2022 ONTD Reading Challenge discussion

Did you enjoy your May pick? Would you recommend it to your fellow readers? Was it difficult or easy to complete this task?

Ooof, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was a lot darker than I remembered.

I still think it's a wonderful standalone (possibly even a starting point for people who just get overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the Discworld series), and a really good mix of fun romp and cute, funny animals to entertain the young'ins and deeper stuff that'll go over their heads and add more dimension for adult readers.

I read Wish You Were Here and I'm not going to recommend it. Being able to hear the owner's animals' thoughts was a fun aspect of this book but so many little things rubbed me wrong. I don't want to quote my entire review, lol. Bright side it was an easy read. (Still haven't finished April)

I read The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss.



This was such a fun story for lovers of fantasy in the vein of Libba Bray and all things gothic horror. I can't wait to read the next in the series! One of the group of girls is a puma-human hybrid!

Okay. I confess that I'm not challenging myself with this particular one and read some children's books

The Tale of Kitty In Boots
Pete the Cat: Go, Pete, Go!
Splat the Cat: Funny Valentine
Millions of Cats

Millions of Cats is from 1928 and is the oldest American picture book to still be in print so that's a cool little tidbit.
I've never actually read anything by Beatrix Potter so that was another first for me.

I read Sabriel to complete my personal challenge of getting out of my comfort zone with books and while I'm glad I completed a fantasy novel, reading it confirmed for me that I don't enjoy "hero's journey" type fantasy novels.

I read The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lillian Jackson Braun. It was a very quick, easy mystery, very Agatha Christie. I did knock off a star for the abrupt ending and the fact that they did not tell us if the journalist gets to keep the cat.

I read Wish You Were Here and it was fine, though not amazing. I kinda enjoy when the animals solve a mystery (a la, the Chet and Bernie books) and thought the conversations between the animals were kinda funny. The animals had some good insights into humans too.

I tried reading Sabriel but couldn’t get into it. So, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland + Through the Looking Glass. As much as love the aesthetics and the Disney movie, I didn’t enjoy the books much. They’re just too scattered and frantic.

If you want to have a good cry, look no further than The Travelling Cat Chronicles. The translation is not my favorite, though. It was so dry.

I started with The Cats of Ulthar for this challenge and since it was short felt like I needed to read another, so I just completed Sabriel. I enjoyed it--or at least, I'm curious--and I'll finish the trilogy, but need to read a couple other things before I dive back into this series. One thing that frustrated me a lot was that I spent a good chunk of the book wondering what some things were (the Charter, Charter Mages, Free vs. Charter Magic, etc.) so it was hard for me to understand why it was important or what it meant in the grand scheme of the story. It felt a little bit like holding things back so that you can explain it all in a future story, which is something that drives me nuts in books and films. For that reason, I'm not sure that this is a book I'd recommend to anyone unless they were looking for a book that fit a specific criteria (like our challenge, where a book where a cat is an important character).