RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[falkner]

What are you reading? Are you reading?

Comments

[falkner]

I've been slowly making my way through Scalzi's Redshirts, and enjoying it even though I'm not particularly familiar with Star Trek or SFF in general. There's some references to what I can infer is tropes of the genre that I'm completely unaware of, but overall it's proving to be a very fun read nonetheless!

[pedanther]

I've just started reading A Tale of Two Cities, which I've been meaning to try for years. I knew the famous opening sentence and the famous closing sentence, and almost nothing about what happens between the two.

I'm also a little way into an anthology called The Night Marchers and other Oceanian stories, which I'm not getting on with. My impression from the cover was that it was a collection of folk tales, but it turns out to be a mix of straight folk tale retellings, riffs on folk tales, and original stories inspired by folk tales. I would have preferred if it had settled on one thing to be, because reading a telling of an unfamiliar folk tale is different from reading a story that assumes you're already familiar with the folk tale it's inspired by, and I keep getting wrong-footed.

[olivermoss]

I DNF'd A Dark and Drowning Tide. I was looking forward to going to a Romantasy Book Club meeting, but this book was very much Not For Me

For audiobook I've on Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. So much for waiting on diving into the next Grishaverse book. I may actually focus on getting caught up in her books.

For ebook I've started Madison Square Murders by C S Poe which I'd been thinking about picking up for a while. I was one of those books like look like I'd like it, but so many of the random m/m books I buy turn out to be not good. We shall see how it goes.

[spiralsheep]

Finished: The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald. I read this meditation on death and destruction while in similar settings to the framing story of a walk along the East Anglian coastline, and with the addition of extreme and bizarre weather this occasionally became a near-hallucinatory experience, but not an engaging read for me.

This is a better review of Rings of Saturn than I could ever write, lol (and, yes, three stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/221843487

Current reading: Perspectives by Laurent Binet, a library reservation with a waiting list, which was recommended by a discerning friend and is a good read so far (approximately 20% in).

DNFs: 5/86. I've had a higher percentage of dnfs than usual this year. Can't decide if my sense of personal mortality and the easy availability of other reading material is causing me to be pickier or whether I'm finally inside a demographic targeted for enough marketing guff to negatively effect my choices. Woe is me - the algorithms fail again &c.

[vriddy]

Currently reading Pageboy, Elliot Page's memoir. It's good, lots to think about.

Edit after finishing the book: it's interesting for the view into the film industry, and also pretty fucking painful overall regarding queerness in general and being trans specifically. Living true to yourself shouldn't have to be this hard, we shouldn't be making it this hard. A really good read.

[vriddy]

Good to see a reminder that Redshirts can be enjoyed even knowing only so much about Star Trek! I'll have to get my hands on it :)

[screechfox]

I'm still working on Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Nicola Tallis and How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, but I had to go away for a couple days and couldn't take them with me, so I've stalled slightly.

While away I picked up a copy of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which I found interesting, and I want to pick up the rest of the series somewhen. They've got the rest in the library so I might grab them from there though! I'd already seen the movie so it was cool to see how they differed, and I'm probably going to rewatch it soon.

I've also just started Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials by Alice Roberts, but I'm not far enough in to comment on it.

[valoise]

Busy week that was also filled with getting ready to go to Worldcon, so instead of committing to something longer, I caught up on short fiction from Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny

Looking for something to read on the plane I dipped into a set of pdfs of 16th & 17th century cookbooks that I'd downloaded a long time ago and picked the 1664 book: The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwell, the Wife of the Late Usurper. Lambasting Mrs. Cromwell with comments like she “was an hundred times fitter for a Barn than a Palace” that her style of managing the estate should be described as “pious negligence and ill management of the Domestique Affairs”. So imagine my surprise when I finally get to the cookbook part and it consists of very typical recipes of the era, richly flavored with the herbs and spices that you'd expect from a noble household of the time. I think the book only exists for the unnamed author to vent their individual frustrations with the times that had just passed.

[pauraque]

I am reading The Vanished Birds, a sci-fi novel by Simon Jimenez. I'm enjoying it, though I wish I'd known the title was literal--the worldbuilding involves the future extinction of all Earth's birds. T_T

[althea_valara]

Oh, neat! I'm glad it holds up well even if you're not familiar with Star Trek. Scalzi is one of my favorite authors. I haven't read EVERYTHING of his, but what I have read have all been really good:

* Redshirts
* Lock In
* Head On
* Fuzzy Nation
* Agent to the Stars
* Old Man's War

One of the reasons I enjoy his books is that they do have some humor (some are more humorous than others) but also have some good moral dilemmas in there that make me think and consider things. Fuzzy Nation and the Lock In series especially do this well.

