Rob’s Comments (group member since Jul 06, 2012)

Rob’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Welcome Liam

So the ideal goal is 10,000 books. Next would be to actually read all the books we pledge to read. Right now we're not going to do either.

There will be some people will overcommit and miss their goal, so if you go over yours you kind of help make up for them.

So I always recommend that if you complete your goal you just leave your goal alone and keep adding new books to the shelf.

It doesn't really matter though. If you want to stretch to read at least 2 more books this year, setting your new goal to 20 is fine.

It really just impacts the secondary goal a bit.

This doesn't have all of them, but does have most: https://soundcloud.com/swordandlaser

I think there is a way to get the really old ones, but I forget exactly where. Tassie Dave or Sean might have a better idea.

Ruth wrote: "Too many Ruths! I like being referred to as ‘the above Ruth’ though.

I think you were the 7th Ruth I tried trying to make you the discussion leader.

I'm not falling behind my goal due to lack of titles so much as diversifying my reading more than previous years and generally reading fewer books in general (I think). I'm actually doing decent on my overall goal, so it may be more of the former than the latter.

For my own personal challenges, I'm finished with:

Sword: 20/40 (50% complete, 8% behind)
Laser: 11/20 (55% complete, on track)
Comics: 7/10 (70% complete, 12% ahead)


This month I've added +2 Sword, 3 Laser, 1 Graphic novels. It ended up being a pretty sci-fi heavy month for me, and I'll be adding at least 1 more next month.

On the fantasy side I have some ground to make up, but I'm not sure that will happen. I'll definitely get 2 fantasy in, but I need to read 7 to catch up, and 4 or more to at least start making up some ground.

We'll see how that goes. The Poppy War is a bit long and I'm planning on reading the Boys at some point, which should more than finish off my comic's challenge but further reduce my fantasy numbers.

July Results:

Sword Challenge
Total Participants: 408 (+7)
Total Read: 3,901 (+649)
Average Books Read: 10 (+2)
Total Committed: 6,983 (+163)
Average Books pledged: 17 (0)
Total Challenges Completed : 3 (+1) NOTE: This number is terribly inaccurate. However there is no way for me to verify/get the correct numbers, so I have to take what Goodreads gives me.


Laser Challenge
Total Participants: 407 (+8)
Total Read: 3,314 (+535)
Average Books Read: 8 (+1)
Total Committed: 6,459 (+79)
Average Books pledged: 16 (0)
Total Challenges Completed (Goodreads): 2 (0) NOTE: This number is terribly inaccurate. However there is no way for me to verify/get the correct numbers, so I have to take what Goodreads gives me.


Graphic Novel Challenge
Total Participants: 113 (0)
Total Read: 1,008 (+117)
Average Books Read: 9 (+1)
Total Committed: 2,596 (+10)
Average Books pledged: 23 (0)
Total Challenges Completed : 2 (+1) NOTE: This number is terribly inaccurate. However there is no way for me to verify/get the correct numbers, so I have to take what Goodreads gives me.

Short Story Challenge
Total Participants: 38 (+1)
Total Read: 277 (+23)
Average Books Read: 7 (0)
Total Committed: 512 (+10)
Average Books pledged: 13 (-1)
Total Challenges Completed : 2 (+1) NOTE: This number is terribly inaccurate. However there is no way for me to verify/get the correct numbers, so I have to take what Goodreads gives me.

After July here's the latest projections: we'll get about 6,700 fantasy books, short of both the pledged books of 6,983 and the goal of 10k books. Similarily we'll only get 5,700 sci-fi books short of the 6,459 pledged.

That said the average fantasy read compared to the average pledge is right about on target (~58%). On the laser side though participants are a bit behind at only about 50% of what they pledged.

We continue to get new participants each month, but overall participation is still down from this time last year.

New month. New thread. Whatcha got?

Mark wrote: "Tweet from Mary Robinette Kowal about The Relentless Moon, the third Lady Astronaut novel...

https://twitter.com/MaryRobinette/sta..."

She finished it.

Trike wrote: "I figured my post was fine since others were already discussing parts of the book, such as Matthew’s post above (#70). I wasn’t even talking about the story itself much; mostly what I thought was going to happen.

But then I’ve always been a magnet for the fuzz. I give off a perp vibe, I guess. "

I guess I just missed it. It also doesn't speculate a whole lot like yours did on the plot. I don't honestly have as much time to read all the posts anymore.

Really though I don't want to be the content police, so I'm sure I do in incosistent job when I do yell at people about spoilers. It's hard to draw the line on what's a spoiler and what's just a first impression.

Most of my moderating is various upkeep tasks, not content moderating.

I believe in the past you've made comments about how quickly you figure out the plot of a movie, and how your wife gets mad at you for spoiling movies in first few minutes. Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else though.

But I think a similar logic can apply to these threads. If you're really good at figuring things out, posting those really good guesses can essentially spoil the book for others.

I honestly don't recall everything you wrote and how accurate it was to the plot but some of it was pretty close.

So the annoucement thread idea was started because we often get a bunch of questions (typically in the What else are you reading thread) about next month's pick.

It was something I started doing even before I was made a moderator. The intent of it was just that, to simply announce the book in a central/consistent way to make it more apparent to everyone beyond simply just adding it to the group book shelf.

People started using it to talk about the book in a generic sense, and so I've just always left that alone unless they started posting spoilers/discussing plot details.

Personally, I don't really want to make 2 threads every month, but would prefer to leave it up to others to create threads as they want to.

There has been a trend (observationally) since I started created these annoucement threads of fewer threads being created per book.

People seem more relucatant to make a new thread for some reason, even though each book gets its own section for like 5 years, before I merge them into a yearly archive. Older books had 10-30 threads. Newer ones are closer to 5.

Mostly I worry that if I created a seond thread for plot discussion people would be even less inclined to make/post in other threads.

Thanks

I know it's almost the end of the month, but this is the kickoff thread and not a place for you to speculate about the plot.

There are other threads you can move your comments to, or feel free to make one of your own.

I'll give you a bit of time to copy/paste your comments before deleting them.

August meetup: https://www.goodreads.com/event/show/...

5/8. All but The Last Unicorn, Vessel and now The Poppy War. So it was the first 5 picks of the year, and I only reread one of them (Theft of Swords).

On the plus side I can include that meetup in the monthly message 😁

Welcome Brian.

I was pretty interested in this prior to March Madness and already own a copy. However some folks chimed in about how dark it is/trigger warnings.

I've tended to shy away from most dark fantasy lately, although I used to read a lot of it in the past. Hopefully I like it. I guess we'll see.

The August pick will be The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

Wayne wrote: "Hi Rob

We are meeting on Sunday, August 4th at 1 PM at Kings Books in Tacoma at 218 St. Helens to discuss Vessel."

Thanks Wayne! Just in time, I'm prepping the monthly newsletter now.