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Hello!

I'm getting to this on Sunday evening. I'll try to get it out a few days earlier. I was in NYC on a business trip until Thursday night and then today we picked up our adult daughter who is visiting/working from here for the whole week.

I have no finishes. But while away I read most of The Ex Hex. I am "this close" to finishing and will finish on or before Halloween tomorrow. This book is okay for me. I probably wouldn't read it other than for a holiday read.

I'm still listening to The Bullet That Missed, the 3rd Thursday Murder Club. Now that traveling is over and I'm home and walking alone I should get more of this done. I am about halfway through it. I have no idea who did the various deeds but I love reading about the antics of the main characters.

I still have While My Sister Sleeps in progress. But since that is my own copy of the book I'll have to see if I get to it before 3 book club books come in. I haven't picked it up in over a week.

QOTW:
If you could be an animal, what animal would it be?

It's funny because we've always said, for my daughter who's visiting, that the turtle is her spirit animal. She is just drawn to them still.

I often say I have OPD because I love Other People's Dogs but have no desire to have one of my own. Would I want to be one? Maybe something that flies as there would be an amazing feeling of freedom and seeing the world from that viewpoint. So maybe a dog or an eagle.

I also mistimed my spooky reads a bit.

Mexican Gothic - Another book to which I have come late, and this time found to have deserved the hype. I was concerned because I saw some reviews referencing body horror, but while I guess it technically qualifies, it's not, like, gross-out torture or anything. It mostly reads like the standard creepy-house family-secrets Gothic novel. The ultimate, uh, central horrific aspect, shall we say, is introduced pretty early and became fairly clear to me before the "big reveal", so I suspect anyone with a particular aversion to that subject would nope out soon enough.

The Castle of Otranto - I should have mentioned in our last weekly question that another reason I like to read books is for context on the development of literature, various genres, etc (sort of a how it started/how it's going thing). This is the OG Gothic novel, for a fun contrast with the modern example previously. (Also it was available for quick download from Gutenberg.) I give it the Marleys' review of Fozziwig's speech: it was not particularly amazing, but it was short! I was surprised by its brevity compared to the extreme wordiness of The Mysteries of Udolpho. I'm sure it was more entertaining before Gothic tropes were all commonplace. The best part was the introduction purporting that it was a translation of an ancient Italian manuscript, in which the author, claiming to be the translator, both praises and criticizes his own work. Very cheeky. (Apparently some people believed the "translation" story when it was first published, but some did not, and subsequent editions acknowledged the actual author.)

QOTW: I like lots of animals, like corvids, but I'm not sure I'd actually want to be one. I think I've gotten too used to being a human to want to trade (and probably many animals would feel the same way about their own lives). Maybe I could be a changeable mantleslug or something like that.

I stated I would finish by the end of Halloween. Last night I was reading to finish The Ex Hex and when I looked up it was 12:01am on Halloween. So I literally finished it on Halloween!

My one finish last week was something pretty different: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. I can't remember where I had heard or read about the book, but I'd added it to my TBR list several years ago and finally got around to taking it out of the library. It was EXCELLENT. I learned a lot about the Hmong people that I did not know - I'd heard the name and vaguely knew that they originated somewhere in Asia, but didn't known anything more than that. It's a fascinating culture. But it's one that American doctors do not (or at least did not at the time) understand, and the barrier to communication was MUCH more than a simple language barrier. Anyway, if you're looking for some quality nonfiction I highly recommend this one. (content warning - the Hmong practice animal sacrifice that's mentioned frequently, so you may want to skip it if this bothers you)

I've started The Sunbearer Trials and am only a few chapters in. I regret to say it's not really impressing me so far, although I plan to keep reading - it just seems so derivative of other similar YA series that it's hard to find much original about it. Maybe I'll change my mind when I get into the meat of the story, so I'll give it more of a chance, and I'm interested to hear what the rest of you think when you get to it.

QOTW: Hmm. Something wild and earthy and free - maybe a wolf?