Aurora Australis readalong 4 / 10, A Pony Watch, post for comment, reaction, discussion, fanworks, links, and whatever obliquely related matters your heart desires. You can join the readalong at any time or skip sections or go back to earlier posts. It's all good. :-)
Finished reading 51. Forest of Noise, by Mosab Abu Toha, 2024, which centres around his life in Gaza in recent years. I thought Abu Toha's previous collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear was excellent and this new book lived up to my hopes. Warning for the author living in a war zone, obviously.
Nearly finished 52. The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums, by A. Kendra Greene, 2020, which is non-fiction (mostly) essays about the meaning and practice of making and keeping museums in the context of the 266 museums (official tourist board count) in Iceland where the population is about 330,000 people (= 1 museum for every 1250 people). Written as a cross between quirky popular travel writing and Granta's thinky-thoughts house style.
Quote: "Siggi is not a collector. There was that time he kept a belly-button lint collection to disturb his daughter-in-law - which proved effective - but with objective achieved he abandoned the project."
Next: I fancy some fiction but my concentration span is short, lol.
Almost done with A Lesson in Thorns, the first book in Sierra Simone's Thornchapel series. Pretty much non-stop modern Gothic horniness, and all the characters are some form of queer and/or kinky. That said, they're also pretty one-dimensional so far, but that's not stopping me from getting the second book cued up for when I'm in the mood for this particular type of escapism again.
I forget the name but one about the history of forensic science and crimes where these different techniques were used and why they helped put the killer behind bars.
Currently reading Noose: True Stories of Australians Who Died at the Gallows, which I only picked up to check off a square in a reading challenge and am not finding particularly engaging.
Surprisingly, I'm not reading anything ! I just finished reading Misery by Stephen King yesterday, and haven't picked up a new book from my shelf yet :) (I really enjoyed Misery ! It was fun in the "shit just keeps getting worse" sort of sense.) I'm thinking I might either get going on Kafka's Metamorphosis, or some of the books I got from free book boxes, so I can finally release them back in the wild.
Noooo ! Not the Librarian in Chief ! Anything, anything but the Librarian in Chief ! lmaooo For real though, the indecision is a Lot. Having a big pile of books I haven't read yet, and not knowing how fast I'll get through them... maybe I should go for one of the history books I have stashed.
Oh, the indecision is real and terrible. When I made it a goal to reduce my To Read stack this year I had to make a rather ominous decision tree to overcome my dithering.
Q. "If this is the last book I'll ever read then which one book from those in front of me now?"
Modified only by, "Does it need to go back to the library?" or "Is it a favourite comfort re-read?", which tend to have already resolved any indecision because urgency or FEELS. :D
Ahh, that's an interesting way of doing it ! makes me remember I haven't gone to the library in a bit, I had to give back an unfinished book to them a month or two a go because i can't renew the loan more than once, and I'd already renewed it. I could always borrow it again...
I do think I've settled on a book to read next, though - it's going to be Wuthering Heights :)
current read is idlewild by james frankie thomas for book club! quirky litfic about getting into slash fandom in high school and also imploding your relationship with your best friend who you're in love with and also about trauma recovery as an adult. i'm liking it a lot so far!
Finished my buddy read of Counterfeit by Kristin Chen. I wasn't really hooked to it at the beginning, it was fine but a bit heavyhanded with the stereotypes and I wasn't too comfortable with that. But then a twist came along and it really shook the whole book up in a fantastic way!
Also finished A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, which was really fun. Looking forward to more of Ana and Din, hopefully the next book won't be a long wait.
I liked Shadow of the Leviathan so much that I decided to try Bennett's other books, so now I'm starting Foundryside.
I've just finished reading 'The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that reveal the future of our world' by Tim Marshall which I highly recommend to anyone interested in that kind of thing and 'Defiant' by Brandon Sanderson. Still trying to make it to the end of 'The First Four Books of Earthsea' by Ursula Le Guin - only about 40 pages left now. Also reading 'The Murderbot Diaries vol 2' and listening to 'A Deadly Education' by Naomi Novak. I've listened to the audio version of the Murderbot Diaries before but it's nice to read the written version now.
Yes, I think so. He was my introductions to horror, so I may be biased, though. No book has ever scared me more than It. But I find him very uneven, some books are brilliant, some I haven't even finished. His writing style is very distinct, and not everyone enjoys it, though I do. One of his shorter books like Carrie, or Dolores Claiborne. Or a short story collections, are propbably a goo didea if you want a low-commitment try. i prefer the earlier ones like Night Shift, Different Seasons or Skeleton Crew.
It might just be that true crime isn't a genre I'm into in general, but I feel like it's lacking a theme or a viewpoint - I'm not getting any sense of why the author thinks these particular stories are interesting and worth sharing.
I'm reading Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, which is two adults looking back, in alternating chapters, at their school days and friendship at a Quaker prep school in New York in the early aughts. Livejournal is mentioned, and oh man, I'm having some serious flashbacks to the end of high school and staying up all night in my freshman year of college chatting on AIM . . .
