Week 12 Check In

[Susan]

Hello Everyone,

Sheri my thoughts are still with you and Teddy and I hope this week was better for all of you. This was a relatively calm week for me before the upcoming storm. My daughter is getting married in 5 weeks and in a couple weeks it will start getting crazy. They live on the opposite coast and they're getting married here, coming to be here a week before the wedding.

This week I finished Recursion. I really enjoyed this and it was very engaging. There were times I wasn't really sure 'how it worked" and timeline continuity kind of messed with my brain. But it was very interesting. My husband is also reading it now that I finished.

I started Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling at the suggestion of a colleague. I am really liking this book. Pre-pandemic, we would attend tapings of the TV show (on World Channel) Stories From The Stage at our local PBS station and loved it. Storytelling is always interesting to me. Also I want to give talks at conferences, write an engineering blog post for my company and give an internal seminar BUT I can never think of what to talk about. I'm done with part I and that was really helpful with methods of finding stories.

I'm listening to European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, book 2 from the FoE Book selection. I am enjoying it. It is a similar format to the first one. It is long though - I think the audiobook is going to approach 16-18 hours.

QOTW:
What is your favorite book cover?

This is hard for me because I appreciate covers that go with the book. I tend to like simplistic covers that pull you in. But I also appreciate artwork covers. I don't think I can name a specific book or cover that I can remember that I would call my favorite. I'm interested to hear what covers mean to others.

[Rebecca]

It was a week of short things, apparently.

False Scent - Still going through the Ngaio Marsh books. This one was not amazing in the plot department, but it's about theater people, which is one of her areas of expertise, so that aspect was fun. I got worried when the costume designer was described as "a bachelor and most understandably so", but he wasn't really any more of a caricature than the other characters (sort of believably over-the-top in the theater context) and it didn't feel homophobic.

Outwitting Squirrels: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels - I don't have birdfeeders, and my squirrel issues were resolved by covering the soil in all my plant pots with chicken wire, but I thought this would be fun and funny. It wasn't really. The jokes seemed kind of mean, and there were enough factual errors about stuff I knew (birds sleep in nests; rabbits are rodents) that I didn't feel I could trust any new information. Also I tried to look up one of the feeders mentioned because I was having trouble following the written description, and I couldn't find it anywhere on the internet, even though I was reading the latest edition. Don't read this, just watch Mark Rober's squirrel videos.

Expedition Backyard - Written by Rosemary Mosco but illustrated by someone else, this is a graphic novel for kids about exploring nature. It was sweet, and I probably would have loved it at the intended age, but it's not one that has a whole lot for adults. Give this to an early elementary kid who likes nature, especially in an urban setting.

QOTW: I had to think about this a lot, because while I will definitely pick a book by its cover (see Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which has a bird and my favorite style of ampersand), I'm not necessarily that fond of the cover itself as an aesthetic object or whatever. I'm going to have to go with my complete Sherlock Holmes B&N "leatherbound" edition (2011 version) because I selected it specifically for the cover, particularly the back. Honorable mention goes to Budgerigar, which is probably a stock photo but a fabulous one.

[Shel]

I posted pretty late in the week last week, so only one thing to add which is that I finished Children of Memory yesterday. I didn't think it quite lived up to the first two in the trilogy, but it was still very good and ended with a twist that I did NOT see coming. I love a good surprise ending (as long as it makes sense, which this one does)!

QOTW: Tough question. When I was younger, I was fairly obsessed with the cover art by Michael Whelan - here's an example where the cover art made me buy the book (which I loved):


I like the aesethetic of leather/imitation leather covers embossed with gold decorations. I can't think of a specific one - I do most of my reading either on ebook or from the library these days, so I don't have my recent reads readily browse-able without click through my GR tags (which I don't have time to do).

[Daniele]

Two finishes for me this week:

Confessions. I mean, any time you pick up a Japanese story set in a school, you know you should buckle up because it's going to be a trip. This was exactly as promised, and a great little puzzle where you see the same events from the POV of everyone involved, and where things get distorted. I used it for Book Nerds "Wise teacher" prompt.

