EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone!

I had a pretty good reading week, considering I was out of town so had lots of plane reading time.

Finished:

Magic Steps - Started this a while ago but set it aside as a bunch of library books came up.

Tao Te Ching - Read this for Read Harder's book of poetry in translation on a subject other than love. Figured an ancient classic was a good choice. I liked it, ended up being pretty short and I finished it in an hour or so.

Descender, Vol. 4: Orbital Mechanics - Picked this up at one of the many Portland comic book stores I went to. I love this series, and the art is beautiful.

Daughter of Witches - i like Patricia Wrede, but i think i like her later books better. this was one of her early ones and it just isn't quite as engaging.

Under a Blood Moon - This is a book by a fellow FoE! It was pretty good.

Current reading:

The Death of Bunny Munro - borrowed this from a friend. I love Nick Cave so figured i'd give it a try. I don't think I've ever been so repelled by a main character as I am by Bunny Munro. However...since the book is called "The Death of Bunny Munro"...I am keeping reading to see what finally gets him in the end.

How's everyone else's reading going?

Hello Everyone,

I managed to finish Kushiel's Dart this past week, which remained kind of "meh," for me. I think I pinpointed the thing I didn't like so much: the potential for the unusual talents of the protagonist kind of went unexplored. I was all ready to buy into it in one of the final scenes, where I thought, "ah--THIS is why it's important that she likes pain!" but, as with a lot of the other scenes, I felt the author cut it a bit short and didn't fully plumb the possible depths of the character/story. A lot of the time, I found this represented in the phrases such as, "I will not tell you all the details of X" so she could move the plot along. Perhaps that's okay in an 800 page book, but I kept thinking, "but I'd like to hear more about X!" or "tell me more about what the character is going through right now." So, yeah, kind of "meh" for me. I suppose Diana Gabaldon has ruined me for a lot of characters' inner monologues in long stories.

As my prompt for a book on a difficult topic, I read The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Definitely a difficult topic, but told with such humour and richness that it was not a difficult book to read, although at times deeply uncomfortable, and certainly eye-opening. I finished this book on Tuesday, and I already see examples of what the author was talking about all around me--Truth and Reconciliation and including Indigenous ways of knowing are major initiatives in my workplace and are frequently in the news--and I'm really glad that I read this book.

I also started The Children's Book as my book recommended by an author you love. Diana Gabaldon has this on her list of books she recommends people to read while they're waiting for the next Outlander book to come out. This one is nothing like that series, and instead focuses on changing social times between the Victorian and Edwardian eras as told through the stories of a set of families with varying degrees of socialist values in England. It's almost like reading Dickens. I'm about 15% done, and I am pretty much in love with everything about this book! I hope I'll be done it by next week and I can follow up with more about it.

I just started reading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. I'm only reading it at night. It is a small book and it has nicely short chapters so it is easy to pick up and put down. The first chapter was very reminiscent of the beginning of his version of Cosmos. Other reviews on Amazon and here say that a good portion of it is lifted, often verbatim, from his other books. I have not read any of his other books so it is all new to me. I'm enjoying it and looking forward to seeing him in person, on stage this Thursday!!

@Susan Oh I've started that too this month. But English isn't my first language and I'm having some concentration problems (cutting back on dose of medicine) so it goes over my head at times, haha. Even so I like his voice so far in this.

Hello!

This week was a productive reading week for me.

I finished Odds Against Tomorrow as my book where the protagonist has your occupation. I'm a statistician mainly focused on health care research and public health. Turns out there are not many books that feature a statistician. In this book, the main character is an actuary working for a large insurance firm, then a small consulting firm, trying to predict major disasters and creating emergency plans that companies could execute if that disaster happened. Mostly the book focused on this guy's anxiety/paranoia rather than the statistics, though there were some mentions of methods. The second and third parts of the books focus on the major disaster that happens in New York City and how the main character escapes it and then how he rebuilds after the disaster. All in all, the book was OK.

After that, I read He's Either Dead or in St. Paul as a book set in my home state. This was another impulse grab at the library for me... They had an end cap full of Minnesota authors. The title grabbed my attention, so I grabbed the book. The book takes place in 1928 St. Paul, when the city was overrun with gangsters. I didn't like the main character much - he was a murdering, lying, slummy, no-good gangster after all. The plot overall was a bit far-fetched, and the twist at the end put the book even more out there for me. This was not the best book about Minnesota... I should have stuck with one of my other top 5 choices.

Currently I'm reading The Shadow of the Wind as my book translated to English. I'm 150 pages in and I really like it so far! It follows a book seller and his son. The son finds a book he loves and wants to know more about the author and the book when mysterious things start happening. Someone is trying to erase all memory of that author and all copies of his books. I'm excited to finish it.