EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi Everyone!

I've been off to Portland for a few days, so didn't get a whole lot of reading done. I did, however, come home with a suitcase full of books after a Powell's stop. So that's a win, in my book.

I finished:

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia - i can't remember if i'd finished this for my post last week, but oh well. It was for Reading Women book set in or about Appalachia, and ATY book with one of the 5 w's in the title. It was interesting, if a bit dry. Did help break up my own held stereotypes & examine why they exist.

Home Is the Hunter - a play for Reading Women. It was ok, a retelling of Odysseus' homecoming from Penelope's perspective.

Artificial Condition - novella for Reading Women. Second Murderbot book, I enjoyed it. My library doesn't have these, so I keep waiting for the price to drop to something priced for a novella instead of a full length book. I'll get them all eventually!

Currently reading:

The Silver Metal Lover - ATY book related to an element. I've read a bunch of Tannith Lee but never got around to this series. It's ok so far, not quite as engrossing as some of her others.

I DNFed The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, it was going to be my Read Harder nonviolent true crime, but it was just so boring. A whole lot of history of wine and Thomas Jefferson's drinking habits. I'm not a wine drinker, so it just wasn't even a little interesting for me.

QOTW:

borrowing from popsugar again:

Does a book being really popular/getting a lot of buzz make you more or less likely to read it?

I find if a book is getting a lot of attention, I'll certainly look it up and read the synopsis. I'll probably eventually bite and read it, if it sounds at all interesting. If it's in a genre I like, it'll get more priority. If it's outside my usual but it might be interesting, I'll probably wait until either there's less of a wait for it, or a reading challenge prompt works for it. But I won't read a book just because of the buzz if I think it sounds really boring or repellant unless it's for a book club or something like that.

Sheri - if you need another non-violent true crime book for your challenge, I highly recommend Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. For me, it was a could-not-put-it-down thriller.

And I was just in Portland last week! We went to Powell's, but admittedly spent more time in Cacao across the street. We went for chocolate shots each afternoon. OMG so good.

I'll post a real write-up later.

Finished up Towers of Midnight and started on A Memory of Light, which is the last book in the Wheel of Time series. After such a slow burn plot build up over 7 months of reading, it feels really odd to have everything finally coming to a head and finding resolution. I had forgotten that most of this book is nothing but battle scenes, though. They're well done battles, mind you, but 900 pages of them, when it's not really your favorite thing to read about, gets a bit tedious. On the other hand, you don't use that much ink building up to an epic final battle for it to only last 4 chapters, either, so at least we fans got our money's worth out of the climax.

Decisions are still being made on what to read next. I may do a run of non-fiction for awhile as a palette cleanser... we'll see.

QOTW: My taste tends to run anti-popular anyway, and it definitely winds up extending to books, too. I'm trying not be so jaded, but when something gets a ton of popular media buzz, it's hard to not take it as an automatic signal of something I won't like. Unfortunately I've been disappointed by way too many hyped up "It-Books" for me to not be highly suspicious, but I am working on it, and I have had a few good experiences with them as a result.

Last week, I wanted a brain break from heavier stuff, so I read a bunch of manga: Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 18, Takane & Hana, Vol. 9, Fruits Basket Collector's Edition, Vol. 7, and Fruits Basket Collector's Edition, Vol. 8.

Then, I read a cute contemporary YA romance, What If It's Us. As someone who used to live in NYC, I love reading books set there, especially when they get things right. I could exactly picture where the characters were at various points in this book. That, along with the general nerdiness and Broadway fandom running through the book, was enough to rate this an extra star from me.

I'm currently reading The Sisters Mederos. I think I got turned on to this book from one of Martha Wells' recommendation posts. So far I'm really enjoying it. The worldbuilding is a lot like what my partner and I going for in our own book, so that's a plus.

QOTW: I think it depends on the genre and format of the popular book. I'm less likely read a popular nonfiction, for example, and I'm kind of sick of the copycat thrillers ala Gone Girl that keep cropping up.

In general, I like to read broadly across genres, although my main focus is still on sci-fi and fantasy since that's what I like to write. If something is getting a lot of positive buzz, I'll usually look it up and read a synopsis and some reviews, both positive and negative, and I check if any friends have read it here on Goodreads, too. If, after all that, it sounds like something I might enjoy, I'll probably check it out sooner or later. I've found some surprisingly good books that live up to the hype.

Susan, I had to drop off some library books so I picked up that Bad Blood, I’ll let you know what I think. I actually heard about that project and had been excited in terms of medical advances and was super bummed and mad when I heard it was basically a scam. Should be more interesting!

Jenna, I feel you on the Gone Girl wanna bes. I really enjoyed Gone Girl. Girl on a Train was ok, I thought The Wife Between Us was pretty lame.

Sorry, on phone so can’t edit, I meant Jen!

I think I skipped a week, but recent finishes include

Split Tooth for the Wizarding Radio / audiobook prompt. I'm still not sure what to make of this. It's beautiful and haunting, and I have no idea what happened.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane for Charms / book with a charming cover. I'm slowly making my way through Neil Gaiman's bibliography and enjoying every minute.

