EPBOT Readers discussion
2021 Reading Check Ins
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Week 10 Check In
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One novel finish this week: Sorcery of Thorns which I really enjoyed. I love the world building here, with sentient grimoires guarded by warrior-librarians. The characters were really great, I thought. This was my Popsugar book on my TBR list with the prettiest cover.The last of my physical library manga for a while: Noragami: Stray God, Vol. 16, The Promised Neverland, Vol. 17, Komi Can’t Communicate, Vol. 11, Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 27, Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 28
I'm currently reading You Should See Me in a Crown, which I expect to finish later today. It's a really quick read and fun so far. The prom-obsessed small town seems really alien and bizarre to my big-city-girl experience, but I know there are places like that in small-town America. Still, I really like the main character, and there's a sweet f/f romance. I'm using this as my Popsugar book that has the same title as a song, since it was apparently titled after a Billie Eilish song.
QOTW: I am a writer! Not published or anything. I mostly write adult fantasy and sci-fi, usually with my partner, although we both write solo as well. We usually do Nanowrimo every year together. I started out writing Sailormoon fanfic in play-by-email role-playing games (which is, oddly enough, how I met my partner).
i finished Fortune and Glory, and now i'm in Ready Player Two. and i have two books waiting for me at the library to get in the next two weeks!QotW - i'm a writer, but only in november when it's NaNo XD i've written romance, time travel, and even did some worldbuilding in my own world. i've done NaNo from 2011-2020 (minus 2015). there's an index of my NaNos at http://bit.ly/33NfIn8
i've also written fanfic (before i wrote NaNo (a long time ago), that's still on my LJ. (LOL) at https://trys-writer.livejournal.com/
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I read and really loved Fool's War by Sarah Zettel for my other group. It took me a while to get into it, but then an unexpected twist got me absolutely hooked and I ended up rating it 5 stars. Totally fascinating look at artificial intelligence. Used for the prompt "set in the future".
I wasn't feeling well on Monday (immune system reacting because I got my vaccine! woooooo!) and needed brainless fluff, so I re-read The Lark and the Wren by Mercedes Lackey because I love me some bards having adventures.
My son and I finished The Son of Neptune and I used it for the "related to water" prompt. The book doesn't actually have tooooo much to do with water, but there are definitely scenes where it is important that Percy is the son of the sea god!
QOTW: Not a writer at all and in awe of those who are :)
I finally read the first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but I am not quite as far in love with it as much of the internet seems to be. I do have the next three novellas (thanks, Tor!) but I'm a bit concerned it will be a diminishing returns situation. Folks who have read them, are they all on the same level?That question was punted for now because my hold came in on Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. I am having a hard time reviewing this. I don't want to say anything bad about it - it's well written and thorough - but I don't think I really took any new insight from it. I was actually most interested by the chapter on football, as there was some stuff I didn't know and some more context to the things I'd heard about. It inspired me to look into Dave Zirin, one of the experts consulted in that chapter. He has a book called A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play, but it was published in 2008, so I'm hoping maybe he will come out with a revised second edition or something.
Also I kind of accidentally reread A Murder Is Announced. Someone mentioned it online, and I have an inherited copy. I said to myself, "I don't even remember who did it," but then I read the first bit and a character said something I wouldn't have even noticed on the first read and I was like, "Oh right." Then I read the rest of it anyway. It's on a lot of best-of-Christie lists, and it's pretty good, but I don't think it's my favorite (not that I would be able to pick a favorite). There's a character who is basically just an Eastern European stereotype, but on the other hand there's what appears to be a lesbian couple treated as unremarkable by their neighbors. Unexpected previous book tie-in from Miss Marple: "People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something."
QOTW: I am not currently a writer. I wrote (possibly more than) my share of adolescent poetry, as one does. I consider it a valuable experience, but it kind of petered out in college. A few years ago I started working on a nonfiction book, but that didn't last too long. Maybe someday when I'm retired.
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Two finishes for me this week: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I found very insightful in terms of both motivation and procrastination. Used it for Book Nerds prompt "author who shares your name or initials".
