EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi all, missed a week again. Don't even really have an excuse, just got busy and forgot. Sorry!

I put up a thread for selecting a book to read for the rest of the year. I meant to do this last week, but clearly forgot!

The last two weeks I finished:

The Broken Kingdoms- did audiobook for this. I love NK Jemisin, but I admit this trilogy isn't my favorite. It's fine, but I just can't seem to get as invested as in her other work. Counted for Posugar author that shares your zodiac sign, for book nerds beautiful cover.

Tipping the Velvet - This was decent, didn't love it. I had hoped more of it would be set in the theatre, I really liked that setting. Counted for popsugar 90s bestseller

Sex Criminals, Vol. 6: Six Criminals - wrapped up the comic, was a solid ending. Was a much more serious comic than expected from a goofy premise. Sure lots of humor, but dealt with a lot of serious subjects like mental health and dealing with sexuality.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden - this was a lot more fun than I expected. It's a good book for introverts, haha. A lot of the passages were her lamenting that she had to keep entertaining guests when she would much rather be alone and read. Also chafing at a woman's place in society, and lots of eye rolling at men pontificating on why women don't deserve a place in society etc. Counted as my popsugar anonymous author (orignally published anonymously), book nerds book set before I was born.

Joust - re-read for fun

Something is Killing the Children, Vol. 3 - creepy comic, really liking it. Will probably cosplay Erika Slaughter at some point. Her costume even has a mask built in, and i found merch places selling them!

All Systems Red, Artificial Condition , Rogue Protocol- audio re-reads. Realized the narrator is Kevin from Welcome to Nightvale!

Sea of Shadows - popsugar dnf from my tbr. I was struggling with this one, since I generally only dnf if I have a really good reason for it. but years ago i picked this up, accidentally sent to my phone instead of my kindle. Started it, didn't like reading on my phone, and forgot to ever send to my kindle. I can kind of see why I forgot about it. There's nothing WRONG with it really, it's just...not super memorable. World building is a little weak, not super connected to the characters. Not bad enough that I would refuse to continue, but since I only grabbed the first one, I probably will forget to ever go finish it.

Piranesi - This was alright, a little disappointing. It feels like the kind of book i SHOULD love, but I didn't. I didn't really connect with Piranesi, and I kind of guessed what was going on pretty early. Spent most the book just kind of waiting to be proven right. At least this one was short.

QOTW:

As we close in on the end of the year, how are people's reading goals doing? Doesn't have to be formal reading challenges, could be personal goals like reading all of a series or making progress on your tbr.

I've got one more book for popsugar, 5 left for ATY. I think the rest of my challenges I'm accepting I'm not finishing. I'm at 74/100 for book nerds, which I thought was pretty good. I went into that one planning to just fill in as i went, rather than TRYING to finish. I'm just going to see how far I get by the end of the year.

I might take a break from challenges for a year. I really have been craving some free reading.

I just learned that you could have Alexa read Kindle books to you! Okay, okay, totally behind the times, but this is so amazing! Not as good as an audiobook narration but she did use different voices for different characters! New running thing! Opened up my world!

Since the last check-in, I finished The Golden Compass. I called it my Popsugar bestseller from the 90's. I actually bought it back then, but could never get into it. (I know, I know....) Reading it now as an adult, it was only okay; the beginning is very, very slow, and I think I only got through it because we watched and liked the HBO series.

Some manga: Sweat and Soap, Vol. 2, Sweat and Soap, Vol. 3, The King's Beast, Vol. 3

I'm currently reading The Bronzed Beasts. I rearranged a couple of prompts so I could fit it in as a free book borrowed from the library, since it just came up on my library holds. I'm really enjoying it so far.

QOTW:
I'm way past my Goodreads challenge total of 150 books, although mostly I have manga & comics to thank for that. I have 3 books left for Popsugar. I haven't really looked at the prompts for Book Nerds in awhile, but I could probably knock a lot of those out with what I've already read.

Depending on the prompt list, I'll probably do Popsugar again next year, but I'll try to fill as much of them as possible by cleaning out my library hold/wish list.

I have a lot of finishes in the last two weeks.

First, I finished Don't Ask Me Where I'm From and just now (literally got off the zoom call 5 minutes ago) had a local session with the author. I was not able to attend the in person event in the next town but joined online. It fits the book nerds prompts of a BIPOC author as well as a local author. It is a YA book about a Latina teen taking part in METCO which is a Boston program that brings students out to suburban schools.

I finished Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison. It was super quick as it is 100 postcard length poems. Each day there was a couple words about the weather and then a short poem. I rarely read poetry. For me, with my engineering, analytical mind, it was only okay. Reading the poems didn't grab or move me. Maybe if they were recited, it would be better, but poetry is not my usual genre but I'm glad I read it and it wasn't a big time investment anyway.

I also finished Tiamat's Wrath, The Expanse #8. I have finally caught up and join the ranks waiting for the 9th and final book due in November I believe. I am happily surprised at how the authors can keep up the quality and engagement in the story over that many books, and these are not small books. I have thoroughly enjoyed the series.

I also finished the last Expanse novella Auberon. It is labeled as 8.5, so I listened to it after book 8 above, but it really should have been 7.5 based on the timeline.

I am currently reading The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions. This is a book that has me all over the place. First, it is depressing when I think of the CO2 and potential climate disaster we're making. Second, I am finding the discussions of the past extinctions fascinating. Third, it makes me want to be a citizen scientist paleontologist volunteer in retirement or something. Interestingly my daughter loaned it to me to read after she finished, and then I found out I independently added it to me TBR list a year ago.

