RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

The flag is waving, the birds are singing and the sun is shining. It is Wednesday.

What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[quillpunk]

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, Power Plays & Straight A's Eden Finley and Saxon James, Biggles Learns to Fly by W.E. Johns.

[wearing_tearing]

How are you liking Leviathan Wakes?

[quillpunk]

I'm about 80 pages in and I like it so far! :D (It is a library book though so technically I really need to speed up my reading, lol.)

[wearing_tearing]

I'm glad you're liking it! The series is so good overall. And the TV adaptation was also so much fun :D

[quillpunk]

Yeah, I've seen parts of the TV show and I love it <3 I'm super excited for the book series; though I am reading very slowly right now. Sigh. But I'm in a scifi/space opera mood, so hopefully i can pick up some speed soon :D

[wearing_tearing]

Cheering you on with your reading!

[cactus_rs]

I just started Bel Canto and I'm also working on The Bright Ages.

[quillpunk]

good luck! :D

[valoise]

I just started Finder by Suzanne Palmer and Recipes from the World of Tolkien by Robert Tuesley Anderson. I always like to have one fiction and one nonfiction going on. Liking them both.

I do archival volunteer at the Danbury Museum and am currently working through the correspondence and author's notes compiled for the 1896 book The History of Danbury. I thought I ought also read the published book and have been slogging through the 1896 book for a couple of months now, but it's poorly written and consists mostly of 'here's these rich/middle class white guys and what they did' from the mid 17th century to the end of the 19th. I'll finish it this month but be very happy to leave it behind when I do.

This week

[dialecticdreamer]

I'm reading

Nonfiction: Moral Disengagement by Albert Bandura
(I have Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb waiting in the wings because I should finish 'Disengagement' later tomorrow, probably before lunch.) I'll need to order more books from the library for next Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'll fill in with nonfiction from the Internet Archive. I look forward to surprising myself with a few new topics, as well!

Fiction: I finished a spate of crossover fics, including a couple that I read to the end just for the sake of not skipping parts. The stories were too predictable, but well enough written that I liked finding the occasional gem of wording. Currently, I'm reading an NCIS fic called "Friends Like These" by hedwig_edwiges on AO3.

[zenigotchas]

A study of Dragons, East and West by Qiguang Zhao!
So it is exactly what it says on the tin. I thought it was just gonna be some surface level comparisons between Eastern dragons and Western dragons but it goes into the history of countries and how their own experiences shaped the way they viewed dragons and the stories they told about them. It also gives you something to think about in the realm of writing and how the East and the West both used dragons as different types of writing tools. I've learned a lot of different things from this book, it's such a treat.

[quillpunk]

that sounds absolutely fascinating! :D

[wearing_tearing]

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers: stalled a little bit since the work week started and I have a difficult time picking up physical copies during breaks. Weird little book; first few stories were pretty great and I'm iffy about the romantic ones.

The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice: had to pick this up after the IWTV Season 2 finale! So far I'm having trouble with all the 83745837568375835 POVs, but I hope this introduction bit gets moving and we can get to some more interesting things.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore: also having a difficult time with the multiple POVs + the split timeline. I do want to love this, though, since it's set during a summer camp and involves a kid going missing.

[petrea_mitchell]

The Gate of Ivrel by C. J. Cherryh, which I first tried reading 25-30 years ago and just didn't click with me at the time. It does now!

[yhlee]

Ahhhh I loved that! Hilariously, I read the fourth Morgaine book first and was intrigued but confused. (It was in my 10th grade English teacher's collection of books and I had no idea there were earlier books; she didn't have them anyway.)

[quillpunk]

It's always fun when you retry something that didn't hit before and find that it does now--makes me feel kind of magical, lol. Good luck!

[yhlee]

Various things in progress - my attention span is shot so I tend to bounce around between books. /o\

Fiction:
- Wiliam Sleator, The Boxes. I read a ton of Sleator's children's sci-fi/suspense as a kid and am on a nostalgia kick after rereading the superb Singularity earlier. I think I remember the sci-fi plot reveal twist for this one, but I'm not sure!

Poetry/other:
- Various chapbooks from Salò Press in the UK because I was desperate for extremely tiny short books despite UK shipping. The one I loved was Matthew Mahaney's Word Problems, which is maybe a cross between weird experimental fiction and prose poetry drawing inspiration from exam questions. The other two fell under the category of "objectively perfectly competent poetry but not to my taste: Connor Fisher's The Unholy Moon, Laura Wetherington's Little Machines. Also Tim Major's play Echec!, which is about a man vs. the Mechanical Turk. Honestly I consider "one thing I loved, the other three not for me" a typical hit rate for random buying of things, so I'll probably order from them again at some point in the future!

Nonfiction:
- Ellen Besen, illus. Bryce Hallett. Animation Unleashed. I picked this up in a used bookstore when I was in California last month and this has been an unexpected treasure, looking more at the pragmatics of animation and narrative than the mechanics of the twelve principles material you see elsewhere. As you might expect given the topic, the illustrations are absolutely load-bearing, and a lot of fun! I've been taking notes on this as I go for a smol animation project. :)

- Annie Cosby & Collin Butts, Set Your Story Free: The Writer's Guide to the Freewrite. This was free and they're up-frontly shilling for the Freewrite word processors, but since I have one, this is entertaining if not groundbreaking on freewriting/vomit drafting as a writing mode. That said, I know writers who polish every sentence as they go at the rough draft stage and it works great. :p

- John A. Bain's Chess Rules for Students. I started learning chess beyond "here are some rules and how the heck does castling work??" back in 2020 so I thought I'd dip a toe back in. Bain's books are for kids but that's where I am, and I like doing workbooks. :) I like this so far, but it really is an orientation to the rules. I'm hoping this will help me remember the rule for en passant captures! (I'm marking up the PDF version in one of those enotebook things, a Supernote Nomad.)

[white_aster]

Early this week exploded with not-fun things. I have not done a lot of reading.

But I did finish: Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life by Alan Deutschman. Which was pretty much what I said last week: not the most mindblowing nor the worst book about how to make changes in your life. If you need reassurance it can be done and/or a set of stated principles to work from, this is a good choice.

I am still reading:

Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton

Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher

Fool's Run by Patricia A. McKillip (I feel like I have to read some of this in the coming week or I have to admit that I've dropped reading it, the poor thing)

[olivermoss]

I finished Wolfsong by T. J. Klune. Next up for e-books is Dear Mothman.

For audiobooks I am a bit into How To Solve Your Own Murder.

[mulhollands]

Started reading The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford because I watched the show of it a while ago.

[tinchen]

Hi! I'm new here!
I'm finally reading Winter's Gifts by Ben Aaronovitch. Plus the endless stream of KU urban fantasy romance novels that are quick to read and don't ask too much of me - right now Hex of the Witch and The Vampire and the Case of the Cursed Canine

[quillpunk]

Welcome! :D I hope you're having fun with your reads. Sometimes reading something that doesn't ask much of you really hits the spot <3 Good luck!