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Hi All,

Having a quiet week so I can actually make a post! They've been redoing my roads out my neighborhood so it's been noisy the past couple weeks. But I think they're at a lull in the project, nice and quiet today. Asphalt is down, i think it's rebuilding shoulders, fixing culverts/drains, repainting lines etc. left.

I lost track of what all I've posted so here's some stuff I read in the past few weeks:

Clap When You Land - did the audio book, really liked the dual narrator performance. It was sad, but really good.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn - this took me a while to get into. Soyara annoyed me a lot at first, she was so passive, and then continually made obviously bad decisions even after being expressly told what a bad idea they were. But eventually it picked up and i got more into it and I liked how it ended pretty well. I really liked the Persian mythology aspects.

We Sold Our Souls - i liked this one better than horrorstor, it was fun. It reminded me a bit of the movie Knights of Badassdom. Horror comedy with metal helping to save the day. Also here for female protagonists that aren't teens or 20 somethings. 47 year old washed up former metal guitarists? I'm here for it.

The Battle of the Labyrinth - audio re-read
Death on the Nile - read for a book club, i liked better than I expected. Not huge on mysteries. I kinda had some suspicions to what was going on, but hadn't totally figured it out. Was surprised it took half the book for someone to actually die. (i figure that's not really a spoiler since it's literally called death on the nile and she writes murder mysteries)

Currently reading:

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her - Disappear - i remembered that my library joined a collective, so I have access to five other Michgian library systems collections now. So I was able to line jump and get this instead of waiting another 14 weeks. It's slow going so far. It's nothing against the author's writing style, it's just depressing and given the current world it feels like we haven't come as far as one might hope in over a century. But now i only have 6 days left on my hold so I actually have to buckle down and finish it or i'm back to waiting 14 weeks.

The Last Olympian - audio re-read

QOTW:

I'll borrow from popsugar this week: Can you pick a favorite author? or narrow it down to a few?

I can't narrow it down to one, but a few of my current favorites are Seanan McGuire and Becky Chambers. Lifelong favorites include Mercedes Lackey, Neal Stephanson, William Gibson, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffery, Bruce Coville, Laurel K Hamilton, Neil Gaiman. (Some of those are no longer favorites, I've grown out of them, but they still were favorites at a time in my life and I devoured everything they wrote for a time, for better or worse)

There's other authors who individual books I LOVE but to be a favorite author I feel like I have to love a significant portion of their catalog, and that also means the catalog has to be big enough to have consumed me for a while. (that's a personal thought, not what everyone has to go by). For example, Night Circus is one of my favorite books ever, but Erin Morgenstern has only written two books so far. And while I liked Starless Sea, I didn't LOVE it to the same level as the Night Circus, so I don't feel like the sample size is big enough to say if as a whole, she's a favorite author or if she just wrote a favorite book.

Our house is officially COVID-free now!

Finishes this week:
Tokyo Ever After for the Popsugar sister city prompt. This was fluffy wish fulfillment, and I really needed that. Very sweet, cute romance, and fun characters.

Comics and manga: Komi Can't Communicate, Vol. 19

I'm currently reading A Mirror Mended for a book with a reflected image on the cover or "mirror" in the title. I'm not too far in, but it's good so far. A quick read. If you liked A Spindle Splintered, I think you'll like the sequel, too.

QOTW:
It's impossible to pick a single favorite author. I have a lot of authors I consider faves right now in the fantasy and sci-fi genre: T. Kingfisher, Seanan McGuire, Margaret Owen, Martha Wells, Lois McMaster Bujold. For romance, I really like Courtney Milan.

I used to be a Mercedes Lackey fangirl, too, Sheri. Tanya Huff and Tamora Pierce also - I still like them, but I'm not entirely caught up with their backlist. I kind of count Jim Butcher as a favorite. I'm invested in the Dresden Files characters enough to see the series through to the end. Leigh Bardugo is kind of a favorite, in that I've read and enjoyed almost everything she's written, but I'm not sure I'm starting to lost interest in further Grishaverse books after what happened in the last one.

got Shadow Fallen from the library the other day, so i set aside Ilium for now. i have a bunch of books on hold, i still think I'm going to get them all at once XD

QotW: if i read the author, i like 'em. hard to pick a fave. :D

Sheri it is good to have you here again! I am heading to a family reunion vacation at a lake. I will not get a lot of audiobook time. I will get some reading time in late at night before bed.

