Week 13 Check In

[Susan]

Hello Everyone! I hope you all had a good week. Spring is starting to come here in New England. It has been a windy week here with typical changeable weather.

I had two finishes during the week. FIrst, I finished my audiobook that I was listening to and started a new one. I finished Old Man's War. I look forward to the next books in this Scalzi series.

Next up on my audiobooks is for this month's neighborhood book club. We're reading The Lincoln Highway. I am not yet far enough into it to have too many thoughts about it. So far it seems fine.

I finished my fluff vacation read also People We Meet on Vacation. That was only okay to me. It was very predictable and bordered on "if you people would just actually communicate you'd have saved 10 years of your life" which is a trope I do not like. I'm not sure how it ended up on the list of Best Romance novel for 2021 (I think that was the year).

I have two books from the library ready to go and I'm not sure which I'll pick so I won't list either so I have something new next week!

QOTW: I have two. The first is a meta-question and the second is the real question.
1. This week I'm still making questions up. Does anyone know of a good source of QOTW discussion points I could pull from?
2. How do you all keep track of your books and what are your feelings on that?

For the 2nd question, I'm good at marking things finished on GR. That's been the only thing I've done until last year. In 2021 I tried doing the Book Nerds challenge and tried hard to post in the FB group photo something that matched the book as well as a general post about the (often numerous) prompts a single book fit.

This year, I'm doing the Book Nerds challenge again, but I'm keeping track in a personal spreadsheet. I am finding that marking GR, editing a spreadsheet and then marking in the FB group photos to be a lot of work to remember to do them all. I know that I shouldn't stress about it too much as it is supposed to be casual.

Is there a better way? Is there a way to link things so that I don't have to remember so often? What do you all do for both keeping track yourself as well as sharing what you've done?

[Rebecca]

Next week is return-to-office (attempt two), three days a week. I expect this to reduce my reading time.

The Hog Murders - This was mentioned in the Golden Age Detection Facebook group, and I stuck it on my list. This led to an odd situation when reading it, as it happened that someone was driving a VW Beetle and I was like, huh, I wonder when those were invented, and then that sort of thing kept piling up until there was a grad student working on computers, and I checked the publication date and it's from 1979. It is, however, almost a pastiche of Golden Age "great detective" books, with an Italian Poirot- or Nero Wolfe-type genius. The solution to the mystery was fairly original, but I don't expect to return to this author.

Scales of Justice - Still working my way through Ngaio Marsh. This one involves fishing and the English aristocracy. The mystery was perhaps less salient than the portrait of a disappearing way of life, but I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of the sidekick character Inspector Fox in this one. In addition to the standard young couple beset by impediments, there's a bonus older pairing in this one, too.

QOTW: I can't really help you, as I have determined that logging in Goodreads with (often approximate) read dates is the extent of my capabilities. I guess I do also post here, but that's more of a conversation than a chore, and also I get notifications for it.

[Jen W.]

Thanks for starting the thread, Susan! :)

Finished this week:
Legends & Lattes - for the Popsugar found family prompt. I loved this book so much! It's a quiet. cozy fantasy, in the same vein as Becky Chambers' Wayfarers stories. In this case, an orc warrior decides to hang up her sword for good and move to the city to open a coffee shop. The stakes aren't high, but that doesn't mean there aren't any; it's more that the stakes are of the personal variety, rather than the "save-the-world" variety.

Felix Ever After - for the Popsugar gender identity prompt. I really wanted to read this for this prompt because it's a book about a trans character by a trans author. I liked it a lot. I will say the characters made some dumb choices, but they were also teenagers, so it's part of growing up.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder - for the Popsugar misleading title prompt. I know a lot of people who are raving about this one, so I thought I'd give it a try. A teenage "good girl" decides to investigate a murder from 5 years ago for a school project, and somehow winds up finding all sorts of clues the police missed or ignored. It kept me interested enough to want to find out the truth, but overall I thought it was just ok. (Why is the title misleading? (view spoiler)[Because the main character isn't actually a good girl, despite her reputation - she does many unethical things in her investigation, including breaking into someone's house, blackmailing and catfishing people... (hide spoiler)])

Isn't It Bromantic? - for the Popsugar prompt of a book featuring two languages, since the two main characters frequently speak Russian to each other. Somehow, the author took a character who's been mainly jokey comic relief in the previous books and made him the hero of what's probably my favorite book in the series so far. It was really cute and funny.

Manga: Daily Report About My Witch Senpai, Vol. 1 - I liked this manga a lot. It's a contemporary office romance, except the female lead happens to be a witch. The art is really nice, and the story is a little predictable but sweet and charming.

I'm currently reading: Chilling Effect for the Popsugar book by a Latinx author prompt. I'm not too far into it, but enjoying it.

QOTW: I log all my books on Goodreads primarily. I love it, because it lets me see my year at a glance, and I can organize books with tags. Like, I have an "owned" tag so I can keep track of what books I've bought. I also keep a spreadsheet for whatever challenge I'm doing, like Popsugar. For just keeping track of owned books and other media, I've used an app in the past called Libib, but for me it's harder to keep that one up to date than it is just using tags on GR.

