EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone, sorry I'm so late with my check in this week. Partially because I was really busy, partially because I had nothing to report.

I spent most of last weekend/early this week reading my comic stash. It's mostly individual issues and I don't enter them until the trade shows up on goodreads for me to add. I don't want to inflate my reading numbers with hundreds of little individual issues. I figure once it's compiled into a trade/volume it's closer to a "book".

This morning I finally finished The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. It was good, and I'm glad I read it, but it was just really depressing. So many of the fears and commentary and political climate the author references is very similar to what's going on today, if not worse. It's just depressing to see so much regression instead of progress. The good news is, I counted it as my book printed on a micropress. This compilation wasn't, obviously, but the early issues when it started were. I'm counting it because I refuse to buy a random book just to fulfill the prompt.

How's everyone doing?

I'm super looking forward to finishing out the year reading whatever I want, without having to fulfill any prompts.

Hi Sheri,

So, are you done all of your challenges now? Like you, I'm looking forward to finishing up the year's challenge and going on to read some things I've put on my TBR list since the challenge started and I joined Goodreads. Fun fact: My TBR list is all inspired by books I picked up from the challenge this year and the Goodreads friends I've made. I have so many things to read that are outside of my "go to" genre that I've been stuck in for a few years. I only have 4 more books left on the challenge, and then I'm not even sure where I'll start!

Last week I started The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as the advanced challenge's book about an immigrant or refugee. I'm surprised that this book has never come up in our FoE discussions--or if it has, I've missed it. It's about a Jewish immigrant that flees to New York city in 1939 and his American cousin. Together, they capitalize on the the growing popularity of the new "comic book" genre (it's the earliest days of Superman and Batman) and start their own comic. I'm only about 20% done so far, but I am pretty much in love with this book. It's also a Pulitzer Prize winner (2003, I think), so it's hitting both my literary and nerd sweet spots, heh.

I took a break from reading it, however, because my copy of Norse Mythology finally came up at the library--it was a few months on the wait list. This was a quick and enjoyable read and I flew through it in a couple of days. I'm not really sure what I was expecting it to be, but was it was turned out to be a really well-researched retelling of several Norse myths in a style that reminded me of the The Silmarillion (hardly surprising there, given how much of Tolkien's work is based on Norse mythology) narrated with overtones of Gaiman's cheeky style in Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. So this was a win-win all around. I'm also going to see Thor: Ragnarok on Friday, so the library loan coming up last week was nice timing.

I imagine it will take me a week or two to finish up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as it clocks in at nearly 700 pages of small, dense print and I'm swamped at work for the next few weeks. I'm really looking forward to chipping away at it when I can and letting you know how it goes.

What's everyone else reading?

So I finished my list and even could add two more: Halloween Party by Agatha Christie and The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. Audible’s daily deal for yesterday was At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft, so that’s my new commute book.