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Hi all,

In the hectic part of the year, for Americans at least, with Thanksgiving leading into various winter holidays.

Apologies for no post last week, I'm putting one up today because I know tomorrow I won't get to it.

Happy Thanksgiving to fellow Americans!

This week & last I finished:

The Future of Another Timeline - Don't generally love time travel books, but I thought the author handled it well and the story was really interesting. Liked it a lot overall.

The City in the Middle of the Night - This was really interesting, very dark and moody. Fascinating world, with a tidally locked planet and the sort of extremes that causes.

A Closed and Common Orbit - after going through the book club read again to make up questions, I was itching to get into the second one. I really liked it, maybe even more than A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It was a more intimate story, only dealing with two characters, but it dug into lots of fascinating ideas about sentience and the rights that should come with it.

Mostly Void, Partially Stars - i've listened to all of Nightvale but I have a hard time really following plot and remembering it if i only hear it. So as much as I love Cecil's voice, it was good to read the story and feel like I grasped a lot more connections than I did the first time around. the intros to each episode with creator experiences was also cool.

Sonata, Vol. 1: Valley of the Gods - this is a cool newer sci-fi series, sort of steampunky visually but it's future tech. I like it so far

Record of a Spaceborn Few - decided to finish up the series so far, although it's kind of a loose interpretation of series. I liked it, but not as much as the first two. This one felt more disjointed, and took much longer to get how the characters wove together.

Currently reading:

about to start Chimes at Midnight , love the October Daye books and i'm behind.

Small Favor - audio book re-read, always enjoyable

QOTW:

Various reading challenges are releasing the 2020 prompt lists, anyone doing any challenges next year?

This year was a little exhausting, so I think I'll only do the popsugar ones. Unless I really like Read Harder, but that one always seems to have at least a couple that make me cringe. I'm really trying to focus on reading books I own this year, and not getting distracted by library holds with ticking deadlines.

Also stuck in the pre-Thanksgiving craziness, but with much less reading going on than Sheri evidently had.

Finished off The Princess Beard: The Tales of Pell, which was just as delightful as the other two in the series were. Silly and highly immature humor, yes, but so much fun to read! My only criticism was originally the lack of my favorite character, but author Dawson came through for me, and he made a cameo appearance at the end. No spoilers, but there is a several chapter long riff on Hogwarts that alone is 100% worth the price of admission for this book.

I'm currently between books, largely because I had the insane idea a few weeks ago that hosting Thanksgiving dinner for 10 in-laws, then leaving for two weeks in Florida a day later would be no problem. The result was predictable: Reading time? What in the world is that???? But I've got nearly 24 hours of travel time coming on Saturday/Sunday, and a well-provisioned Kindle ready to go, leading off with Brandon Sanderson's new book Starsight, as well as the rest of the Admiral series, among other goodies.

QOTW: I've actually never done a challenge list before, so if I can find one with a theme that I like, I may try one. I've got a ton or random stuff on my TBR list, and two series in my bedroom bookcase that are calling to me to be re-read (The Camlud Chronicles and The Sword of Truth series), so I may just work on that. The fourth book in The Stormlight Archive is tentatively due out a year from now, so that series will likely get at least a partial re-read next fall as well. Oh, and a job change coming in February that will likely shake things up a bit, too.

Happy thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates! :)

Since the last check-in, I've had a few finishes.

Rebel Girls - this was a fun, very nostalgic story to me, because I would have been the same age as the main character in the year it was set. So a lot of the musical and cultural references really hit home, even if it was set somewhere completely different.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers's latest novella, unrelated to her Wayfarers series. This is a story about space exploration. More specifically, the human cost, and the human impact, of exploring other worlds. As usual, Chambers's writing is beautiful, poignant, and powerful.

Geekerella - a super cute YA romance retelling of Cinderella, centered around fandom and conventions. It was fluffy and fun.

Manga: The Ancient Magus' Bride Vol. 11 and Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 20

Currently reading: Made Things - this is a steampunk-flavored fantasy novella about a thief and her magically-animated puppet buddies. I'm not very far in but enjoying it so far.

QOTW: I'm currently planning to do Popsugar's reading challenge for the first time in 2020. I already put together a spreadsheet of ideas -- I gave myself two choices for each book, just in case I don't like something, or I can't get a hold of it from the library -- and I was able to match quite a few of the prompts to things already on my To Read shelf, so hopefully it will help me make inroads on that, too.