For questions, we could always crowdsource some questions from group members. I'm also in the Popsugar Reading Challenge group on GR, and they have a QOTW on their posts as well. That might also be a source for some ideas.

[Shel]

Hi all! Last week I finished and absolutely loved Once Upon a River (I used it for the Europe prompt on the Book Nerds challenge). I was not familiar with Diane Setterfield at all, until my other GR group selected it as a monthly read, but now I want to read more!

I'm now about a third of way into Sea of Rust - I've read books about a robot apocalypse before, but never one where they actually already killed all of the humans and the main character is a robot!

QOTW: no idea for your first question! For the second, I have kept track on GR for more than a decade so it's part of my routine when I finish a book now. Last year was the first time I participated in the Book Nerds challenge and I'm doing so again, so I'm tracking it in the spreadsheet and I usually post on the FB page as well.

[Susan]

@jen, if you can curate some QOTW from the group you're on and message a bunch to me, I'll queue them up.

@shel, that is the routine I'm trying to get in. I am good with keeping track on GR. I'm trying hard to fill out my spreadsheet. I'm filling in any finished book on any/all open prompts that it fits, so I have a lot of copying/pasting. By the time I'm done with that I often forget to comment on the in FB photos. I may do a mass commenting from the spreadsheet all at once some day.

[Shel]

Susan wrote: "I'm filling in any finished book on any/all open prompts that it fits, so I have a lot of copying/pasting. By the time I'm done with that I often forget to comment on the in FB photos."

Yeah, that's a lot. I'm just selecting one prompt per book so it's simpler.

[Trystan]

finished Daemon, now i'm reading the sequel, Freedom™.

QotW:
1. i'm sure there's lists of questions from a google search? that's what i would do.
2. starting back in 2009, i used to keep two lists on google docs - one ordered by year, in the order i read them; one master list of everything in chrono-alphabetical order. i moved to goodreads in 2014. moved everything over and never looked back.

[Kathy]

Three done this week, which included a few days of vacation so extra time to read. Finished IRL book club selection The Passenger. I made it through and it was an interesting thriller but all the characters are miserable so not really for me. Second was Bloodless Assassin which had some cute parts; urchin blackmails an assassin who faints at sight of blood. Liked it but probably won't continue series.
Last was Clear to Lift which is authored by a former navy pilot, the role of her main character, so fits "in the navy" for Book Nerds. I remember really enjoying the author's debut novel featuring a different navy pilot and was going to reread that for the prompt when I saw she had another book. I liked it, and it had lots of techy pilot stuff that was cool, but the romance/relationship plot lines seemed really obvious even for a romance novel.
QOTW
I sometimes think of things it would be fun to discuss in the group have shared with Sheri in the past so will work on some for coming weeks.
In fifth grade, I kept a notebook with all my readings (265) but that was a one-time thing until I started on goodreads 2018. I love the year-end review and the detail summary of book covers by rating. I am a huge spreadsheet nerd so I am good at remembering to log my books there.

[Jen W.]

Susan wrote: "@jen, if you can curate some QOTW from the group you're on and message a bunch to me, I'll queue them up.

@shel, that is the routine I'm trying to get in. I am good with keeping track on GR. I'm t..."

@Susan, I tried to message you but it said you're not accepting messages. :)

[Sheri]

popping in mostly for the questions:

A lot of the questions I had I pulled from the Popsugar good reads reading group, that's where I got the idea for the question of the week from since it always generated good discussions. I skipped ones that were too referential to the popsugar reading challenge, like referencing prompts or challenge progress. I tried googling questions about reading and had some success but a lot of times that brought up questions more for teachers about reading comprehension and stuff like that. Otherwise I just try to think of something interesting or ask for suggestions from the group!

I haven't been tracking or posting much outside of good reads this year just because everything has been so overwhelming this year. I haven't found a good method really! I have shelves for all the various challenges, so I can tag what challenges any book is being counted for, so if nothing else I can look back and say "oh I used this book for this challenge". Although that doesn't mark what prompt I counted it for. Sometimes it's obvious, other times not. So I guess it comes down to how much time you're willing to spend posting, and decide where your priorities are. Could always do some sort of master post and copy and paste to some degree?

[Susan]

@jen - thanks for letting me know. I had it set to friends or groups only. You should be able to send a message now.

@sheri I had the same experience searching for questions and finding reading comprehension ones. But I did find one page where I've grabbed a bunch and have them on a document ready to go. I'm not on other discussion groups so I don't see PopSugar ones (and searching for PopSugar myself didn't turn up the right ones apparently since there was no questions and no discussion threads).

In any case, I'm happy to get suggestions from people - you can all send me messages now. And in the meantime I have a list I can pull from.

Thanks for the tracking ideas (or at least commiserating that keeping track in multiple places is hard and I'm not alone in this feeling).