RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

The time dice has been rolled and the universe has decided that it's once again Wednesday.

What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[quillpunk]

Still reading the same books as last week but alas I started Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and so haven't made any progress on anything else, lmao. I really like it, though! Rocky is very lovely, and I'm excited to reach the ending! :D

[ravengown]

Currently, I'm still "stuck" on Heaven's Official Blessing volume 1. It did finally pick up at least!! Webnovels are hard I think haha.

[ilyena_sylph]

I just blew through Ninefox Gambit, by DW's own yhlee, and it is incredible!

[muccamukk]

Just started The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Ann Older, which is the second Mossa & Pleiti book, so MOAR lesbian Sherlock Holmes on Jupiter! I'm pleased to get to this.

[white_aster]

What I've finished: The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I was hoping that this book would give me more of what I liked about Caves of Steel (the solid sense of place in a skewed future world, some interesting robots) but less of what I hated (the world's worst detectiving and being unable to follow the trail of evidence if it was on fire, plus bonus casual sexism). It did the former (the various phobias of the characters were very prominent and viscerally done, with some neat thoughts of how they became "cultural" in the societies depicted), but fell. down. so. hard. on the latter. Detectiving: still terrible. Sexism: Doubled down on! Ugh. It didn't even give the robot character I like much to do! I am ANNOYED that I still want to read the next book in the series. ANNOYED, I TELL YOU. I blame the popcorn effect, since these books are fairly short.

What I'm currently reading: A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher is going well. Though I'm not much of a horror person, the main character (a somewhat doofy scientist) is enough to blunt the creepiness for me (though not totally! I need to stop reading this late at night!). I also fell to peer pressure and borrowed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. I read like 3/4 of the first chapter and my enjoyment might depend on how the author decides to handle his characters. I disliked the first character introduced, but that might be the point, and I get the sense she's going to get some comeuppance real fast.

What I'll read next: Children of Time is humongous, so that might be my plan for a good while. But, I also would like to read one of my physical books on my to-read pile (I know, I keep saying this, but I keep being a slave to whatever keeps coming up on Libby), and Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip has been sitting on my side table for a good while. So, might be a continued trend of sci-fi for me for a bit.

[givemeyourhonor]

Still reading Prince of the Sorrows from last week. It got a little scary where I left off, though I like that there are consequences for characters' actions. There are some little worldbuilding questions I'm hoping will be answered in either this book or the next one, since I plan on continuing with the series unless something frustrating happens. But I'm still having a good time.

[peaceful_sands]

I loved Project Hail Mary when I read it a couple of years ago - I gave it five stars! I don't do that with many. I'm going to presume that you've already read The Martian, but have you tried Artemis by Andy Weir? I enjoyed it but not as much as the other two I've read.

[peaceful_sands]

I've been tempted by this, so interesting to see how you are getting along with it.

[jellyfishlover]

I started reading through Adachi and Shimamura (vol 1) by Hitomi Iruma this last weekend and I'm already most of the way through it already! I'm usually not a big fan of reading romances, but I've been enjoying this. It really nails the complicated personal lives of 14 year olds! So many messy feelings! XD

It's also a bit more fantastical than I expected it to be? But it doesn't seem like the main characters are too interested in the supernatural nonsense happening in the corner, which makes for a pretty funny juxtaposition.

[peaceful_sands]

The long weekend gave me a chance to finish a few titles - I did a fair bit of gardening which let me plug uninterrupted into my audio books and make some real progress too.

This week, I finished reading 'The Life Changing Magic of not giving a F**k' by Sarah Knight, 'Dragon Class' by Melanie Ansley and the first volume of FAKE. I also finished listening to 'Firefight' by Brandon Sanderson, 'The Mystery of Four' by Sam Blake, along with 'Black Heart' and 'The Couple on Cedar Close' by Anna-Lou Weatherley.

The best book of the week was Dragon Class - highly recommend this (for clarity, I read an early reviewers copy). It's got Dragons, and is set in the Tang China era - strong female lead, challenging authority, deception, dragons, historical feel, China, and dare I say again Dragons! The author explains at the end that the dragons are 'western dragons' with the take on them being more in line with the dragons from old Western stories than the dragons from China's own stories.

I'm now reading 'The Immortal Games' by Annaliese Avery, FAKE Volume 2, still chipping away at 'Cloud Runners' and am ready to start listening to 'A Desolation Called Peace' by Arkady Martine - between those it should keep me fairly busy.

[svgurl]

I haven't read much this past week so I'm still reading the same book I was before, which is "The Idea of You" by Robinne Lee. So far, it's not bad.

[ravengown]

Ha! Was going through my inbox (slowly), and realized you actually commented when I mentioned this a few months ago! I'm still going through it really slow just because I haven't been reading much.

I think the main thing is that if you're not used to like, web-novel style it might throw you off? Since even though it's a pseudo-historical setting, the language is very, very modern. I'm not sure how well it works for me, but it does seem to be picking up more now.