I'm actually curious to go look at the 2019 prompts for Popsugar and see how much of them I may have hit accidentally.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! Like everyone else, I was busy with the onslaught of family and friends from out of town, which is lovely to a point but doesn't leave much time for reading! I did finish One Day in December, which was 100% not my jam, but I'm very glad to be through with well in advance of the IRL Book Club #1 meeting where it will be discussed. I also got about halfway through The Partly Cloudy Patriot in between things, since it seemed like a good time for something that could be read in short spurts - and I also needed to hear someone like Sarah Vowell to remind me that the characters from One Day in December really aren't representative of the world at large.

For 2020, I'm just sticking to the challenge of keeping up with all of the book clubs - it would be interesting to look at how everything I read this year lined up with the popsugar challenge, since I've heard so much about it here all year! I'll do that in January after 2019 is officially complete. :)

It's been a while since I posted, so I have no clue how many books I've completed since then. My last two have been Presto! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales and The Raven: Soaring Through History, Legend & Lore. I also read a debut novel by an author that the local paper said was a strong new voice: Chienne. A very tough read, like one long trigger warning. Very vivid.

QOTW: In 2019, I tracked the Golden Trio Challenge, Modern Mrs. Darcy, Pingel Sisters, ATY, Popsugar, and Book Riot. I completed the first two then let my reading roam more freely. I got to 41/52 for Pingel Sisters and ATY, 32/50 for Popsugar, and a totally uninspired 7/24 for Book Riot, which was a surprise considering how much I'd enjoyed the list in 2018. I'm currently at 79 books for the year, well behind last year's high of 105, but only 800 pages behind. Blame that on reading the last 3 GoT books.

For 2020, I mostly have my eye on the Mommy Mannegren, ATY, and Popsugar challenges. The Flourish & Blotts challenge isn't as inspiring as much as the Golden Trio was to me, and we'll see if Book Riot comes up with something interesting.

I did not get much reading done these past couple of weeks. My son got married last Saturday! Life was crazy a while. I only started reading again after that today. So I'll report next week on books.

QOTW: Sheri's been leading the weekly check-ins for a while now, 2 or maybe 3 years at this point. Thank you Sheri! I appreciate just having to reply and thank you for taking the lead on creating posts. I know anyone can create one but we all wait for you.

In any case, in all those years I've been a regular check-in participant even though I'm not doing a challenge. Maybe someday I'll decide to do one, but I'm not feeling the need right now.

Aw thanks Susan :) and no worries about challenges, they’re fun for some but stressful for others. But I still like having a place to chat about what’s being read!

Hello, fellow bots! I've been lurking in the membership for a while but never posted (I'm Michelle Efros Fox on FB). I mod another group here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ so I've been hesitant to add another time-suck to my day, but life just threw me a few unpleasant curveballs and I need a distraction, so here I am :)

Right now I'm reading Consider Phlebas after hearing so many of my members over in my other group rave about the Culture series, and so far I'm liking it.

I'm also reading The Graveyard Book out loud to my third grader in the evenings - I've read it before but remembered very little, and it's been fun to revisit it with him!

QOTW: I have never done a reading challenge, the group I mod chooses one SF and one fantasy novel to read each month, plus we usually have a series going (currently Robin Hobb's Realms of the Elderlings books). I don't always read every book that was chosen, but I try!

Is the book club the science fiction and fantasy book club? I’m in they buy I haven’t managed to read any of the hooks in the proper window/participate haha. I get you on the time sucks!

Sheri wrote: "Is the book club the science fiction and fantasy book club? I’m in they buy I haven’t managed to read any of the hooks in the proper window/participate haha. I get you on the time sucks!"

It's Beyond Reality and any of you are welcome to join in and poke around :)

I haven't done specific challenges, but just set a goal on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. Last year I exceeded it by a lot, but it was a stressful year and that's how I distract myself. So I guess it's good for my mental health that I had to adjust my goal down to 104 books and am still behind.

But I knocked off 6 books in the past week while traveling so I'm going to see if I can read 18 more this month. I just requested favorite short book suggestions at FoE, and people reminded me that revisiting favorite children's books still counts, so I'm going to do that, as well as 10 requests from the library from the FoE suggestions.

I finally finished reading How To, by the xkcd comic strip. It was very funny, and the engineer in me enjoyed his analyses. It just took me awhile because I prefer fiction. I really enjoyed our book selection of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and plan to read the next two; somebody (sorry I forgot who) named this one of the best sci-fi trilogies of the decade. I also liked the Invisible Library, which was librarians traveling in alternate universes. Plus dragons. Also finished the latest Donna Andrews Christmas mystery, the 8th Peter Shandy (that I'm rereading in order this year), and a novella, the Jewel and her Lapidary. (Seeing how short this one was when I picked it up from the library gave me the push to finish my challenge with short books.)

Good luck to everyone else trying to finish their challenges!