

and i might get to Lost Gods - adventure tag, B - but i'm not sure if i could get through 4 audio books in one week lol, guess it depends on what i end up doing.

i was going to save Wicked Gentlemen - adventure tag, B, G - for if we got walnut but i think i will go ahead and try it now since it fits the genre and who knows if we we will actually get walnut at all

and none of these have the adventure tag so i i could do any of them depending on what letters we end up needing:

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind - G. will probably end up doing this one since it's an ARC and it publishes on tuesday lol. constantly behind on ARCs

Blood Divine - B G
The Gilda Stories - G
Exquisite Corpse - B E
An Illusion of Thieves - I G
No Tomorrow - E
Escape from B-Movie Hell - E
Seers Stone - E

haha it definitely would

@Melindam you said you liked terry pratchett so i was wondering if you remembered if there were any characters with the right letters for week 1 in Hogfather if you've read that one? it's the discworld book i'm reading next and it's tagged as adventure so it would be great if we could use it but from the summary/characters listed on here i'm not getting anything that would work.

so for the tagging i know it has to be the exact word but does it have to ONLY be that word? like if someone tagged a book 'het-fantasy-adventure' does that count because of the word adventure or not count because it has other qualifiers as well?

most of my books will probably be in the 200-300 page range but i do actually have several i'm hoping to get through this month that are between 400-500. i don't think i have more than a handful on my whole tbr that are over 500 though so i definitely won't be bringing the points with the longer books lol

haha the great library, or the series where nothing ever happens. it does seem like more and more authors are drawing out plots that really should be shorter because i guess publishers want longer series now. i'd rather have something shorter but better, but i guess they think that the more books in a series the more money they will make. but not if i just lose interest and stop reading ;)

just a heads up, i'll probably actually start this on the 14th since that is when wheel starts and also i'll probably finish my current audio book tomorrow so i'll need something on the 14th anyway

i know you guys read this ages ago but i decided to read them in order so i'm just getting to it now. i've gotta say i am not really liking this one at all, to the point where i probably wouldn't even be finishing it if i wasn't listening on audio [i'm a little over halfway through now].

the other two did not have much action but they did at least have an overarching plot structure i could follow. this one i'm not sure what is supposed to be happening other than 'here's a random look at 5 or 6 people who all live in the same place and aren't really doing much'

@Sandy the one with the acting troupe was weird because i did like it but also it was kind of frustrating that we as the reader knew exactly what was happening the whole time and it seemed like the characters were just being purposely dense about it. i was like hey i thought you guys were smart? lol but i think that because i disliked the two books before that it kind of made that one look better by comparison. still a really interesting series though.

i didn't really like books ...4 and 5 i think of nightrunner just because they were totally separated for 4 and then 5 was all about sebrahn [sp?] and i just sooooo did not care, but the last two in the series i thought were a welcome return to form.

@Sandy i agree, i've taken so many sequels off my tbr this year because i'm just like 'can i really read 5 more books of this? probably not!' like if a book is just okay but it's part of a completed trilogy then i'm usually thinking 'okay i can give it a chance', but if it's book 1 of 8 and the author is still writing more i'm like uuuuuuugh.

i think one of the few series i haven't dropped this year was the nightrunner series by lynn flewelling [7 books] and even then it took a definite slump in the middle but i liked the characters so much that i powered through it lol

i really like series if they have good characters but it seems that so many today just all use the same 2 dimensional stand ins so i've been getting into standalones a lot more

@Sandy i think you have definitely put into words why this book frustrates me so much. it is definitely a lot of telling rather than showing and i can only hear about how gorgeous achilles is so many times lol

DQs Day 5 (Chapters 26-end)

17. Patroclus decides to save Briseis over giving Achilles the opportunity of the men honoring him "like a god; exchanging "her safety for my honor." Comment on your feelings about where is real honor found.
i mean there's definitely no honor in letting a woman get raped to make yourself look better so i've gotta say patroclus is in the right here. i think that a lot of times even today 'honor' is focused more on what other people think of you rather than like actually doing the right thing, although the two do also intersect a lot of the time.

18. Achilles says that Patroclus is "a better man than I" and Briseis said he was the best man. In relation to the story, do you think this was true? What did you find as Patroclus' greatest strengths and tragic weaknesses?
to me he's a better person because he cares about other people and tries to help them and i think that is definitely his strength here. oddly enough i kind of see achilles as his weakness because i feel like if he wasn't so focused on achilles all the time he could really do more good, although he did kind of break away from that at the end and stood up to achilles for what he thought was right

19. Have you read The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Agamemnon? Do you prefer the old version or this retelling? Why?
i have not read any of them, although i would like to. i just have a lot of trouble with verse in general and also old books so they are like going to be doubly hard for me to get through. i like parts of this version though, but i would have liked a bit more action.

20. Overall, how did you rate this novel and why? Would you recommend it to others?
i rated it 3 stars, although this time it might have technically been more of a 2.5 since i was getting pretty frustrated. but really it is technically well written and i think she accomplished what she set out to do, it's just not something that necessarily keeps my interest. but like i said before, actually making achilles and patroclus a couple instead of pretending they are cousins deserves a whole star by itself so i feel good with the 3 star rating.

i would probably recommend it if someone asked me like specifically for retellings or historical/myth based m/m books or something but would mention also that i found it kind of slow.