EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi Everyone!

Didn't accomplish much this week, but I've been doing Inktober and Drawlloween and adopting kittens so I suppose I had an excuse.

I finished Moon Called audiobook. It was a reread, listened while painting and crafting and such.

The Night Circus took a break from my current book to read this and get in a halloween/artistic mood.

I'm currently reading The Shadow of the Wind still. I'm at a weird place with it, where I still want to know how it ends, but i'm so tired of reading it. I keep finding myself playing on my phone or staring off into space instead of reading. It's just not really engaging me. But i don't dislike it, or hate it. I don't really know what the problem is.

QOTW:

Borrowing from popsugar this week, at the library or bookstore are you a browser or a person with a mission?

I don't go to bookstores much anymore, most of them have closed that were my go-tos. But if I do go to one, it's usually spur of the moment "oh hey it's actually a book store" so i'm going to just browse. For the library, it's kind of a pain to get to. I usually only go to pick up a hold, but while I'm there I usually check out at least the new releases. If I have time, I'll do a wander down the fiction aisles to see if anything jumps out.

It was a week of quick reads, for the most part. The first was Sea Prayer, which fulfilled the ATY Water element prompt.

I also finished the Modern Mrs. Darcy challenge with a recommendation from my librarian or indie bookseller. My librarian was thrilled with the question, and she gave me not one but three recommendations. So that's how I wound up discovering three new Quebec authors: I finished novella Comme enfant je suis cuit and Les gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles, a short story collection.

I am about a third of the way through La femme qui fuit, her last recommendation and what will be my 70th book of 2018. I have 5 prompts left to complete ATY and reach my stretch goal of 75 books for the year. Then we'll see if I have time to complete Book Riot, for which I have 6 prompts left, including 2 comic books.

I'm happy with the librarian's recommendations because I really don't read enough in French, to be honest. But often, stories just feel more comfortable in English, even though French is my mother tongue.

QOTW: I browse at bookstores. Sometimes I go to work at the library (I'm a freelance translator). Otherwise, I'm mostly on a mission, because it's a small library and the selection of new titles is fairly slim.

I have quite a few books requested at the library. Several are new releases by favorite authors, so I have awhile to wait. So I was happy to get the latest by Charlaine Harris An Easy Death and raced through it. It's a western-alternate history-fantasy. I enjoyed the main character. Ended satisfactorily but with opportunities to continue.

I was raised as a library girl so that is where most of my new stuff comes from. We have a great library reserve system and I can walk there in 10 minutes so I am a frequent user. I will buy favorite author series as they come out, or wait to buy boxed sets so they match. Also prefer used bookstores to new.

One branch of our library just remodeled and instead of having "mystery" they have at least a dozen categories of "amateur detective", "historical", "thriller", "police procedural", etc. (Same with other genres). While this could be great for browsing, they don't include the subcategories in the catalog listing, so I think it could be terrible if you were trying to decide the correct subgenre in which to locate a book. Would Sherlock Holmes be historical or private detective? Not sure if I approve....

I am still working through The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind. It is getting difficult as I'm enjoying the depth of details less and less. It is very dense. I'm starting to just skim much of it now. I have a week or two left before it is due at the library and I have no more renewals. Keeping at it for now.

When walking by myself I'm still listening to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I am enjoying this a lot. Lin Manuel Miranda has a great voice in this. I think I'm about halfway. Just the other day I actually laughed out loud while walking when he read the line "and I had to write an essay on Alexander Hamilton." I wonder how many audio takes that one took before he could read that without laughing!

I am definitely a book store browser. We used to buy much more long ago. We've always used the library a lot anyway, but now I just don't want more in the house either. Always have books around, but library books are most common now. I love browsing the new arrivals shelves at the library. I find a lot of random things that I never would have picked up otherwise.

Hello All, and Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to those of you who are celebrating. We went to visit my family for the weekend, which meant some excellent reading time in the car and in the evenings as things wind down pretty early at my parents' house. So, I managed to finish reading Gone Girl, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This kind of surprised me because, while I can get behind an unlikeable character, I found there weren't really any likeable characters in the book, which is usually a red flag for me. But I thought the book was so well-crafted and with a really unique storyline, so I pretty much devoured it. I hear this book is somewhat polarizing, but you can put me in the pro-Gone Girl camp. Cross "book with alliteration in the title" off my Popsugar list.

I also started watching the movie last night, but it didn't really do much for me, and I turned it off halfway through when husbot was ready to watch Doctor Who instead.

I'm also about 1/3 way through Norwegian Wood, my book with song lyrics in the title. This one has been on my TBR list for a while--I actually was going to read it for the 2017 challenge, but swapped it out for something else at the last minute. This is a beautiful rambling book that's short on plot on long on reflection, originally written in Japanese, that deals with themes in a way that we don't usually see in Western writing, even though the book is clearly dealing with the tensions of Westernization in post-WW2 Japan (it's set in 1970). I'm quite enjoying it. In many ways, the narrator reminds me of Holden Caulfield, so I was chuffed to see him make a reference to Catcher in the Rye at one point in the book. It seems the author also had this on his mind when creating the book!

I'm 100% a library retriever rather than a browser! I know what I want to check out and which branch to visit to get it. In fact, I usually have a book sent to my closest branch so I can just run into the hold shelf and check it out. I think this might change next year, as I'm planning on giving Popsugar a break so that I can read without "restraint." I've really valued two years of engaging in Popsugar, but I feel that it's more than accomplished my initial goal of re-engaging my love of reading and getting me back to a reading place where I read a wide variety of genres. I look forward to a year of reading whatever, whenever, and I'm sure this will include browsing library shelves.

Stephanie,

Yeah I did take 2016 off after doing Popsugar the first year in 2015, it was nice to just read whatever. But then the lists come out and i start figuring out what to plug in them and then suddenly I'm doing 3 challenges. But then I also know I'll finish the challenges early so I have a few months at the end of each year to just read whatever anyhow. So usually once January hits i'm ready to give it another go.