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Hi all, sorry about not posting last week. I kept meaning to, and then getting distracted. Then it got so late into this week, made more sense to just do a double post. Sorry!


This week and last I finished:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Finished this up, which finished Read Harder for me with a self published book. It has a publisher now, but she originally kickstarted to self publish. I really liked it, will read the rest!

The Fire Rose -re read just for fun.. Always interesting going back to this because it's not technically part of her elemental masters series, she wrote it several years before starting that. So there's a lot of things that were clearly the precursor for that series, but also a lot of things that clearly got changed for the series, probably being too confining to work around.

The Gates of Sleep - just wanted to read more of her, she's my comfort reads.

Semiosis - I wanted to like this more than I did. It's a really cool premise for planet colonization, but something for me just didn't quite gel. I think some of it is that while I like shifting viewpoints, I always like it better when it cycles between them, not just a continuing succession of new characters. I get why, it's a generational story, but it just doesn't let the story flow the way I like it. I kinda almost just wish the whole thing was from Steveland's perspective, from landing to end.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vol. 2 - starting another comic binge, the new buffy series is alright. It changes a bunch of stuff, which is probably the point. but there's still a lot of "but that's not right!", since i watched most of the show.

Currently reading:

Clue: Candlestick - interesting version of Clue, leaning very into the board game. there's a whole essay in the back about his experience with the game and his thoughts about it. actually pretty interesting, since he points out that D&D and video games get blamed for violence, but not Clue when it's literally about murdering people in the real world.

QOTW:

Will borrow from Popsugar again, we might have talked about it before. Do you re-read? what value do you get from it? Or if you don't, why not?


I'm a pretty big re-reader, or at least I used to be. Now i do so many reading challenges, I do far less. Back in the day it was somewhat of a budget thing. Best way to extend a limited book budget was to re-read the ones you owned a whole bunch. I didn't use the library a lot once I got into high school/college, I don't know why. I guess my mom never went, so I didn't either? Also maybe the whole having to deal with taking the books back when done, but wouldn't have been that big a deal with school libraries.


But I still like a good re-read and try to work them in through the year. I often try to re-read books that I liked at least twice because I tend to get so excited to know how it finishes I read fast, and my memory of them is pretty patchy. I'll re-read a year or so later and still cant' remember how it ended, or at least only have a vague idea. I also like to re-read to give my brain a break. If I read a whole bunch of new stuff, I just need a break and to fall back on an old comfy story that I don't have to work too hard at. Especially if I read something very heavy, dry, emotional etc. If I'm having a really bad day, I'll also pull out an old favorite.

Others I just like how they make me feel, no matter how many times i've read them. Night Circus is one in particular, it's just always magical.

Winter is definitely on the way here, which makes for great reading now that we have the house ready for the change of seasons. This week:

Finished A Trick of Light, which is Stan Lee's posthumous novel. I really enjoyed it- Lee was so great at keeping his teenage characters down to earth and relatable, despite the usual plot that a standard-issue origin story usually follows. I'm really looking to the others in this series as they come out. Plus, it's set in Cleveland! And is very, very Cleveland too, which made it super fun to read!!!!

Finally had time to finish Out of the Silent Planet. Classic 50/60s futuristic sci-fi is such an odd thing to read, and this one is no exception. The fun part however is knowing that CS Lewis wrote this partially to troll JRR Tolkien- who did an almost complete rewrite during the editing process and trolls him right back. Watching these two greats subtly pick at each other was definitely the best part, and I'll read the rest of the series at some point.

I'd been eagerly awaiting Robert Jordan's Warrior of the Altaii to be released, and was not disappointed. It was his first novel, written in the 70s and was finally able to published posthumously for the first time by his editor (who he happened to be conveniently married to). Her forward to the story most definitely attracted the onion ninjas. The book was a great story, it's rare for an author's first crack at a full novel to be this cohesive and well written, even though it's still obviously early-career writing. You can also easily see where he was playing around with tons of ideas and elements that would eventually become The Wheel of Time, so that was fun to track, too.

Working on Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas. I really loved Kurlansky's book on Salt, and this is proving to be just as interesting. The entire history of human agriculture, nutrition theory, microbiology, and sanitation, all tied together by one element.

Up next, I've been anxiously waiting almost two years fore the concluding book of the Lightbringer series to be released; Tuesday I can finally get my hands on The Burning White. Brent Weeks, please do not let me down!!!!

QOTW- I'm a huge re-reader! It's like visiting an old friend, and so comforting to revist something that you know you loved the first time, knowing that there won't be any stressful surprises waiting. Others I just love to revisit the magic again and again. And so often, when I reread something that I haven't touched in ages, I've forgotten enough about it that it's like reading it again for the first time, but knowing in advance that I'll love it.

These last two weeks, I finished:

Gideon the Ninth - I wound up loving this. Despite the slowish start, the ending was a doozy. Very much looking forward to Book 2.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass - This was sort of Snow White retelling in a lot of ways, but one where the "evil queen" isn't, really, and both the queen and the princess are sympathetic characters. I was surprised how much I liked this one.