[althea_valara]

I successfully completed the summer reading program at the library! We had our choice over reading a set number of books or going by minutes; I chose minutes, because I some of the books were audiobooks plus there was a chance I'd reread manga and I don't think one issue of manga really counts as one book? but that's me. Anyway, I read/listened for 600 minutes for a water bottle, and then jammed another 600 minutes in during the last week, to get some entries into a drawing (I did not win, alas).

Books listened to: the first two Murderbot Diaries. The narrator is a joy and a half, well worth listening to.

The theme for the program was "Level Up!" and you got a bonus entry if you read a book relating to gaming or self improvement, so I read Single Player by Tara Tai, which was on the library's recommended list. It's a queer romance between two game developers, and it was really delightful. I'm so glad I gave it a try!

I also reread about half of Ready Player One but fell off it when I finished the reading challenge.

I'm currently not reading anything. I'd like to get back to the Murderbot Diaries; I had started listening to the third audiobook, but then got distracted. I'm also behind on John Scalzi's releases, and would like to read some of his newer books. I do so enjoy his books.

[rekishi]

The last few weeks I read "Rendevouz with Rama" (Clarke) for book club, "Whale Fall" (Elizabeth O'Connor), "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" (Yoon Ha Lee), "In einem Zug" (Glattauer), and "The Pendragon Legend" (Antal Szerb) as well as a lot of dead boy detectives fanfic.

I'm contemplating which book to bring for book club on Friday.

[dancesontrains]

Read 'The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas for a book club; very well done and struck a good combination of sad and hopeful. Also read some volumes of 'Witch Hat Atelier', which continues to be delightful, along with 'The Tea Dragon Society' GN. Zoomed through books 2 to 5 of 'Enola Holmes', which is also a delight.

As for work aimed at older audiences - was disgusted by Guy Delisle's 'Pyongyang' autobiographical GN, the art was good but he forgets to treat the North Koreans he's around as human (giving his translator '1984' with no context, describing some nasty sexualised things he'd like to do to women he meets whom he finds attractive and non-sexualised things to those he doesn't fancy, generally mocking them for the bad luck of being born in one of the worst coutnries around). Had a far better time with the excellent if sad 'A Small Revolution' GN by Boum, a comic about children under a harsh dictatorship who make their own attempts to fight back.

Started 'Hild' by Nicola Griffith, only 10% in (60 pages) so can't offer a review yet. Was brought out of the narrative somewhat by Hild reciting the 'Men are scared women will laugh at them, women are scared men will kill them' quote in seventh century (what will become) England.

[haunted_cherries]

Currently reading a book called Another Day by David Levithan and this was one of the rare books where I read the premise and IMMEDIATELY needed to understand how this book panned out xD

I'm sure I'll have more to say when I'm done, but I've been enjoying it so far!!

[silversea]

Started Automatic Noodles by Annalee Newitz last night. Seems fairly run of the mill cozy sff that's been popular recently, nothing about it particularly stands out from the other cozy sff books so far. It's at least a breezy novella so I'll probably finish it. It seems short books are the only thing I can read lately.

[valoise]

I’ve always thought Agent to the Stars would make a great mivie

[althea_valara]

That might be one of the ones that're being shopped around Hollywood, I forget which ones are. He did say recently that there's some references in it that make him wince now because they are dated, but a good script doctor can fix that, and yeah, I agree it'd make a good movie!

[petrea_mitchell]

I haven't had a lot of reading time in the last couple weeks, but I did finish The Lost Camels of Tartary. Now I'm back at another gamebook, The Encyclopedia of Xanth. The introductory essay by Piers Anthony includes a vivid description of caterpillar season in Florida that might be better than any of his actual fiction.

[chroniclesofreading]

At the moment, I'm reading Brad Abraham's Magicians Impossible. An estranged father seemingly commits suicide, but the bigger shock comes when he discovers his father was a secret agent in an ancient society of spies wielding magic. His future is at risk now that a secret society is trying to recruit him.

[cornerofmadness]

The Secret of the Orange Blossom Cake because I apparently went nuts and requested an arc of a magic realism romance (not my genre) and now I feel obligated to read it (honestly it's not bad at all, just not my thing. I swear I thought it was a mystery)

[falkner]

I'm an avid reader of Scalzi's blog (and social media, on the rare occasion I do go on it) so I thought it was time I actually try reading some of his work. I'll definitely try some more of it after Redshirts, so I'll save this list, thank you!

[falkner]

I'm actually listening to the audiobook, and if you enjoy those, I would rec trying to get your hands on it! It's narrated very well, and how perfectly the narrator inflects some sentences to express how utterly done the characters are with what's going on has been a good source of fun.

[ktea]

I started Jill Duggar's memoir Counting the Cost. It's an excellent read so far, but very heartbreaking.

On the much lighter side, I started listening to Teen Idol by Meg Cabot. She was one of my absolute favorite authors as a teen (and I still love her a lot), but somehow I missed reading this one. It's been a delight so far.