RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[pauraque]

What are you reading? Is the TBR pile growing or shrinking?

Comments

[mxroboto]

It was shrinking there for a bit but then I came across a queer indie bookstore with a lovely used scifi shelf, truly a slice of heaven...

Inhaled a gifted book in an afternoon: Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry. It put a lot of words and context to all the roiling discontent I feel in this cutthroat capitalist hellscape. More importantly, it inspired me to find ways to work around it, or perhaps in spite of it. I'll be planting serviceberries and pumpkins next year in hopes of sharing the harvest with my neighborhood. I'm gonna give it a few more reads before passing it along as it was to me.

Finished N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell's Far Sector. Jemisin, god, she's incredible, even when doing a format (comics) she'd never touched before. So many layers, such an uplifting story, and such amazing art to go with it! Gonna pick myself up a copy for sure.

Started The AI Con by Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna, very illuminating so far. I'm writing an anti-AI short story and this book is very helpful (for that and in general). It's helped calm me a bit, or perhaps focused my rage.

[vriddy]

I just read The Serviceberry, and found it really inspiring as well! Ideas on how to get different, better and healthier systems working in parallel to what's already there felt hopeful to me. Possible. Your multiple re-reads plan sounds excellent!

[mxroboto]

Yes, hopeful and possible is exactly what I got out of it too. I like that she didn't call for replacing capitalism -- as nice as that would be -- but instead focused on how to coexist with it.

[pauraque]

The Serviceberry is on my list! I loved Braiding Sweetgrass.

[mxroboto]

Braiding Sweetgrass has been on my list for ages but it's been pushed up to the top after The Serviceberry!

[zenigotchas]

Beyond Good and Evil is finally finished. It shrunk.

Enjoying No Bad Parts

[rocky41_7]

Audiobook right now is "Road to Ruin" by Hana Lee, which has been a fun dystopian fantasy drama so far, although I'm curious to see how it will extend its plot over the remaining nine hours of runtime.

Physical book is "The Other Wind," by Ursula Le Guin; I've just got this one book and then the remaining short stories before I've finished the Earthsea Cycle completely!

[quillpunk]

i'm reading Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman! super liking it so far XD (the TBR pile is a demon that i can not tame, alas, and has only grown stronger...)

[dualscreen]

Back at it again with Sherlock Holmes, this time starting The Sign of the Four. A pleasant enough read thus far, though I am not quite as invested in the mystery as I was with A Study in Scarlet. I'm sure that will change as I get further in though.

[tellshannon815]

Recently started The Mirror and the Light. Given the length, my TBR list may grow (I did say to myself I wouldn't buy anything new between my birthday and Christmas, to get caught up a bit on existing TBR).

[petrea_mitchell]

Continuing the Aldiss Award shortlist...

Finished Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon and remained disappointed.

Read all of Kavithri, which is very well-written but also brutal and sometimes gory.

Now about a quarter of the way through Saints of Storm and Sorrow and liking it so far.

[mxroboto]

Whoa that's such a cool idea to follow an awards list!

[petrea_mitchell]

Thanks! It's not something I'd normally do, except this is a brand-new award that caters to one of my big interests.

[pedanther]

The TBR grew a bit when I got the Martha Wells Humble Bundle, though not as much as it might have, since I've already read at least half the books in the bundle as library books. So far I'm still ahead on the annual goal to read more of the TBR than I add.

My fiction this week has featured several comic book collections - Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre, in which Godzilla battles various public-domain characters, and the first couple of volumes of Naoki Urasawa's current series, Asadora!. Monsterpiece Theatre was a disappointment - it's got strong "kid invents a story on the fly by pulling action figures out of the toybox at random" energy, with the corresponding level of concern for rounded characters and fidelity to the source material. I'm enjoying Asadora! a lot more, though I don't think I'll be too bothered when I reach the end of the volumes the library has.

I also read The New Shoe, the next in a series of old detective novels I'm working my way through; not one of my favourites of the series so far. I found one of the side characters interesting because the way he's described makes it clear that these days he'd be seen as on the autism spectrum, but back in the 1950s neither the characters nor the author have the context to express it like that.

