EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello everyone,

I hope that anyone in the path of the major storm hitting a lot of the country is well and prepared. We're heading up to Maine just before it hits and will be up there long enough for all the roads to be cleared up.

My only finish this week is Soft Launch. I used it for the "debut" prompt on the Nerd challenge. It was about 2.5 stars (rounded up to 3) for me. I think I'm just not the target age range to enjoy this. I personally did not like the super focus on alcohol overall. My favorite parts were the (infrequent) logic path of pursuing a legal defense.

I am still listening to How to Stop Time. This is an interesting story. I'm enjoying it more than The Midnight Library by the same author. It is a similar concept. Not really time travel but spanning a very long time and the story, as presented, jumps back and forth, but in a logical way.

I am now reading The Epicenter of Forever that I got on Amazon First Reads. While I'll finish it, the further into it I get, the more annoyed I get at the writing. There is constant foreshadowing to some big reveal of a major past event but it has been going on so long that it is "enough already". It has also turned into a form of the not-communicating-causes -all-problems trope that I dislike.

QOTW:
GR has their most-read-books list from 2025. How many have you read (whether in 2025 or earlier)? https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/3029

I'm at 17. Nearly all of my reads here are earlier than 2025. Only maybe 1 or 2 are from 2025.

Overall Top 12: 0
Fiction: 3
Historical Fiction: 4
Mystery & Thriller: 0
Fantasy: 3
Romantasy: 0
Science Fiction: 4
Horror: 0
Romance: 0
Young Adult: 1
Memoirs: 1
History & Biography: 0
General Non-fiction: 1

Did a reread of We Ride Upon Sticks, which I recommended to my book club. It's set in the late 1980s so I was there witnessing the extreme hairstyles they mention in the book so it was fun for me. Also read Black Cake as another book club pick, which I liked better than many of my IRL book club choices.
Read the next Rivers of London book, Stone and Sky, which I continue to enjoy. My other completion for January so far is The Lost Bookshop. It seems like it should something I would really like, but there were to many loose ends that I wanted more info on.
Off to finishTomb of the Sun King, a solid second entry onto the Raiders of Arcana series I found on Libby.
QOTW: 18 overall for me. I'm surprised it's that many. But I read a few for my IRL book club and enjoy Abby Jimenez.