I just started listening to Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. I'm back to Wil Wheaton narration after all the Jefferson Mays of the Expanse. Both are great narrators. I literally am 10 minutes into the audiobook so have no opinions yet.

QOTW:
I didn't really have a goal but I am way ahead of last year. While I've been posting on the book nerds I haven't kept track of what prompts I've filled in there.

Also been skipping a few weeks. Finally got Ready Player Two from my hold list which I enjoyed. One of those sequels when I loved the first one so much that I was expecting to be disappointed at least a little because it was a hard act to follow.
I read Sorcerer to the Crown, which was on the NPR best scifi fantasy books of the decade, in the category with four other books that I had given 5star ratings to. So it was good, and some unexpected depths about prejudice in magical late 1800s England, but I was also probably expecting too much because of its placement on the list with four other favorites.
I also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? because I am relatively new to science fiction and every so often try a classic. Didn't really like it but finished it since it was short; I'm not generally a fan of dystopian stuff. It was an interesting coincidence that it was set in 2021 when I decided to read it, and it was written when I was 1YO. A depressing thing was that the author could imagine hovercars, but not women in the workplace? ugh.
Latest finish was The Conductors, which was an interesting spin on Reconstruction era with magical twist. Two retired conductors from Underground Railroad living in Philadelphia and solving mysteries. Learned some things about the period.
I am slightly ahead of my goodreads challenge (88/110) and doing well on my book nerds. This is the first time I've tried a challenge and enjoying it more than I expected. I took the approach of reading what I wanted, and using each book to fill in as many applicable prompts as it met. Then tried to fill in prompts that were left, and now trying to get down to one book per prompt. So i'm up to 79 prompts with one book each, 16 prompts I've covered but each book counting twice, and the last five still to go but with a tentative plan for most. I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I would have read anyway fit the prompts, and the new things I wouldn't have tried without the prompts and liked have outnumbered the ones I didn't.

I think when we last checked in I had just started Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. I finished it and it was fascinating. Lots of food for thought. I used it for the cover with mostly text prompt.

I don't know what it was that made me think of it, but I had read and enjoyed Sing the Four Quarters by Tanya Huff as a teen, and randomly decided to get it from the library and read it again. I'd only remembered one particular plot point that was a part of the climax, so it was fun to read it again and have it be both new to me because I didn't remember, yet knowing where it was headed and not sure how they were going to get there. Also, something that I didn't pick up on as a teen, for obvious reasons - Huff absolutely NAILED the pregnancy aspect of the story. First of all, there aren't many stories period where the protagonist is pregnant for the entire book - pregnancies happen in fiction, of course, but I've rarely seen it portrayed so intimately! Anyway, I really had fun re-reading it, and I may go on to borrow the rest of the series that I'd never gotten around to when I was younger. I used it for the "book with a princess" prompt.

Finally I read Stargazing by Jen Wang for the graphic novel prompt, and also for my school's upcoming one school-one book lesson - everyone is reading the same book and will be discussing it in our advisory groups. It's a quick read and quite lovely.

QOTW: This is the first year I've done a book challenge, and I've enjoyed fitting my reading into the Book Nerds list of prompts. A few times I used the list to help me decide what to read, but mostly I read a book and then tried to figure out where it should apply. I've finished most of the first 50, and had a few others that didn't fit the remaining prompts so I started in on the second list. I'm up to 54 books read in 2021 at the moment and am quite happy with it.

since the last check it, i've finished Out of Spite, Out of Mind, The Dazzling Heights, and The Vexed Generation - I've finished the Magic 2.0 series!

I'm currently reading The Towering Sky, and that will finish the Thousandth Floor series.

QotW: my goal was to read 37 or more books, since in 2020 i read 36 books. my current book is #48 for the year, so... yaay! :D

I was on vacation this week and brought a big stack of books, but didn't end up with that much downtime and only read one. Better safe than sorry, and I'll get to them soon enough. (Piranesi is one of them, so we'll see if I agree with Sheri. It sounded like potentially not my jam, but the "at least it's short" thing was a deciding factor.)

Burglars Can't Be Choosers - A career burglar gets mixed up in a murder and has to clear his name. It's supposed to be lighthearted and funny, but some of the humor was the protagonist commenting on women's bodies in a way that was not, like, super icky (particularly for the 70s), but slightly off-putting. It also contained a fair number of implausibilities. The series seems to still be going but I don't think I'll continue.

Riot Baby - Still going through the free Tor novellas. I would describe this as "what if Matilda were Black" - and I mean that in a good way, exploring the implications of a power fueled by injustice when it's injustice all the way down. Toward the end it incorporated some near-future tech police state stuff that didn't feel necessary to me, and I'm not sure how much I bought the ending, but definitely worth the read.

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses - I think "Braiding Sweetgrass" is the more popular book by this author, but I saw she had this one about moss and I knew that was the one I wanted to try. This was great to read on the trip because I would read a bit in the morning and then we would go hike and see some moss and I would be like, "The moss lady said..." I really enjoyed this, and I will eventually read her other book.

QOTW: I have fallen off adding books to my Book Nerds list. I have been doing well at adding everything to Goodreads, so I could still go back through and add them later, but to be honest I probably won't. I don't think I'm a challenge type of reader.