RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

Still doing this! What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[quillpunk]

Taji From Beyond the Rings by R. Cooper <3

[white_aster]

...I think I own that! I think I bought it from Smashwords at some point and never got around to reading it. would be interested in what you think. :)

[falkner]

About to finish volume 4 of Dungeon Crawler Carl!

[quillpunk]

Nice!

[dualscreen]

I finished up reading Lord of Chaos last week (holy hell that ending was crazy) and now I'm about a fifth through A Crown of Swords :)

[silversea]

Just finished The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King, which I enjoyed.

Currently reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey and A Harvest of Hearts by Andrea Eames. I'm unfortunately not really enjoying either so far, but I'm still early so hopefully they'll get better.

[peaceful_sands]

I recently finished Orbital. When I stopped hoping for a plot and action of some kind I began to enjoy it for the way it looked at the minutiae of life onboard and the distance from life on earth and the perspective it gave the characters.

[silversea]

Hmm, now I'm not sure if I want to continue with Orbital, since I do like having some plot to follow. I'll keep trying to see if the characters will grow on me.

[screechfox]

I completed both of my two library gets, Pod by Laline Paull and Penance by Eliza Clark. I've got a couple of reservations pending so hopefully they'll be through by the time I get to the library again on Friday.

Still reading through Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker, although I'm into the section on autumn now, so I'm in the home stretch. (It's not a big book, to be clear!) Just learned that Lammas, which I previously only knew as a Wiccan thing, was a Christian festival - the 'mas' is the same as in 'Christmas'!

Because I was apparently still in the mood for fiction about teenage killers after Penance, I'm rereading The Devil's Mixtape by Mary Borsellino, an old comfort read of mine (... that probably shouldn't be comforting).

[spiralsheep]

I vaguely recall Lammas being from "loaf mass"? I refuse to check though because loaf mass is a sweet expression for a grain harvest festival. :-)

[screechfox]

Yes! From 'hlafmæsse', although according to the book we don't really know what bread-based things they specifically did for Lammas.

[spiralsheep]

Yeah, loaves as art are a widespread Eurasian agriculturalist set of traditions but difficult to demonstrate archaeologically for obvious reasons, and not a common feature in official records or durable high status artistic representations for equally obvious reasons.

[screechfox]

Yeah! We have recorded blessings for bread generally in Anglo-Saxon sources, and a rite/ritual to protect the harvest from mice using the bread consecrated on Lammas, though, apparently!

[spiralsheep]

Yes, recorded prayers are a surprisingly useful source for what people cared about in everyday life. I hope the mice got their share anyway. :-)

I remember looking at that book when it was published and deciding to wait until the library got a copy. I keep seeing readers enjoying and recommending it.

[olivermoss]

Still on Gideon the 9th.

for bookclub this weekend I'd got Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman, which I've read before so I wasn't going to re-read, maybe skim, But after checking my own notes on the book I feel the need to actually re-read it for the discussion. It's an amazing transmasc vampire novel. I re-listened to a podcast interview with him about it last night and, yeah, I need to find a way to make more time between now and Sunday

[screechfox]

How are you finding Gideon the Ninth? I know last post you said you'd bounced off it the first time.

[olivermoss]

Decent so far. I didn't bounce off it last time, I just got derailed. I don't know by what, but it happens sometimes. Either I get too busy to read for a while or another canon drops and derails everything

[screechfox]

Oh, that's fair! I do that sometimes, although more with TV.

[olivermoss]

I find shows easier to pick back up. If my reading gets too interrupted, I'd need to restart. That's why I really want to make sure I make it through this time. Restarting again would get annoying

[spiralsheep]

Currently reading You Are Here, by David Nicholls, which is supposed to be a middle-aged, second time around, romance with hiking but I'm at the very beginning so I don't have an opinion (and I'm apparently the only person in my social circles who has never read Nicholls before).