[vriddy]

I really enjoyed it, too! :D Rocky and the optimism around that whole encounter is just really lovely and a nice change.

[vriddy]

I read it a few years and found it really interesting and engaging!! :D

[vriddy]

I'm curious about whether you'd rec "The Life Changing Magic of not giving a F**k"! I hadn't heard of it but the title is certainly intriguing me :D

[vriddy]

I finished 'The Female Man' by Joanna Russ for a book club. I can't say I enjoyed it, unfortunately, it moved between extremely confusing 75% of the time and really painful 25% of the time for me. However I can see how it would have been important in the time period it came out, and is likely also an answer to contemporary conversations about feminism in the US in the 70s. I could also see some of the seeds for "How to Suppress Women's Writing" by the same author which I found very powerful and seems to have been written a few years later. Haven't had the book club meeting about it yet but considering the members have consistently complained about stories with non-linear writing over the years, I suspect it might not be a popular one...

[peaceful_sands]

The main idea of the book is prioritising the things in your life that matter - what should you take the time to worry about and balance - how much time are you wasting worrying about things that aren't important to you but are being pushed on to you by other people - it categorises everything into four groups from 'Things' to 'Family' and so you are encouraged to consider how important it is to you and whether you want to give it your time and energy. The idea being that say someone invites you to attend their best friend's niece's school show, you immediately know whether that's something you want to do and if it's not, you politely say no and aren't guilt tripped into it. It also talks about being 'Not Sorry' but keeping things out of being an a**hole territory. It looks at it from a semi-Marie Kondo way about what brings joy to your life and what doesn't and how to give more time to the joyful aspects and where possible remove the rest. I haven't really implemented the full process, but plan to spend some time doing so in the hope of getting a better balance of what I want, rather than what I have been guilted into.

[peaked]

I finished reading The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden today and absolutely loved it. It's my favourite of the Winternight trilogy.

I'm listening to Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison, which is actually quite fun! I've laughed, which is not something I do when reading/listening. So far it's a fun first POV (a POV I don't often like) and balances comedy/horror well.

I'm starting How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell tonight. I wanted something fun and easy to read, and since I enjoyed the movie, I felt I might enjoy this. (I forgot I had this book on my shelf.)

[peaked]

I've added A House With Good Bones to my TBR as I want to try horror, and if you're enjoying it as someone who's not much of a horror person, I feel there's a chance I might enjoy it!

[white_aster]

It might be good to try, then! Kingfisher really does have an interesting mesh of tones with it. It's a creepy story (oh, and if you are overly scared of bugs...there's a lot of bugs in this book, and they do some creepy things), but (so far) it's not Gratuitously Horror, if you know what I mean. Also, the POV character is very down to earth and earnest and logical and worried that something mundane like abuse or dementia is happening to her mom, and kind of funnily...honestly a lot of the creepy is just BLITHELY SAILING OVER HER HEAD. Once she figures out that (spoilers) The Supernatural Is Involved, I mostly expect her to go, ".....what the @&#^!$ HELL?" and want to fistfight whatever's causing this. So, it blunts some of the harsher parts of the "horror" aspects.

I mean...it's not COZY horror...but if that was a genre, it would be cozy horror ADJACENT, I think.

[white_aster]

the main characters are too interested in the supernatural nonsense happening in the corner, which makes for a pretty funny juxtaposition.

Lol, funnily enough, that's the exact same vibe I'm getting from A House With Good Bones. The main POV is mostly Tired and Just Wants to Rest, and a lot of the creepy that's going on is kind of sailing blithely over her head because she is focused on whether her mom has dementia and sciencing out why the bugs are acting weird in her mom's house. It makes for an interesting "horror" book. ;P

[jellyfishlover]

Oh wow, that does sound like a pretty interesting horror book! Poor protagonist, so many things going on that the horror doesn't even register on the stress scale...! XD

[white_aster]

Is "cozy horror" a thing? Because that book would be cozy horror. :P

[quillpunk]

Having now finished it, this book was really lovely! :D Rocky definitely is a huge part of the draw, and yeah the optimism in their encounter and friendship is just... super nice to read :D It's a very good book, and I really enjoyed it!

[quillpunk]

I actually haven't read The Martian :D (though I've watched the movie!)

I do own it, so hopefully I'll get around to it soon now that I've finished Hail Mary, but alas my TBR list is so long LOL. I own Artemis too but haven't read that either, but I can see from the summary how that's not quite the same vibes as Martian and Hail Mary, not being about gestures vaguely in lack of words optimistically surviving against odds in space, let's say.

[quillpunk]

Consequences for actions are very nice to read :D

[quillpunk]

Glad you're having fun! :D

[vriddy]

Oops, I forgot to say thank you for the longer summary, I appreciate it!! Very interesting.