Holes, which was an entirely new story to me. It's a short audiobook, but it still took a while to get going. Not mind-blowing, but enjoyable nonetheless. Used it for Book Nerds prompt "children's classic".
18/100
About 10% into Dune, because this week is all about one-word titles I suppose :) It's not catching me so far either, but all this exposition just has to lead to something interesting!
QoTW: I'm wondering this myself. I wrote the high school poetry as well. I've worked in marketing and communications, and I'm now a translator, so I do a lot of writing from a professional standpoint. I have failed NaNoWriMo once and succeeded zero times. I am now sitting on an outline for both a novel and a non-fiction book. I suspect the latter will insist on being born first. So I want to say yes, I'm a writer, sort of, ish, in a general kind of way. :D
This week I finished Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris; I really enjoy this 3-book series so finally just bought it to reread. Really interesting characters. I also reread Very Bad Men, a mystery by Harry Dolan. His books are set in Ann Arbor where I live; it's fun to know exactly which urgent care and which restaurant he's talking about. For new books, I read the novella Finna, which is set in a not-IKEA. Apparently the showroom layout is conducive to opening portals to other universes, and two employees (who just broke up) have to go look for them. It was fun and includes a non-hetero romance. I really appreciate an author who can pack a great story into less than 150 pages (especially when my IRL book club pick is 560 pages).I am an engineer who does automotive safety research and often our main product is a report, so I am a technical writer. I've written a bunch of technical reports and journal articles and a few book chapters but no fiction. It's crossed my mind to write a mystery, but so far the urge to read is way stronger than the urge to write outside of work.
I've had a run of ridiculously busy weeks, so haven't been making much progress in my book stack, but thanks to some library due dates, I did manage to finish a few. Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West. Wow. I loved this! Oak Flat is ~2 hours from my house, and although I've never visited there, I'm familiar with the area and the heated struggle between mining interests, the economically depressed town of Superior, AZ, and the San Carlos Apache to whom the land is sacred. The book is written in short, powerful prose, so very quick to read, and is peppered with illustrations - a unique twist on an "adult" book. It's an interesting overview of the history, cultural significance, and ongoing power plays for the land, and a darn good book to boot!
Black Sun. I'm a big fangirl for Rebecca Roanhorse, but I realize this might not be everyone's cup of tea. It's an alternative history fantasy loosely set in ancient Mesoamerica, and features some amazing worldbuilding and cultural development. But, as one would expect with loosely Mayan/Aztec/Incan characters, there's a lot of violence and grim stuff. Highly recommended if you want a non-European fantasy that will immerse you in an entirely different sort of world.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. All good points (and why I'm already largely off the major social media sites), but nothing new here if you're already media savvy. Worth skimming if you'd like to brush up on all the mental and emotional manipulation, tracking, and general icky stuff built into the sites everyone frequents (alas, even Goodreads).
QOTW: I'm another NaNoWriMo author ("winning" since 2002). I write mostly urban fantasy and light SF/space opera. As soon as I finish a college program I'm taking, I want to make a serious effort to finish, edit, and prepare some of my stories for publication. We'll see how that goes :)
Late check in, but just two finishes to report.Finished off The Moor, which was a nice, easy, enjoyable read. Strangely for a Sherlock Holmes story, it wasn't really focussed on the actual mystery, but was more about the main character and her life and what it's like for her being partnered up with and married to Holmes.
Read that in a hurry because my library hold of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue finally came in! I think this is the first time that I've been able to get one of the books for this group through my library, and this was one I really wanted to read as well. I enjoyed it a lot, but it didn't quite tip into five star territory for me. I'll need to go back and look through the discussion thread, see about putting some thoughts in there.
Currently reading Girl, Woman, Other. This was loaned to me by a colleague who really rated it. I'm only a few pages in but so far, so good. It's an actual paper book which is very rare for me these days! As a result, it's living at work now and will be my designated lunch reading for a while.
QOTW: Not a writer. Similar to others, beyond the adolescent poetry and short stories I've never really harboured any ambition to be an author. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one I know that doesn't want to write a novel! I do a lot of writing of assorted papers for work, but that's different. Generally, I just want to consume the stories, not necessarily create them.
