RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

Yet another week has somehow gone by. What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[silversea]

Still very slow with reading. I finished The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, which I really liked. Definitely going to check out its sequel later this year.

I'm now reading If the Villainess and Villain Met and Fell in Love Volume 3 by Harunadon. I think I'm in a bit of a reading slump with the stress, so I'm hoping this can be something that get me out of the slump.

[earlymorningechoes]

I just put The Tainted Cup on my TBR, it's good to see people are liking it!

[silversea]

It's a pretty fun mystery and the characters (especially Ana) are charming, but I found myself enjoying the world building more than I expected. Very Lovecraftian but also reminds me a bit of Attack on Titan.

[white_aster]

I loved Tainted Cup, and just need to get through my current few books before I can take on the sequel on hold at the library for me. :D I'm looking forward to it!

[silversea]

Me too, and April isn't that far off! Can time please hurry up?

[snowynight]

I have just read Ghost Music by An Yu. It's a short good read. It's surreal and sad, exploring the social expectation of women, the conflicted relationship between artists and art, and contains a speaking mushroom.

I'll definitely read her other works.

[sixbeforelunch]

The last few days haven't been great for reading but in theory I'm working on Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford.

[petrea_mitchell]

Finished Majipoor Chronicles, and enjoyed it a lot. Now I've learned that the two random Majipoor books I picked up are books 1 and 2 of a trilogy, so I may as well track a copy of the third one down.

I also went through the Crossroads Adventure book set in Majipoor, Revolt on Majipoor, which was the thing that prompted me to read the Majipoor books in the first place. This one is by a different author than the ones set in Pern, but it has the same problem, where it's a novel in chunks occasionally interrupted by a die roll, rather than a typical gamebook writing style. At this point I'll have to blame the editor.

Now I've switched over to nonfiction with Origin Unknown, which is a book on word origins and the process of tracking them down.

[screechfox]

How is Origin Unknown so far? I'm always curious about interesting linguistics books.

[petrea_mitchell]

If you like nice tidy detective stories, it's not a good choice. Most of the word origins remain unsolved; you get a tour of possible explanations, and the writer often has an opinion on which is most likely, but there's no definitive answer. It's interesting from the standpoint of the investigative work, and the information about how language evolves in general, and the limitations of the available sources.

[screechfox]

Oh, good to know! Definitely still sounds interesting.

[white_aster]

I remember reading some Majipoor stuff some many moons ago (Lord Valentine's Castle?) and liking it. Makes me want to look it up again!

[earlymorningechoes]

I'm a little book hungover from how good At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard was, so my reading has slowed down a lot. I'm poking at Aurelius (to be Called) Magnus from the same series, and also slowly making my way through That Librarian by Amanda Jones, a memoir about dealing with being an accidental face of the opposition to book bans in Louisiana.

[screechfox]

I just (about two minutes ago) finished Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. I found it fluid and funny, although I'd like to get an edition with larger text than the one I currently own, because it was difficult to read in places.

My current non-fiction read is Trans Britain, edited by Christine Burns. Interesting although it already feels dated in places (it came out in 2018). A library hold for Boy Parts, by Eliza Clark, just came in, so I'll probably pick that up tomorrow and start reading it then.

[pauraque]

I just finished Stories of Your Life and Others, a short story collection by Ted Chiang. Very high concept sf; even the stories I didn't like gave me a lot to think about.

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis is up next because it needs to go back to the library soon. I've been warned that it's not as good as the first book in the trilogy, so I'm braced not to find it as delightful as I found Out of the Silent Planet.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I finished a book of poetry Versed by Rae Armantrout, which I enjoyed and am still working my way through Work of Art by Adam Moss which is a large anthology of interviews with different kinds of artists about the artistic process. I've sort of stalled on Exit Music by Ian Rankin (#17 in the Inspector Rebus series) but it's my comfort reading so maybe that's a good thing.

[tozka]

I just finished The Compact by Miriam Benisse (decent queer fantasy/romance but had some structure problems) and I'm almost done with a short story by KL Noone (Sound the Fairy Call, another queer fantasy/romance) which I thought was a regular-length book and now I'm bummed because I LOVE fantasy-romances with fairies who, like, steal people.

[bluapapilio]

I'm at 81% in my listen of Project Hail Mary and I'm going to be sad when it's over, it really won my heart. :')

[white_aster]

IIRC, the end of it was some of the best parts. :D ......either that or some fanfic set after the end of it was some of the best parts, I can't really remember now....

[zenigotchas]

Finished The Reluctant Dragon. It was cute.
Gonna get started on chapter 2 of Beyond Good and Evil

[olivermoss]

Reading This Is How You Lose The Time War for one of my book clubs. I am not into it, but hey it's short.