The Tenant, which I picked up because I saw someone in another FB group claim that her not connecting with the book was probably the translator's fault. As a translator, my ears perked up. It's your standard Nordic Noir police procedural, usually gray and bleak. I don't know Danish, but I can usually smell bad translations, and this wasn't it. Doubt I care enough about the cops to read their next cases. Used for the Book Nerds "A book in translation" prompt.

I hope Teddy is coming around! Sasha's new medications (and the warmer weather) have put the spring back into her step, and I am happy and relieved - as is she, I suppose!

Yesterday, I asked the Book Nerds group to help me out with suggestions for new to me authors, as that's what I'm committing to reading until my birthday in late July. Feel free to add your recommendations here too!

QOTW: The first ones that come to mind are graphic novels, but that might be cheating a bit. Among conventional novels, I love The Girl in Red. And I like punny/innuendo/abstract covers, like The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains or several variant covers of Lolita.

I discovered one of my favourite authors as a teen by picking up The Diamond Throne at the airport based solely on the cover, so I suppose it should get a special nod too.

[Jen W.]

Hi, everyone. Things have been pretty quiet this week.

Finished:
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - 4 stars - for a book set in or about Hollywood. The bisexual rep in this felt so validating and so well done.

The Echo Wife - 4 stars - for a book about a divorce. I really enjoyed this.

Comics & manga:
Persona 5, Vol. 2
Spy x Family, Vol. 9

Currently reading:
The Witch's Heart

Upcoming/Planned:
Blood Debts
I have a pile of physical manga I need to get through this week from the library, too.

QOTW:
I have a whole shelf called "love the cover" here on Goodreads. Although I don't always remember to update it. I especially love the covers for Little Thieves and Painted Devils.

Recently, this one caught my eye, although I haven't read the book yet: Flowerheart.

Daniele, I think I picked up The Diamond Throne from the library based on that cover, too. That was the first Eddings I had read, and it sent me down a rabbit hole to read all of his other books.

[Sheri]

Hi all,

Teddy's doing a bit better, vet wants stitches to stay in til tomorrow night so he's still coned. But gave approval for Teddy to roam the house again, so he's less miserable being cooped up all day. We still have him isolated at night though, but with my husband sleeping with him in the guest bed for company. (he's better at sleeping with animals, he sleeps like a rock.). The girls are freaked out by the cone and there's more fighting than usual when they going, even Pixel his bonded sister wants nothing to do with him right now. So we don't want him out at night when we can't break things up if it gets too intense. We have an oncology appointment for May 1st, which is farther away than I like but we're on the list if there's an earlier opening. It's really just a consultation for next steps, there's no current sign of anything returning. No actual urgency to it, it's just the anxiety of "what if". And being unable to make plans, not knowing if he's going to need additional treatment no matter what, or only if something shows up.

this week I finished:

The Echo Wife - I liked this quite a bit, kind of dark and creepy and unsettling. Part of my book club's TBR challenge.

A Holly Jolly Diwali - audio book, this was cute and light

Followers - got this as part of my book club's white elephant book exchange at Christmas. It was a social thriller involving social media. I liked it, weird. A bit over the top. Also part of my TBR challenge.

Currently reading:

The Genesis of Misery - kinda expected to LOVE this, but it's dragging a bit. I don't hate it or anything, but i expected it to be much faster paced, in you face than it is. Spending way too much time just in one character's head.

Paradise Lost - trying to do the audio for this, which I thought would help. Not huge on poetry, but usually someone reading it imbibes personality and emotion to it. But the narrator for this one is reading at a pretty emotionless speedy clip. So it just kind of turns it all to background noise, making it hard to really follow. I'm not sure if I'd do much better reading though. I 100% tend to skim poetry, which is why i picked audio in the first place. It's a bummer there doesn't tend to be multiple audio editions to choose from. (i get why, it's just a bummer).

QOTW: I'm a graphic designer, i do love a good cover. I tend to like ones that either have fantastic artwork or really striking design. I love , ,