I also read a short story, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, an urban fantasy story set in an alt-history Egypt, which made me curious about the author's longer works in the same setting.

Comics/manga-wise, I read quite a few:
Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 19
Kiss Me At the Stroke of Midnight Vol. 9
O Maidens in Your Savage Season 2
Komi Can’t Communicate, Vol. 1
Noragami: Stray God, Vol. 8
The Way of the Househusband, Vol. 1
(Whew!)

Currently reading: I just started Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. I went to a signing event for the book the other day, and hearing her talk about it got me very excited to dive in.

Of course, when it rains, it pours. I just had three other ebooks come up on digital hold at the library all at once. I'm a slow reader, so I quickly suspended every other digital hold I have to make sure I have time to read them all. I think I might have to put my Kindle into airplane mode. So I guess I have my reading for the next few weeks set out already!

QOTW: I am a re-reader, but I haven't been re-reading as much lately.

I tend to pick a series or an author I haven't read in years for re-reads, and then work my way through the entire series/the author's entire works. Sometimes re-read for comfort, or to refresh my memory on a series if it's been a long time since the last installment, or if I started a series but never finished it.

I also like to re-read through audio for a different experience. I have a 45 minute commute by bus, so plenty of time to listen to stories. My partner reads almost exclusively via audio, too, so a lot of times when I'll finish reading a book, if I think he'll like it, I'll get it from the library in audio format so we can listen together.

In the last two weeks:

I finished Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome on audiobook. It was after Lock In on the same audio. I am enjoying this series.

So not surprisingly, I also started Head On also on audiobook, also narrated by Wil Wheaton. I am enjoying this too, but I'm still close to the beginning, so I'm not yet at the point where I walk laps around my house just to listen more.

I also finished The Friend Zone. This was written by FoE's own Abby Jiminez. I hope she's not on this group and reading this because I had very mixed feelings about this book. It started out well and had characters I cared about, but then it fell into the trap of typical romance keeping some secret and behaving like a jerk because of it, which was completely out of character for all other interactions for the character. Much more realistic in my mind would be something like saying, "Look, here's the deal..."

I have restarted Artemis. This is the third time I've started and I'm not sure why I haven't finished so far. We own this book so it kept getting pre-empted by library books with a due date. I am now much further into it than the other two reads (where I barely got started). This one is good but isn't pulling me in quite the way The Martian did.

QOTW: I am not much of a re-reader. A few times I've reread some early Nora Roberts which had not aged well. I cannot recall the last book I re-read.

At last check-in, I was reading The Invention of Wings, and I won't reiterate all of the issues I raised last time except to say that my thoughts on the matter did not change as I finished the book. The rest of the book club was fairly lukewarm on it as well, although most of them for different reasons.

I needed something fun after that, so I finally read Wildcard, which was great. Despite how much time had passed since I read Warcross, it wasn't hard to slide back into the characters and story. I highly recommend these to anyone who enjoyed Ready Player One.

I decided to keep the fun going and picked up Deadly Memories - Joanne Fluke's early thrillers are fabulously cheesy and often a bit predictable, but they're like a time capsule back to grocery store paperbacks from 25 years ago. This one actually had a fairly decent/suspenseful plot, which was a nice bonus.

Next up was Shadowsong. Wintersong was a slight disappointment for me, but I had heard from multiple people that the second installment was better - and they were correct. Like many of these "duologies" that seem to be the thing these days, it does seem like the publisher split up what would have been a good but slightly long novel into two parts so they could charge twice for it - but in this case, it seems like the author's writing progressed quite a bit (or perhaps the editor's skills improved) between the first and second installment, so the split paid off.

By the time I finished that, The Hate U Give had finally come in on my Libby app for IRL book club #2. I'd seen the movie, and many people I know have already read it, so I was already familiar with the plot and characters - but it really is a great book. The movie was good, too, and introduced some plot elements that made it more visual than the original story, but Angie Thomas does an amazing job of capturing what it's like to be sixteen - and then adds a realistic, compelling story on top of that. I'm looking forward to talking about this one with the book club, since there's a mix of people who read a lot of YA and people only familiar with the movie.

I'm currently keeping the trend of finishing duologies going with The Fates Divide. For some reason, it took me longer to get back into this world than Wildcard and Shadowsong, even though I absolutely loved Carve the Mark and couldn't wait for the sequel at the time I read it. I'm finally back in the groove, but it took me more than half the book to get there. I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a movie or TV show of these, since it has so many of the elements of Star Wars, Avatar, and other popular series - but maybe it will happen eventually.

QOTW: I rarely re-read actual books, since my TBR is already out of control with stuff I haven't read yet - but I do frequently go back to humor books I've had forever, and bookmarked online stuff that makes me laugh. But I have revisited Harry Potter a few times over the years, and I have a feeling that I will be back to the Night Circus eventually, too. :)