Week 10 Check In

[Sheri]

Hi everyone!

Wow, week 10 already! Year's zipping by fast.

I was in Chicago the past weekend, so did not have much reading time. All I finished was The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. . I liked it overall, but it was a real chore to get through. Normally I don't flinch at high page numbers, but something about this one just made it feel so long, even while i enjoyed it overall. I think maybe there were just too many incidentals included that werent' really plot relevant. It's my book with two authors for Popsugar, and my alternate history for ATY. (It's a little bit of a stretch, but since they're doing time travel for the express purpose of changing history and thus the present, I'm counting it)

Currently I am reading Mary Poppins which will be my Popsugar children's classic I never read, and my Read Harder children's classic written before 1990. I'm enjoying it so far, nice to have an easy brisk read after that tome.

I'm going to borrow Popsugar's reading group question this week, because it's interesting. Do you read the "it" books that generate a lot of buzz?

I generally don't go out of my way to read them, but I will click on them and read the descriptions. if they look like something I'd like, in general, I'll give them a try. Otherwise I won't bother, unless a lot of people I know, whose opinions I value, say a book's good. I find the ones I try can be pretty hit or miss. I keep bringing up Beartown, but that's one that was EVERYWHERE and everyone seems to love it, except me. Even within my own genres it can be hit or miss. I LOVED Bear and the NIghtengale, which I kept hearing a lot of buzz about, but I was pretty indifferent towards Snow Child even though on paper it looked right up my alley.

[Daniele]

Another busy workweek for me, so little reading time.

Only book I got through was AU COEUR DE MES VALEURS, which I'd been lent. Seeing as it's the autobiographical exploration of the values of an ambitious and very successful 62 year-old businesswoman, our opinions were bound to diverge in several instances. But there were a few brilliant passages when our values were more closely aligned.

Still working on The Satanic Verses, but that's a longer read. I'll be doing some driving in the coming weeks, so I've got a few audiobooks lined up as well. Not sure what I can fit in to which prompts yet.

QOTW: Personally, I'm a book fair fiend, so I don't often stumble on the "it" book until well after it has been replaced by a newer "it" book. My only Overdrive access is as an alum, and university library selections don't often skew to what's trendy. I'm also trying to get through these challenges as frugally as possible to help whittle down my TBR stacks!

[Cara]

I don't feel like I've progressed much this week, because I haven't finished a book, but I didn't realize how long A Discovery of Witches is! I'm nearly done with it, so will probably be moving on to my Book Flood book next week. I'm also still slowly going through Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It on my lunch at work.

QOTW: I almost never read the "it" books. I have learned that my tastes tend to not run with pop culture too much (see every time I've ever tried to join a regular book club) and I just can't stand to muscle my way through something that doesn't hold my interest at all. Unless it's already in a genre I like, I usually don't bother. The only ones I can think of off-hand that were really popular that I read and enjoyed were The DaVinci Code: A Quest for Answers and . . . I'm coming up blank on anything else!

[Susan]

This is a somewhat strange week for me. We just got power back on after 41 hours without. Reading some of a bunch of things without solid focus on any one of them.

This coming week I have to return The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies, and Bars as I've exhausted all renewals! On Sunday I made homemade Fig Newtons. On Tuesday/Wednesday I made homemade Oreos (dough chilled overnight)! There were two fun coincidences there. Tuesday was also "National Oreo Cookie Day". I subscribe to A.Word.A.Day (wordsmith.org) - a delightful daily (M-F) email giving you a new word, its definition, earliest use and an example. Soon after making the dough I got the daily email and the word was azymous. That means "unleavened" and the chocolate cookie wafers for the homemade Oreos are unleavened, so that made me chuckle. (I think it was funnier in person than typing it out seems...). In any case, of the 3 cookies made from that book, they're all excellent, but the Oreos win as the most-likely-to-make-again. The thin mints were a lot of work. The fig newtons are good but they were a medium amount of work too. The Oreos were much easier and very good. I need to photo each of the pages I want to keep.

(As an aside, I highly recommend subscribing to wordsmith.org if you like words. It is short, bare-bones text (started in 1994 at the beginning of the internet without all the embedded ads, graphics, it really is just the meaty text) and I've subscribed for nearly all of that time. It is this guy's hobby and he shares it.)

I finally started Artemis. I have a trip next Friday overseas so if I don't finish that, it goes on hold until I come back since I'm not taking a hardcover book with me. I'm enjoying it so far but I'm not very far into it yet.

I also started The Millionaire Mind. This is by the same author who wrote The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy which I read many years ago. The newer one was recommended to me by a CPA friend as I find personal finance an interesting topic. It is a lot of rehash of the earlier book actually.

I also read through a good chunk of Nadiya's British Food Adventure. Cookbooks like this I page through like novels.