That puts me at 47/52 prompts for the year. I was hoping to be done by my birthday on the 27th but that's looking less and less likely, in part because I'm now working on A Dance with Dragons but I still have well over 27 hours of audiobook to go.

QOTW: While it's hot, I have zero interest. If it's in my preferred genres, I'll usually circle back to it years after the dust has settled.

I was away on vacation in Oregon last week. Spent an afternoon in Powell's and then in Cacao just about across the street.

For the flights I listened to and finished The Dark Talent. This is the 5th and final Alcatraz & the Evil Librarians books. I've really enjoyed them. This one was also very interesting up until the end. I found the ending quite a bit unsatisfactory. It felt like it wrapped up way too quickly and simply. Things were not fully explained. But, it does prepare you for this for the entire series in a snarky "I told you this would be this way. I told you I'm a coward." running theme. Maybe it is a setup for more follow-on.

After finishing that, I started listening to The Android's Dream. We enjoyed listening to John Scalzi's Redshirts on a flight last year. I need to give this more of a chance. I'm about 3 chapters in and it is a bit too much political setup so it is a bit slow for me right now.

In a real/paperback book I finished A Week at the Lake. I got this from the give-away shelf at my library. It was a great vacation read. It is not a romance novel but a novel about friendship. It might be a BookFlood gift at some point in the future. It was just right for the trip.

I paused and am now picking back up (because it is a hardcover book so it didn't travel with me) Melinda Gates' The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. I was reading it before I left. I'm enjoying it so far and it is also a fairly fast read.

QOTW:
I generally don't keep tabs on what is hot right now. I get most of my want to read items from here, and reviews I read in other places like friends, blogs, magazines and the WSJ. I'm probably more likely to read a non-fiction hot book sooner than a fiction book.

Susan wrote: "I was away on vacation in Oregon last week. Spent an afternoon in Powell's and then in Cacao just about across the street.

For the flights I listened to and finished [book:The Dark Talent|26114421..."

I was annoyed by the end of the last Alcatraz book too, but I think it was intentionally written to be that way. There is a footnote hidden at the end of Dark Talent, but I'm not sure how well it translated to the audio version, so you may not have gotten it. The note was from Bastille and basically apologizes for the unsatisfactory ending, explaining that the book was written by a very burnt out Alcatraz, and that she will be finishing the story in the (surprise!) actual last book. Sanderson is currently working on it in tandem with writing Stormlight Archives #4. I'm personally waiting with baited breath- I LOVE this series!

I only finished one book this week - The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. It was...ok? Some parts were interesting, but it seemed really unfocused and like the author couldn't decide what story she wanted to tell. It was part biography, part medical thriller, part 1920s political commentary, part science, and none of the parts really gelled. It was like someone threw books by Eric Larson, Mary Roach, and Mark Kurlansky in a blender and didn't bother to edit the resultant mess.

I've been tracking my books on bookcrossing.com since 2003, and have a loose goal of reading the 10 oldest books on my shelf each year (so they don't sit forever). I picked up The Book of Dead Birds yesterday and am surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. It's one of those mother/daughter dramas that were so popular in the late '90s/early 2000s, but the writing is very good, and the characters are compelling. It's also a very quick read, which is a nice change after the Poisoner's slog.

QOTW: I've read and enjoyed plenty of bestsellers/hype books, but by and large, they're pretty disappointing. Or they're so far outside my preferred genres that they just fade from mind as soon as I'm done, no matter how well told they are. (House of Sand and Fog and The Kite Runner come to mind.) There's not enough brain space to remember so many emotionally wrought family dramas :)

@sarah Yes, I did hear the post-ending bit by Bastille but it only felt like a teaser of maybe more to come, but wasn't clear to my plane-numb brain. Also it will be interesting to see how the other post-ending footnote about the grandfather not really dying will be incorporated. But overall I very much enjoyed the series. The later books were all different and interesting on their own.

At my last check-in, I had just started Grim Lovelies - I ended up finishing it in a day because I couldn't put it down! It has the same type of vibe (although different plot) as The Night Circus, Caraval, and that kind of thing, so if that's your jam, I highly recommend it. The sequel is coming out soon, I believe, so we won't have to wait long to find out what happens next!

I also couldn't put down my next one - both because it was a great book and because I didn't get it until two days before IRL book club #1 would be discussing it - Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Everyone at the meetup loved it - there were a couple of online members who weren't as impressed, because they like more of the romance type stories, but I'm really glad to have read it. It's one of those that's hard to describe, because summarizing it really doesn't do it justice, so I probably would never have come across it on my own - thank goodness for book clubs!

I'm currently about 1/3 of the way through Empress of All Seasons, which I am enjoying so far. There is not as much detail about the rooms as I was expecting so far, but it's really just getting into that part of the book.

QOTW: We were actually just talking about this at book club the other night - it seems like the vast majority of the books we've read that were really popular, none or few of us have liked! We don't know if we have different taste from the rest of the reading world or what, but sometimes it's hard to figure out why some things are so popular. That seems to be the case sometimes with my reading outside of book club as well - once in a while something will click with me that happens to be a bestseller, but the ones I really love tend to be a bit less popular.