Current reading: I've just started The Well at the World's End by William Morris, but I don't know if I'm going to stick with it. I'm not getting on with the narrative style, which is self-consciously old-fashioned in a way that annoys me.

On the non-fiction side, I've finished reading The Ghost Empire and gone back to Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which I started a while back and then had to return to the library and wait until I got back around to the head of the hold queue again.

[cornerofmadness]

growing. Always growing. Right now I'm reading an urban fantasy Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World - sort of like what it would be like to work for a place like WOlfram and Hart

[haunted_cherries]

Sadly the TBR pile has been stagnant thanks to stuff at work, but hoping to pick it back up soon!!

[spiralsheep]

My To Read shelf is at 78, which is down from 90 on 1 Jan but up from 68 at lowest ebb this year so far.

I just finished book 90. The Hotel Avocado, by Bob Mortimer, 2024, comedic crime novel, 5/5.
Entertaining sequel to The Satsuma Complex. Very Bob Mortimer. Better read with the first novel freshly in mind. I sensed the set-up for a third novel featuring the corrupt councillor and Brighton underworld.
Warning for descriptions of physical violence, including to children by other children.

[valoise]

It's been 5 years since the last book in Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series came out so it took me a bit to catch up when I started reading The Martian Contingency this week. I liked it and the focus on the personal lives of the women working to establish a viable habitat on Mars. But I remember liking the previous books a lot more.

Real world events are a bit distressing right now so Who Killed Nessie? is just what I needed right now. It's a light, fluffy graphic novel written by Paul Cornell with art by Rachael Smith. A murder mystery at a convention of mythical beasts, fairies, and cryptids, the book is light-hearted fun.

[drawnecromancy]

Growing, growing quite big indeed.

I remembered about my e-reader and added several books I've been meaning to get to to it. I think I added in total 14 new books to the tbr ? Whoops ! On the other hand, I'm currently reading Amber Skies by CT Kelly on it. I've heard of it ages ago while their old tumblr blog was still called thecaretaker or something and it always seemed interesting to me, and I'm in the mood for weird sci-fi right now, after leaving it dormant in the ereader for years. It's very meditative. I'm really enjoying it.

[phantomtomato]

I just read Bunny by Mona Awad and hated it. The prose was unbearable. I’ve started The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker and and I’m enjoying that a lot more!

[pauraque]

Oh no! What was wrong with the prose? Or is there a forthcoming review to give the full picture of the unbearableness? :)

[phantomtomato]

Ha, there will be a full review! But the short of it: sooo many sentence fragments.

Ah, and thanks again for your Le Guin short story writeups! I read and enjoyed April in Paris, at least until the neatly paired-up het ending. The opening scene-setting was really gorgeous.

[pauraque]

Oh, my pleasure! Yeah, Le Guin's writing is very straight. She was opposed to homophobia and sometimes included queer characters, especially in her later works, but you can always tell she was writing from a straight perspective. (Personally I would have liked a poly ending for "April in Paris".)

[huxleyenne]

My TBR list never shrinks, probably because it's been a while since I read something cover-to-cover. I have a lot of text and reference books where I'll read something like 3 to 4 pages of info I want to know more about, and then I put it down. I've also taken to reading poetry. I want to get back into the habit of reading more fiction, though, since that's what I like to write.

[merrileemakes]

My TBR list feels like its shrinking, but that's because I've been intentionally reading down my Kindle library this year with the view to mostly ditching Kindle and moving to Kobo.

Lately I've been reading The Water Thief by Natasha Brown, a dystopian robin hood retelling with a female MC. The set up was fantastic and then the plot just kinda spun its tires in the mud. I gave up about halfway through.

I'm also reading Robot Wizard Zombie Crit!, a short story anthology free from John Joseph Adams. I've read a few of his anthologies over the years and this one seems to have the cream. It was worth it just to get all 3 of the Shadow Prisons novelette, which was previously spread over 3 anthologies.