Week 2: 1/4 - 1/11

[Matt]

I have also read only one book so far this year: All The Light You Cannot See. This book fulfills my celebrity book club prompt. I am currently reading Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. This is going to fulfill my favorite prompt from past POPSUGAR challenges (New York Times bestseller).

Other than the POPSUGAR CHALLENGE I have a personal goal of reading more books and pages than I did the previous year. I usually try to increase it by 15%. Other than that I am trying to read all the works of Stephen King and want to re-read Harry Potter.

[Nadine in NY]

poshpenny wrote: "... For me it depends completely on the narrator. Sometimes I feel it would be better in print, and sometimes I know the narrator has added a whole level of something I would not have had in my head. ..."

Same! There are some books that I know I loved just because the narrator did such a bangup job, and I'm not really sure how I would have felt if I'd read them without the audio. (For example: Lolita read by Jeremy Irons, You read by Santino Fontana, and The Raven Boys series read by Will Patton.) Others, I didn't like the narrator and I stopped listening immediately and checked the ebook out of the library so I could read it with my eyes instead. (Example: The Killer Inside Me, Delicious Foods)

[poshpenny]

I find it especially true of characters of other nationalities/races/ethnicities, or things with certain kinds of humour, such as
anything by P.G. Wodehouse read by Jonathan Cecil
The Sellout read by Prentice Onayemi
Binti read by Robin Miles
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) read by Ray Porter
Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain read by Scott Aiello
The Her Royal Spyness and The Kane Chronicles series read by the recently late, very great Katherine Kellgren

I had to return a few things, most memorably The Lost Hero and The Woman on the Orient Express because I just couldn't take the narrator

[Luke]

I've finished Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for task 21 and reviewed it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Megumi]

I've finished one book, started another, and discarded one as well. The book I finished, and have been waiting a year for was The Lost Plot. It did not disappoint. It is one of my recommended series and could also cover the library/bookstore task though the majority of the book takes place on an alternate universe.
After finishing The Lost Plot I started Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. I'm not too far into it but as of right now it reads pretty close to the movie.
Before The Lost Plot I was trying to get into Homicide in Hardcover. I don't know if I had over saturated my cozy mystery interest or if the book wasn't up my ally (come on it is about books!) but I just couldn't get into it.

[Anteria]

I know this is really late, but I wanted to wait until I finished reading my second prompt book before I posted anything.

I read/am reading The Handmaid's Tale for the feminism prompt (13). It's been two weeks and I still haven't been able to finish it. The problem is the way the book is written. There are half flashbacks, broken dialogue, non-dialogue, times when I don't even know who is being talked about. It's all a big disjointed mess and it keeps throwing me off-kilter when I try to read it.

I'm only halfway through, but I'm getting there.

[Anna]

I finished When Dimple Met Rishi at the beginning of the week, and then sped through Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

I would definitely recommend When Dimple met Rishi - so sweet and cute! I used it for a book written by an author of a different ethnicity than me.

I'm a little iffier on Redefining Realness. I read it as my LGBTQ+ book, and on that front it was really illuminating for me. But it's also a reallllly heavy book, even if she's now currently successful. Glad I read it but would never re-read.

The other goal I set myself is to read 40 books! At the rate I'm going that should be easy, but I'm a very uneven reader - I go through peaks and valleys of reading productivity. Hoping this challenge will help me be more consistent.

[Laura]

In the second week of the year, I only read one book called black chalk. It will count for my color prompt. It was a very interesting book that I would not have picked up if I wasn’t in this challenge