Insiyah’s Comments (group member since Apr 12, 2022)

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

Hey everyone, apologies for going silent - things got a little chaotic on my end. Good news though is that we're going on vacation to Georgia for a few days! I'm really looking forward to it now that it's finally booked. Plus, the flight is three hours long, so that's three uninterrupted hours of reading!

I've read both Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, which I thought I wouldn't like but loved, and Oona Out of Order, which I thought I would like but really did not. I'm not a romance person unless it's a classic, so a lot of the tropes in Oona were not ones I enjoyed.

Have any of you read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus or The Starless Sea? What are your thoughts on those?

Devann, please add the first HP book to your shelf.

My TBR is already growing so much, and it's just getting worse - I found a paper list of books to add to my TBR. Yikes.

Elli, please add Spaceman of Bohemia to your TT shelf.

Steven, keep telling us all about the places you go to please, especially the book related ones! I'm taking notes!

Mia wrote: "In my experience the male narrators tend to talk slower.. So i always go for 1.25/1.5 with them. But a a lot of the female ones talk so fast already there's no need to speed up"

Somewhere in there is an interesting study corelating linguistics with gender studies.

Happy reading, everyone!

I finished Mrs. Dalloway with ten minutes to spare! Kinda proud of myself right now.

I'm a little confused, because it's also a webtoon, so is the novel the same as the webtoon? Because that would be really easy to read rather than having to track down a copy.

Steven wrote: "24 hours and I’ll be at the airport to go to the UK! Aaaahhhh!"

You're going on vacation, right? If you are, do tell us where all you're going to be visiting!

On another note, has anyone here read the Heartstopper series? It's all over my GR and YouTube feeds - it's basically haunting me at this rate.

To everyone:

Please make sure to link the edition of the book you are reading. If you're not able to link it itself, then copy paste the link manually in the Alternatives column.

Denise wrote: "So just to clarify...
It's ok for me to list any books now that I want to read before the end of the challenge - even if they are June or July books, right?

And I'll just leave the "mini" info bl..."

At the moment, try to focus on May books so that we all have an idea of numbers and so on. In my case, I've left my books open to see which mini tasks are left to claim, because the general tasks (character with 'A', etc.) usually have leftovers. If you want, we can start a separate tab for Jun-Jul-Aug books for future reference.

I'm trying to complete my backlog for a couple of TBR clearing challenges, and my fingers keep heading for my planned TT books instead.

Sophie wrote: "Please don't start this week if you want to read it for the challenge. We can't use anything that you start befire the challenge starts.

We know that people can struggle to keep up with the DQs so..."

That rule is so infuriating for me right now because i'm itching to get my hands on A Little Life, but alas...

@Sophie, I'm glad he's okay! Are you?

I'm volunteering for DQs for The Witch's Heart as well - the book looks fascinating!

Volunteering for DQs for Team Cassandra

JL wrote: "So for the minis when it says spell out Thalia are we picking books that start with Each letter in the name until we spell out the name or books that have all the letters of that name in the title?"

"the first letter in the book's title, the first letter in the author's first or last name, or the first letter of a character's first, last, or nick-name, or the first letter of the series name. If you are listening to an audiobook, the first letter in the narrator's first or last name also can be used. We're also allowing for Translators names, as long as the edition you are reading is a translation version."

You can check out all the Mini rules here - May Mini

The Cartographers does not count as BoM for this challenge, though it's valid for NBRC Book of the Month points. You can use it for points for that :)

Same, I don't actually write full reviews, just the stars and mood thing, etc. But that is still pretty good

My shelf, since I forgot to post it previously - tower_teams_9_2022.

I've been using Storygraph as well, and I love the stats feature, and the reviews really go in depth, so you can really express yourself. The only thing I really don't like is that their database is not as vast as GR, but that makes sense because it's so new, plus you can import your editions, so that's a nice workaround.

What's your username on there?

A lot of us seem to have gone through major reading slumps. Mine lasted for almost five years, from 2014 to 2019 before I slowly managed to start reading new books again. Most of my books from 2016 to 2019 were easy to read YA in series that I was familiar with already.

I read a Tumblr post that described it perfectly - that burnt out readers who've been reading since a very young age often go through a phase where they are unable to identify with brand new characters. In my case, this was very true, because I was reading still. I was just not reading books - I preferred fanfiction. The familiar characters were ones I already had a relationship with, and the different plots provided a fun story.

Have any of your experiences with reading slumps been similar?