Interesting, I'm also reading this for a book club this week! :-) I'm also really liking it; I'm a little older than the protagonists, but I was definitely staying up late to chat with people on AIM and posting in my Livejournal during my freshman year of college, lol.
i'm a little younger than the protagonists (just missed HoYay, apparently!) and i've been having fun with the bits that are deeply familiar and the bits that are new for me. definitely lots of fodder here!!
I finished "You & Me" by Tal Bauer (M/M romance) and "Cut & Run" by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux (M/M crime). Very different books, I found the former to be perfect for scratching that hurt/comfort itch. Not entirely convinced about the latter: I liked the story but I want to read the following books in the series to see if it finds feet later on.
I'm currently listening to "The Magpie Lord" by K.J. Charles and I'm in love! I'm really intrigued by this historical fantasy setting. I definitely want to know more about this universe, but there are only three books *whines* I'm almost at the end of the audiobook, so I'm already searching for other stories read by Cornell Collins, he's fantastic.
I finished the last of the Terrance Dicks Doctor Who novelizations that I picked up last year. This time it was The Five Doctors. There are too many Doctors and companions in this short book to give focus to anyone, really, but he did add some context to Susan's life at the beginning that she never got in the show.
Wole Talabi is one of my favorite short story writers and I was happy to pick up his second collection, Convergence Problems. His writing is sharp and both his fantasy and science fiction experiments with story telling in wonderful ways.
I liked The Hallowed Hunt, but it certainly took some adjusting to, considering I had no idea it was set prior to the first two and had a rough time at the beginning.
Last week I whipped through Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time (okay, but not really for me) and Deanne Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age, which was a lot of fun and a quick read. Love me a found family. Now I am on to Sarah Rees Brennan's Long Live Evil.
Sorry - I couldn't remember whether I'd replied or not - but here I am. I tend to have books that are quite substantially different on the go at the same time (1 crime, 1 sci-fi, 1 fantasy or 1 non-fiction) and also different formats - a physical and an audio at the same time, one small physical that I can carry with me, 1 larger physical that isn't really portable - that kind of thing. Think of it like watching different series on TV - you can switch from one to another at the end of an episode or two.
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Aurora Australis readalong 4 / 10, A Pony Watch
Reaction post 4 / 10:
https://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/666759.html
Text (warning for a pony being shot offscreen):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/A_Pony_Watch
Readalong intro and links to discussion posts 1-3:
https://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/662515.html
Reminder for next week: Southward Bound by Lapsus Linguæ (anon):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/Southward_Bound
Personal reading
Nearly finished 52. The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums, by A. Kendra Greene, 2020, which is non-fiction (mostly) essays about the meaning and practice of making and keeping museums in the context of the 266 museums (official tourist board count) in Iceland where the population is about 330,000 people (= 1 museum for every 1250 people). Written as a cross between quirky popular travel writing and Granta's thinky-thoughts house style.
Quote: "Siggi is not a collector. There was that time he kept a belly-button lint collection to disturb his daughter-in-law - which proved effective - but with objective achieved he abandoned the project."
Next: I fancy some fiction but my concentration span is short, lol.
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Also just more Spawn :)
I neeeeed to go back to Nietzsche
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I just finished reading Misery by Stephen King yesterday, and haven't picked up a new book from my shelf yet :) (I really enjoyed Misery ! It was fun in the "shit just keeps getting worse" sort of sense.) I'm thinking I might either get going on Kafka's Metamorphosis, or some of the books I got from free book boxes, so I can finally release them back in the wild.
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For real though, the indecision is a Lot. Having a big pile of books I haven't read yet, and not knowing how fast I'll get through them... maybe I should go for one of the history books I have stashed.
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Q. "If this is the last book I'll ever read then which one book from those in front of me now?"
Modified only by, "Does it need to go back to the library?" or "Is it a favourite comfort re-read?", which tend to have already resolved any indecision because urgency or FEELS. :D
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makes me remember I haven't gone to the library in a bit, I had to give back an unfinished book to them a month or two a go because i can't renew the loan more than once, and I'd already renewed it. I could always borrow it again...
I do think I've settled on a book to read next, though - it's going to be Wuthering Heights :)
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Also finished A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, which was really fun. Looking forward to more of Ana and Din, hopefully the next book won't be a long wait.
I liked Shadow of the Leviathan so much that I decided to try Bennett's other books, so now I'm starting Foundryside.
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I'm currently listening to "The Magpie Lord" by K.J. Charles and I'm in love! I'm really intrigued by this historical fantasy setting. I definitely want to know more about this universe, but there are only three books *whines* I'm almost at the end of the audiobook, so I'm already searching for other stories read by Cornell Collins, he's fantastic.
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Wole Talabi is one of my favorite short story writers and I was happy to pick up his second collection, Convergence Problems. His writing is sharp and both his fantasy and science fiction experiments with story telling in wonderful ways.
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