My audiobook is Children of the Night, which is way better than Burning Water so far. Some amusing retconning going on. I'll talk more once I am further into it, but it still has some of Burning Water's flaws, just way toned done. Di continues to be very weird about Romani people.

I finished Malum Discordiae by Ashlyn Drewek. I enjoyed it. It was very much not what I'd typically read as it's enemies to lovers, but it was very well crafted. A lot of weird tropes and conveniences that I typically see in that genre were either absent or done surprisingly well. the amount of polish and also having an author who really knows what they are doing was great. Also, while the characters were obviously being batted around by the plot they were also smart and not just reacting to things. For both of them, there was a sense of agency and that they were smart, not just emotionally blind idiots.

[got_quiet]

I'm reading How to protect bookstores and why. The present and future of bookselling. It's basically a biography of a number of bookstores, mostly in the US, with some analysis of why they have managed to survive and what challenges they face. It's upfront about how hard the business is, and there's no silver bullet offered so far, just calls for civic engagement and some industry friendly policies.

[cornerofmadness]

Still working on A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer and it is slow going

[silversea]

What a fun title! Is the book as good as the title, or is it a letdown?

[cornerofmadness]

let down. I wanted to love this but the main character is just not doing it for me. Mostly I want to slap her

[phoenixsong]

Finished audiobook of “Mexican Gothic” this week, basically in one day. Definitely enjoyed it!

Last month, I read “Famous Adopted People”. Also thoroughly enjoyed, but it is an absolutely wild ride of a book. If you have assumptions regarding adopted people, specifically Koreans adopted to the U.S., please leave them at the door.

[lassarina]

Mexican Gothic is one of the few things I've successfully read in audiobook. What a great and horrifying story.

[valoise]

I'm continuing to read the Bob Dylan bio while listening to music relevant to each chapter.

I only finished one short book this week: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. This was engaging. The plot, people at a remote location being mysteriously killed off one-by-one, has become a well-known trope. It was interesting going back to the source to see how Christie pulled it off.

[ilyena_sylph]

Old Kingdom series by Nix and the Silmarillion and he Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham when I need to swap to nonfiction.

[lassarina]

I read Onyx Storm, the third book in the Empyrean series (Fourth Wing), which ate my brain just as thoroughly as the other two books and it may be a bit of a garbage fire but this dumpster is quite nice for me actually.

I've started Our Deadly Designs by Kalyn Josephson, second book in a Jewish-inspired fantasy duology about golems and the price of a soul. Very much enjoying it.

Nonfiction wise, I continue to creep through Michelle Eltman's The Selfish Romantic because probably at some point in my life I will consider dating again and I would like to make fewer fuckups.

Otherwise, fanfic. So much fanfic. Thank you, DA: Veilguard fanfic writers, for being on point with the spicy fic.

[white_aster]

I did finish Heavenly Tyrant, #2 in the Iron Widow trilogy. I was...kind of meh about it, for both structural and "this is just not my trope" reasons. The first 75% of it was extremely slow, with the previously dynamic character now injured, side-lined, imprisoned, and highly circumscribed to the point she couldn't do anything. Her love/hate relationship with the new emperor was a spark of interestingness, as he was charming and had some good ideas and was really framed well as a morally gray character who nonetheless was an arrogant asshole. In the end, though...it just didn't hold together for me and the "nope, not my trope" happened so much at the end that I'm thinking book 3 is just not going to be for me.

In better news, I also picked up The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O'Keefe, and I am INTRIGUED! The blurb kind of made it sound like scifi-romance, and that...well, it can go either way with me, depending on the ratio of romance to scifi. This one, though, is heavily leaning into the scifi aspects in super interesting ways, and no one has done anything incredibly stupid yet (I'm about a third of the way through.) The book actually has some very interesting plot mechanics to it (clones, essentially! zombies, essentially! survival and mystery on a dying planet!) I have been middling impressed at the science aspects that we've been shown so far. One main character is a geophysicist, and has already scienced his way through one catastrophe (good!), but I've already had a few moments of "....uh...how does that rule you laid down...WORK? Wouldn't X or Y prevent it?" I hold out some hope that perhaps there IS some explanation for this, but I will have to see. I at least applaud them for their ambition. Anyway, I'm really liking this and looking forward to seeing where it goes.

[givemeyourhonor]

Getting near the end of Swordcrossed by Freya Marske. It's been a decent enough read with one or two caveats here or there

War and Peace is going? The war part of this is really boring. I'm hoping to get back to drama at home, since that was slightly better.

Also started reading Bastian by Solche, because r/otomeisekai hates this woman, but I heard her writing is good. The plot is intriguing so far in terms of messy, messy romance. The worst meet cute ever, or is it meet uncute?

[barbaratp]

Estou lendo "O Escaravelho do Diabo" um livro juvenil da escritora brasileira Ana Lúcia Machado.