I think at last check in I was reading Ask Again, Yes for IRL book club #1. It started promisingly, but it seemed like there was going to be some big mystery uncovered at the end...and there wasn't. I think I would have been less disappointed if it had a less suspenseful tone in the beginning, but I probably still wouldn't have been a huge fan, since there are multiple white main characters who are police officers who "discharge their weapons in the line of duty" and there is never any discussion of who they shot or any broader impact of what they did than their own self-esteem. I'm now reading Lone Wolf for IRL book club #2...and it's certainly different. I didn't even know what it was about before I started (as I've mentioned before, I often do that intentionally with book club selections from others), but I was absolutely not expecting the title to be so literal - I figured it would be about a detective or something. I'm about 1/4 of the way through and I really am not sure where it's heading, so I guess that makes it more suspenseful than the other one. :)
QOTW: I have never considered writing any kind of fiction - I write instructions, support documents, and correspondence for my job, which I think I do fairly decently, but there are plenty of great stories out there for me to read.
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I'm also still listening to Babylon's Ashes. I think I still have a long way to go with this.
QOTW: Like @kathy, I'm a software engineer. I've written many technical documents, conference papers and co-wrote a technical textbook. There's often a stereotypical joke about engineers and bad writing. But I think I can write technical information clearly and in complete correct sentences. I have no interest in writing fiction and admire those that do.
Susan, I hope you live somewhere warm! I enjoy cool weather, but even for me the beaches in my state (Ohio) are still a bit brisk for sitting at the moment!
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I saw that photo :) Did you go North or South?
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EPBOT Readers
Books mentioned in this topic
Babylon’s Ashes (other topics)The School of Essential Ingredients (other topics)
Lone Wolf (other topics)
Ask Again, Yes (other topics)
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Sarah Zettel (other topics)Mercedes Lackey (other topics)
Enjoying some decidedly spring like weather again this week. Getting some cold next week, so enjoying it while it lasts. Even saw robins on the lawn! Cats are loving the sunbeams.
Book club
I have put up a new thread for picking a book for April! https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Feel free to make suggestions! Any genre welcome.
This week I finished:
The Leavers - this was just ok for me. Kind of a rollercoaster of "hey this is moving along" and "ughh dragging". The story was kind of sad, and i feel for the general circumstances of the characters. But the way they were written, I didn't personally connect with any of them so it was hard to really get invested. Counting it for popsugar multiple countries, book nerds author I haven't read before, around the year a book involving an immigrant.
A Phoenix First Must Burn - book of short stories by Black women, all SFF, mostly involving Black women leads. Short story collections are all hit or miss for me, I rarely LOVE all the stories. But this one I think came out better than most, some of the stories were a little meh but none were terrible, and several were interesting enough I looked up the authors to see what else they wrote. Counting it for Read Harder SFF collection edited by a person of color, popsugar book I think my best friend would like, reading women book cover designed by a woman, and book nerds book of short stories.
What's Mine and Yours - got this ARC free from my library as a reading challenge prize. I only just got to it, book's actually coming out this month (assuming it's not already out). I liked it pretty well, but something just didn't quite click into "really liked" or "loved". I think I'm finding that I don't mind timeline jumps, and I don't mind changing perspectives, but doing them together needs to be handled delicately. I get annoyed if I have to constantly have to keep track of just whose perspective and what year I'm in.
Used for popsugar book published this year, book nerds book published this year, aty book published this year (popular prompt, huh?), and Reading Women's book with a biracial protagonist.
QOTW:
Obviously if we're in this group, we're all readers. Are there any writers here? What do you write?
I am an all over the place writer. Tends to go in spurts. Sometimes I'll get really productive and write every day for a good span. Then something interrupts it and then I won't write anything for months. have trouble finding time/energy/concentration for all the things I like to do! I have a novel that I've probably started over 8 times over the last decade, a children's book I have a bunch of notes on but never actually pulled together, and a bunch of ideas and character sketches for a comic that I still haven't actually written.
It's currently march of robots so I'm drawing my children's book characters mostly, hoping that I can turn all the quick drawings into motivation to actually get a story written, that I can illustrate properly.