This week I finished listening to The Ghost Brigades. That is book 2 in the Old Man's War series. Last year I read the short story The Sagan Diary which is book 2.5 (but I didn't know that at the time). I listened to that again now that I have the context and world to understand it.

And I started the next book, The Last Colony, book 3.

I am still reading Sea of Tranquility. I am about halfway through it. I am enjoying it and it is interesting. I'm not sure where it is going yet though.

QOTW: At the moment John Scalzi is a favorite. In romance novels Nora Roberts was a longtime favorite. Her novels have gotten stranger in recent years and too formulaic but I've read most of her slightly less recent works. When younger, I loved Isaac Asimov.

Hello, I've been a member of this group for a while, although not active until now. Welcome to my first comment/post.

I just this moment finished reading The Last Graduate by Naomi Novak. It is the second book of her Scholomance series. Unfortunately the third book is not yet released. I cannot wait.

This is the first year I've actually tracked my reading progress on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I reread a lot of my cheesey romances as I call them, Betty Neels is a favorite author for that. I'm at 70 books read for the year so far. a mix of new and rereads.

I feel like I shall be in book purgatory for a bit while I digest the ending of The Last Graduate. Which is okay as I have house work and chores to catch up on for a bit, as well as a kindle that needs to be charged, heh.

Favorite authors are Anne Bishop, Colleen Gleason, K.M. Shea, Naomi Novak, Heather Graham, Betty Neels, Anne Rice, Kim Harrison. I've read most if not all the worlds these authors have created.

The Night Circus is also a favorite book [I've read it a few times], but I have not yet read A Starless Sea although it's on my to be read list.

We did not in fact get record high temperatures here, just the "normal" very hot, so I'll take it.

A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey - My husband sometimes tries to find book suggestions for me, with mixed results, but this was a winner. The titular creature is the caracara, a group of weird crow-like South American falcons. I thought there were some missteps in the book's organization, but otherwise it basically covered the template of bird topics for me: avian intelligence, convergent evolution, dinosaur ancestry, the works.

Lock In - This was my second Scalzi, after Redshirts, which was funny but got too meta for me. I picked this one since it seemed the most mystery-novel-adjacent, although it is more thriller/police procedural. I would describe it as "workmanlike" (and I don't think the author would take exception). I will eventually read the prequel Tor gave away for free, maaaybe the sequel, and the kaiju one after the hold list calms down, but I don't think I'll be devouring his catalog.

QOTW: Absolutely not - I can never pick a favorite anything. I tried to think of any points in the past at which I might have had a favorite, and I suspect that when I was ten-ish I would've said Jim Kjelgaard.

Yeesh - I don't think I've updated since April 0_o !

To summarize,

The Good: The Midnight Library, The Echo Wife, The Three-Body Problem, The Girl in Red

The Alright: Magic for Liars, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And other Questions about Dead Bodies. Hater

The Infuriating: The 4% Fix

So while I am still well on my way to monumentally failing to complete all 100 Book Nerds prompts, I should equal or beat last year's total count.

Sheri, thanks for that summary of We Sold Our Souls - I've added it to my TBR list!

QOTW: With a gun to my head, I'd probably splutter Douglas Adams. On literature-map.com (highly recommend), I run in the Neil Gaiman/Stephen King area. In terms of authors I have more recently discovered, I'm quite fond of Sarah Gailey's voice, and there's no one who can touch N.K. Jemisin.

Daniele wrote: ....literature-map.com
wow, that is really cool!!!

Glad to see you, Sheri! :)

In the past week I read and really enjoyed The Kaiju Preservation Society, which was EXACTLY the kind of book I needed - snarky fluff, which Scalzi excels at. I also finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows to my son. I've read it a bazillion times and wanted to share it with him. He absolutely loved it but of course we were both sobbing madly at the end. I'm going to start The Giver with him next.

I went back to Brightness Reef yesterday and have managed to get back into it, so that's good. I also have picked up The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories for the second time and am reading some of the short stories in bits and pieces.

QOTW: My two current favorites are Guy Gavriel Kay and N.K. Jemisin. For lighter reading, Seanan McGuire and Gail Carriger are go-tos. I also have some nostalgic favorites, that I probably would be unimpressed by if I read them for the first time today, but that I read a billion times when I was younger and I still re-read today sometimes when I need comfort - Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, David Eddings.