EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello everyone
Welcome to the week before Thanksgiving. I hope you're all planning to have a great week whether you are with family, friends, alone or traveling. My husband and I will be alone, up at our ski timeshare. Skiing will be interesting, very early season, and I've never eaten Thanksgiving in a restaurant.

My only finish this week is Snake-Eater. This turned out to be just okay for me. I've been wanting to read T. Kingfisher based on other's recommendations but the writing style and book ended up just not being my jam. Just an average 3 stars from me.

I am "this close" to finishing Wildfire. I am loving this Ilona Andrews Hidden Legacy series. This is the 3rd book. I like the fact that the MCs act like adults, communicate clearly and effectively, trust each other and deal with their problems. I hate the "keep secrets" or "don't communicate" tropes so this is refreshing.

I am reading The Wealth Ladder: Proven Strategies for Every Step of Your Financial Life. I have subscribed to the author's personal finance weekly blog writing for several years now and enjoy it. This book is not entirely new to me as he expanded on several topics he has blogged about in the past. It is a fast read and I'll finish it in the coming week.

QOTW:
The weather outside in NE is cold. Tell me about a cold setting(or hot if that's what it's like where you are) in a book you’ve read recently.

The only one that really comes to mind is The Frozen River but I read that several months ago. It is set in Maine during the winter so definitely a cold setting. And I'm headed up to Maine to ski so it feels appropriate!

Susan, so glad you are enjoying the Hidden Legacy series! Just finished the first six that were available this fall. #4/5/6 feature Catalina as the MC. It was so nice that they were always available for me on Libby when I was ready for the next one.

I have also been reading some t kingfisher. She seems to do both fantasy and horror-tinged fantasy. I loved Swordheart which is fantasy/romance and fun, so you might want to give that one a try even if Snake-Eater didn't work for you.

Really liked my irl book club book, First Lie Wins. Mystery/thriller involving con artist and one plot twist after another.

Sunward is a not-too-long scifi mystery that I enjoyed. Part of the plot is a human pilot who mentors AI bots in their first year. I thought it was an interesting take given all the AI being inflicted upon us these days.

I was able to travel to Iceland this spring, so read Snowblind, a mystery set there when I received a recommendation for it from somewhere. Not bad for a debut, so will be trying at least the next in the series.

I will be visiting my family and hope to use the opportunity to figure out what books to get the nieces this year.

I would say Kingfisher is also not my jam, but I like her better when I like the source material, for example her Beauty and Beast retelling (which is clearly influenced by the Robin McKinley versions). She does do a lot of genres, so if that's what didn't mesh, I agree you might want to try again; in my limited experience, the tone is fairly consistent. Snake-Eater sounds similar to her short story "The Jackalope Wives", which I would say is well done but not my favorite sort of thing, so I don't think I'll read that one.

The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing - This is about the deciphering of cuneiform writing in the Old Persian and Akkadian languages. I think Mike from Penny Arcade mentioned having enjoyed it. It was interesting and entertaining, although I will say that there was one tangential bit that crossed my personal sphere of knowledge, and it was wrong ("In the mid-nineteenth century, the committee's members included William Rowan Hamilton, an Irish mathematician who had developed quantum mechanics" - he definitely had not done that). Hopefully that was an isolated incident and the author did the research on the stuff the book was actually about.

QOTW: Well, looking at the list, I guess it's The Wind in the Willows, in which there is a scary moment of being lost in a snowy wood, but (I guess I will spoiler for a century-old book) (view spoiler)[they end up having a cozy Christmas situation (hide spoiler)].