QOTW: If I read "it" books I am far behind the curve reading them much later and I tend to be judicious about what I read. If people in my family get excited about an "it" book then I'll likely read it sooner. For instance that happened with my daughter and The Fault in Our Stars several years ago. She went to a book signing/talk by John Green when it first came out, and drove it to be the One School/One Book selection in her high school and arranged the entire event once school restarted around the book (including a skype call with John Green himselfr). With all that, I figured I really should read it to see what her excitement was about.

But mostly books sit on my TBR list for far too long so they are no longer anywhere close to "it", just members of the "former-it" club!

[Kathy]

QOTW: Never been much to read adult "it" books; an exception was DaVinci code. However, I have read a bunch of the young adult series that have come out, mostly because I have had teenagers. So I've read Hunger Games (but not the rest), Uglies, and all of Rick Riordan's stuff.

I finished my two book flood books this month-RedShirts and Wool. I had already read RedShirts but enjoyed it another time through. I also really liked Wool, and it was probably not something I would have chosen for myself.

I also tried two other books inspired by other book flood gifts. I stopped pretty quickly on the Coldest Girl in Coldtown; beginning was too grim/violent for me. Just finished the Court of Thorns and Roses; I liked it but not sure I will continue the series with so many other series to try that I liked more.

Cara, I liked Discovery of Witches but it just felt soooo long, I didn't read the rest of the trilogy. I've decided that if I'm noticing how long it takes me to read a book it takes away from my enjoyment of it. And just so many other things to read where that isn't a problem.

[Stephanie]

Hello All,

I managed to finish my audiobook and physical book this week, so lots to report on! After what felt like forever (and one library renewal, ha), I finally finished listening to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. My enthusiasm waned for this book after a while. There was a LOT of detail/info dumps in it, and while I do like a good info dump, I think it was just too complicated of a book for me to listen to. I suspect I would have enjoyed it much more as a physical book.

I also finished my bookflood book, which was Written in Red. I really warmed up to this book as it went along, and I enjoyed the pacing. It was slow and thoughtful, which I wasn't expecting from an urban fantasy book. And I appreciated that romance wasn't the primary driving factor in the novel--not that I don't love a good romance book, it's just that it was nice to see the main characters dealing with their problems without the added layer of romance being involved. There was a nice tension between the two lead characters that I suspect will be developed in later books in the series. I thought it was a great choice on the part of the narrator not to try and squeeze that in there in the first book. I'll definitely give the next book in this series a read.

So, now I'm on to a new audiobook and a new physical book. I'm listening to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I owned this book when I was a kid and remember reading it a few times when I was maybe 8 or 9. It popped up on one of my reading lists a while ago--for Black History Month, I think--and I thought I'd like to revisit it. I must have been a seriously naive kid, because I remember that the family in this story was treated badly, but I totally missed most of what was going on. But then again, at 8, I didn't know about the depression or much about the legacy of slavery in the US. This has been a great re-read for me and I'm really, really enjoying it. It's also narrated by Lynne Thigpen, who played The Chief on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and I know and love her from other things as well.

Finally, I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale for the Popsugar March Challenge for a book about feminism. I last read this book 20 years (!) ago in a Canadian Literature course I was taking in my undergrad. I also lobbied HARD to have it included in the first year seminar course being taught at my current institution, which is a women's university, and have been so glad to see it on the syllabus this year. Reading this book as a 41 year old in 2018 is certainly a different experience from reading it as a 21 year old in 1998, and I'm savouring every gorgeously crafted world even while its content is making me feel sick to my stomach.

For the QOTW, I don't read "it" literature until years after it's come out. Party because I want to use the library and the waiting lists are so long, but mostly because I want to read other things. Even then, I won't go out of my way to read it unless I know people who have read and enjoyed it or there is still a lot of buzz a year or two later. The exception to this are the Outlander and Song of Fire and Ice series, because I just can't wait to find out what happens next.

Thanks for keeping our chat going with your weekly questions, Sheri!

[Sheri]

No problem Stephanie, although if anyone has any ideas feel free to message me. I keep scrolling through old popsugar's for ideas but I don't always want to parrot what they're asking.

Also yeah, I liked Handmaid's Tale back when I read it, but I was reading it during the previous presidency. I don't really want to re-read it now under the current one, I feel like it will ring far too close to home.

[Sarah]

Just got done with a 4-day librarian conference- it was a blast, but pretty well killed my reading time for the week. Oh irony....

Finally got Hidden Figures finished up, and really enjoyed it. The fact the I was struggling to wade through math and physics explanations that were way over my head, but were accomplished with easy by these women, against all odds, made me love it even more.

I typically don’t do “it” books. I have fairly specific taste in what I enjoy, and I’ve been let down too many times by a weekly bestseller that doesn’t really have much enduring value. I’m in the same boat as Stephanie, too, in that I get my books from the library, so am subject to the waiting lists (which is why I’ve just now gotten my hands on Hidden Figures).