Read since last week:

The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke and illustrated by Victoria Sawdon (I agree with everyone who has said it didn't feel like a complete story); and

Rocket Girl vol.1 & 2 (complete arc) by Brandon Montclare and Amy Reeder; and

The Girl Who Can, And Other Stories, by Ama Ata Aidoo, expanded edition 2002, short stories mostly set in West Africa and the US; and

My Faith in Frankie, by Mike Carey and Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel, which is a fantasy romance comic from 2004.

[peaceful_sands]

Still making my way slowly through The Guardians by John Grisham and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I’ve just finished the first two in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series and have now started on the third - The Farthest Shore.

[starfleetbrat]

Wayward Children #10 - Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

its pretty good so far, very character focused. I find the books in this series that focus on just one or two characters the better ones. The group stories seem to lose focus and don't hold my attention as well. This one is focused on Nadya.

Disappointingly, there is no news of a book #11 at all. But hopefully that doesn't mean there won't be one at some point.

[gingicat]

I think this is the one that broke my heart the most.

[petrea_mitchell]

Finished Master Slave Husband Wife. For a book where you know not everything can turn out great, it was quite the entertaining adventure. And now I need to read up on panoramas, another bit of 19th-century technology I've never heard of before.

I also read The Neverending Story, which has been on my "I need to read that sometime" list ever since I was a kid and my cousin told me that the movie only adapted part of the book. Which turns out to be true. In fact, the events loosely adapted by the movie are really just a prologue to the main story.

Now reading Daughter of the Bright Moon, which has a competent, well-written heroine but is definitely a book from another era in other ways.

[apachefirecat]

Ooo! Was Neverending Story good, at least worth HALF its hype and the love and nostalgia that most, if not all, of us bookworms feel for it from our childhood?

I recently came across my late Father's last copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. I WANT to read it, but it's gonna be HARD... for multiple reasons... </3

[petrea_mitchell]

It was!

[apachefirecat]

Thank you for that assurance! <3

[givemeyourhonor]

Finished Peach Blossom Debt. What a fun book. The ending feels rewarding and touching all at once. Like it starts pretty slow pacing wise and I think some characters could have gotten more screen time, but the last third is excellent.

War and Peace. We are home from war for now. I'm excited to see what changed for everyone ngl.

Bastian. Bastian became a controlling jerk, which he himself alluded to when he made the offer to Odette. This is too much power for one person to have over another. Odette is also not always thinking about the risks like she should tbh. This can only be more of a mess.

Started Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas. NGL, I didn't realize it was a sequel until after I bought it, but decided to just yolo through it and spent last night reading up on some characters on the wiki, so it'll be interesting to go through this with limited context.

[dark_phoenix54]

"The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024" edited by Hugh Howey. Short stories are not my preferred reading format, but I haven't read any short SF&F in ages, so what the heck. And, so far, so good!

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I finished listening to The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu which was good and included a primer on Islamic militantism in North Africa in the middle.

I also read DJ Skills by Stephen Webber, which was too complicated technically for someone completely new to the subject (and probably not so relevant as it's 17 years old). But a nice history.

[raspberrysweettea]

Mickey7. I saw the movie on Sunday and loved it so much I paused Shards of Honor to read the original book. And that's saying something because I love everything I've read by Lois McMaster Bujold thus far.

[white_aster]

I'd be interested in what you think, approaching the book after loving the movie. I went at them the other way around, and they are definitely different beasts.

[raspberrysweettea]

I'm very happy I had not read the book, or known the book even existed before I saw the movie. If I had, I don't think I would have considered it good, because I struggle to appreciate movies that aren't near exact scene-for-scene adaptations of the book.

Since I got to see it from the other way around this time, I like different things from each story, because they're absolutely different beasts as you say. I see why they made the plot changing decisions they did for the movie. I liked most of them. Both versions of Marshall were useful and interesting in their own way, though.

However, the near-threesome scene in the movie was uncomfortable. And so was the scene between Mickey and Kai, which seemed to come out of nowhere. I like the way those were handled in the book way better. And I prefer the resolution of the book over the movie.

[white_aster]

Yeah, it's been a long time since I read the first book, but I remember Kai and Mickey's relationship being very different, and also 7 and 8's relationship being a lot less fraught (I agree, that almost threesome was ugh in the movie, though to be honest, I found a lot of things in the movie just Too Much for me. I'm ok with satire, but it was hard for me to root for anyone at all.)

