Cathryn’s Comments (group member since Dec 12, 2017)

Cathryn’s comments from the 2022 ONTD Reading Challenge group.

I'll be late with it, but I'm going to try to read The Girl in 6E for Prof. Tyler Posey's Onlyfans Administration course. It's already on my kindle, so that's great!

Thanks for all the recs! Awesome ONTD post.

I'm going to be reading Pachinko this month. I read the first few chapters last year and then got distracted, so I'm starting over. I'm going to check out the books in the post as well and see what I can add to my tbr.

I read Song for a New Day and The Midnight Library. I didn't like the Midnight Library very much -- it felt really trite to me in the end.

Loved Song for a New Day. It was fun and almost prophetic. I can see why it won the Nebula and was shortlisted for the Hugo.

lol does Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators count?

Hello! I'm going to be trying out the Luminaries because I think it'll be a good challenge. I've just barely started it already and I think I should be able to soldier through!

I still need to catch up on last month, but for this month I'm going to have some fun and finish up the third and fourth books in Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles series. The whole series is a weird mashup of YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy fairytale retellings.

Cress is a loose retelling of Rapunzel and Winter is a loose retelling of Snow White.

If I have time, I might also read Song of Achilles and Circe, but we'll see!

yay! thanks! always glad to get through something I already own. good excuse to read this one! I know the series is really well-liked!

I was looking at my Kindle to see what I might have for this month and I'm wondering if "A long way to a small angry planet." Would this count?

I read The Devotion of Suspect X, which I thought was good, but I don't think I'll ever love another Keigo Higashino book as much as I loved Journey Under the Midnight Sun.

I also finished The Knife's daughter, a novella I randomly picked up at the library. It was also okay, written in second person perspective which was very interesting.

I started Pachinko but I think I may be working on that for awhile.

I read one book for this theme a bit early, The Devotion of Suspect X. I liked it well enough, but it wasn't the type of mystery I enjoy the most.

I also plan to finish up The Knife's Daughter, which I picked up randomly at the library recently. It takes place in Korea.

I also have Pachinko and A Tale for the Time Being, which I may try to get to, but we'll see. I'm reading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series and I might wind up just sticking with that for now.

Sappho's Bar and Grill sounds great! I added to my tbr.

I read 11/22/63 this month. I was going to try and read Kindred as well, but I think I need a break from time travel.

I enjoyed 11/22/63, but imo it was a little too long. The middle section dragged a lot and I had a tough time getting through that part. This really lessened my enjoyment of the whole book because even though I liked the ending, I was kinda over it by the end and I just wanted to be finished.

Thanks for all the recommendations as usual! I will be reading 11/22/63 and Kindred this month! Looking forward to both!

I'm pretty well constantly listening to non-fiction audiobooks these days, so I got through quite a lot for this month's theme:

Life Itself: I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. Roger Ebert is a phenomenal writer and the audiobook is read by Edward Hermann, so it's great to listen to. It's super long, however, and Ebert writes quite glowingly about several of his problematic faves (John Wayne, Woody Allen). I think, if you're interested in film criticism and journalism, it's good, but I definitely did a lot of eye rolling throughout. Despite all that, it's wonderfully sincere and honest.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: I liked this a lot. Great information presented in a way that I enjoyed and Neil Degrasse Tyson has a voice that is wonderful to listen to. Then I found out about the sexual assault accusations against him and aaaaaauuuugggggghhhhhhh.

Emotional First Aid: Practical Strategies for Treating Failure, Rejection, Guilt, and Other Everyday Psychological Injuries: I read the first two chapters of this last year and decided to finish it up for this month's challenge. This book is recommended a lot in Buzzfeed articles recently. It's okay, I guess, but I didn't think it was significantly helpful.

A Room of One's Own: I loved this. It's definitely a heavy slog, but Virginia Woolf was brilliant and I heartily enjoyed her criticism of men and women and fiction.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing: I've been on a decluttering journey for a long time now and so actually applying the KonMari method isn't something I'm planning on doing, but I loved the show on Netflix and figured I would check out the book. The content was fine, but the audio book narration was monotone and awful and lessened my enjoyment considerably.

We Should All Be Feminists: This is an amazing primer on feminism and I will be recommending this to nearly everyone I know.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love: This audio book is great. Narration by the author can be hit or miss with me, but Dani Shapiro has a beautiful voice and this book deals a lot with her upbringing in orthodox Judaism. Hearing her delivery of Hebrew phrases was beautiful and touching to me. I work as a genealogist and it was very interesting and idk, I just loved this. Heartily recommended.

haha, omg, tl;dr

So, I listened to Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. It was fine, I guess, but then I looked up Neil Degrasse Tyson and aaaaauuuuuggggghhhh. Men.

I read 99 Percent Mine and didn't like it very much. The end was okay, and the writing was decent, but the MC was strange and her brother was an asshole, idk, I just felt like everyone was kinda giving her shit she didn't deserve all the time and it stressed me out.

I'm doing all of my nonfiction via audiobook right now so I'm super excited to see everyone's picks. I've added a bunch of titles to my tbr list on the Libby app.

Right now I'm listening to Roger Ebert's memoir, Life Itself. It's very long and a very traditional memoir, but I like it well enough. It's read by Edward Hermann, which helps a lot.

I'll probably also listen to (because something shorter might be nice):

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
A Room of One's Own
In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs

I'll be reading 2 books for this month: 99 Percent Mine and Emergency Contact since I already own them and I'm excited to have an excuse to read them!

I read The Sun is Also a Star and I enjoyed it way more than I was expecting.

I had a lot of trouble deciding what to read this month bc none of the options particularly appealed to me. Was going to read Little Women because I hadn't read it since childhood, but I started and it was super slow, so I decided to pick a different book. I chose The Sun is Also a Star because it was available at my public library and I loved it. Kinda Scott Pilgrim + Before Sunrise vibes.

So I read the first few chapters of Little Women and it was terribly slow. I need to read something that moves a little quicker atm, so I checked out some lists and saw that The Sun is Also a Star was available at my local library. I picked it up this morning and I'm enjoying it a lot.

I've decided to revisit Little Women for this month. Haven't read it since I was about 12, so I think it'll be fun and nostalgic. Snagged a free copy from Project Gutenberg, which I recommend checking out whenever you're going to read any classics -- they have loads of legal copies of books no longer in copyright.