Marshall, oddly, gets more character development in the second book. I remember feeling like the second book was a bit more of a mixed bag for me than the first, but I do remember liking what it did with Marshall.

[white_aster]

I've finished:

- The Fractured Dark by Megan O'Keefe. Held together, though I got the sense that the author wasn't sure where to cut between books 2 and 3 and ended up giving this book a bit of a tail after what I thought seemed like a fair resting place to end came at about 80% through. I'm also not sure I'm a fan of the rather static and constrained situation that Naira and Tarquin found themselves in at the end, or how Naira physically went from badass to dishrag so quickly. Still a fan of the innovative problems that the body printing and cybernetics and mind-casting situation sets up, though.

- That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon by Kimberly Lemming. Fun, funny, and just my combination of lighthearted romance and floofy fantasy, without any of the things I don't like. Sold.

Still reading:

- Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
- Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work by Alison Green

Also have The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton waiting for me, which I'm hoping I'll like a little more than I liked the Mickey 17 movie.

[matsushima]

I started rereading The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia but then forgot it at work right before vacation. 😮‍💨

I've been meaning to read The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir but it's heavy and I need something a little more lighthearted and comforting to balance it out.

[gingicat]

Just finished the audiobooks of Madeleine L'Engle's Austin series, borrowed from the library and listened to in Libby. I'd forgotten quite how much Vicky Austin suffers from Wrong Genre Disease in the fifth book. The reader is excellent, though she changes Adam Eddington's accent between the fourth and fifth books.

Currently reading Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros in Libby, and The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison in Audible.

[valoise]

As much as I enjoy Terrance Dick's novelizations of Doctor Who stories he didn't really help tone down the problematic elements in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. On top of that, that wonderful chemistry between Jago and Litefoot in the broadcast story was so much due to the actors, the don't seem to click in the book.

[spiralsheep]

I read a lot of the Target novelisations of Doctor Who when I was a kid and remember them being of very variable quality (including the covers!), even books by the same author weren't reliable. I couldn't compare them with the tv serials at the time though so it's interesting when people do.

[milo_r]

I finished the audio version of Fourth Wing, which sounds fun when I sum it up to people and I mention the tropes (enemies to lovers and her family killed his family! mommy issues! bookish disabled protagonist is thrown into elite combat training!), but the actual experience of listening to it was blah because 1) the protagonists are so so so generic, which i know happens often in romance but come on, 2) the translation was Bad, and 3) the reader decided it wasn't their duty to read it in a way that de-emphasized the awkward sentence structures the translator inflicted on us.

On the plus side, I'm reading Het lied van ooievaar en dromedaris which doesn't seem to exist in English but it's about the lives of a fictional version of the Bronte sisters, told through the pov of people touched by them in some way (neighbors, scholars of their work, etc). Very gothic, very atmospheric, really enjoying it although I'm less than a third through.

[gingicat]

I'm sorry to hear about the translation issue.

I don't think I could manage this series as audiobooks - I find myself needing to flip back and forth to see what plotty bits got buried in something else.

[screechfox]

That second book sounds really interesting! I'll have to hope it gets a translation at some point.

[wyrmlore]

Just started with Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

[pedanther]

The Rout of the Ollafubs, which is somewhere between a short episodic novel and a collection of linked short stories with recurring characters. Fairy-tale-ish fantasy. I read it as a child and remembered that I enjoyed the stories featuring the family of talking bears (there's something about making a bear cub with a Cornish accent the hero of a fantasy adventure that guarantees it's not going to stick to well-worn lines) but was bored by the stories with human protagonists. I had hoped that I would find more to appreciate in those parts coming back as an adult.

[dornishviperx]

Currently readind Patrullerxs de Neltume by Jorge Durán Delgado and Anita Durán Hidalgo, which is about the formation of the destacamento Toqui Lautaro in Neltume in the last 70s-early 80s. Really interesting so far, because the story starts much like a biography of Jorge and his family!