EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi Everyone!

Finally sleeping in our new bedroom! It's so nice, we can walk around the bed and not stumble on things. Still some frustrating things to wrap up, but it's getting there!

This week I finished:

Sparrow Hill Road - no challenge, I just wanted to read something that i actually wanted to read. I like it, i generally like Seanan McGuire. Not my favorite, but good. Ghost stories aren't my favorite, but I like her take on them.

The Friend - didn't love this, was kind of weird. Thought it'd be more about the dog, but there was a lot of pretentious stuff about writing and who should write and who should read that was kind of offputting. Also a lot more talk about suicide than I was really in the mood for.

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 - this is for my books & brew group. It's alright so far, not super engaging. Might read this and another space book for the ATY two related books prompts, those are my last two.

QOTW:

When you read books, are there certain tropes you love, that you'll go out of your way to read? Are there ones you absolutely try to avoid?

Personally I don't like books that lean too heavily on tropes, or get predictable. However I tend to go for female leads, especially female leads doing things that are unusual. Female hackers, detectives, necromancers, mechanics etc. And I tend to like them snarky.

I tend to avoid super tropey romance unless vampires are involved, and I don't like anything that uses raping or murdering or otherwise abusing women to motivate a male character.

I just read a couple of Courtney Milan's romance novellas this week:
Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure and The Pursuit Of... (part of an anthology Hamilton's Battalion: A Trio of Romances which I now want to read the other two parts of). I haven't read the main series that these are attached to, but I saw these stories were LGBT-focused, which I enjoyed. Besides that, I think I'll pretty much read anything Milan writes now.

Now I'm reading Circe, which I grabbed because I've always loved Greek mythology. I'm still really early in it, but I'm enjoying it so far.

One manga this week, too: Again!! Manga Volume 10. TBH, I'm kind of glad this series is almost done. I liked it at first, but it went pretty off the rails in the last arc. I mostly want to finish it because I support the author, and I still want to see how it turns out.

QOTW: I have some tropes I utterly love. Found or chosen family is the biggest one. A group of misfits coming together and finding each other. Broken people leaning on each other and holding each other up.

Friendships or romantic pairings where the characters are snarky/banter with each other, or challenge one another, but you can tell they love each other. Those are my favorite character dynamics.

I don't know if it's necessarily a trope, but I will devour anything involving heists and thieves. Especially in non-modern, genre settings like fantasy or sci-fi.

I'm with you, Sheri, on the abuse of women to further a man's story. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed some stories where that happens, but in general it's in spite of that, something I put up with because I'm otherwise invested in the characters or stories. The other one I hate is animal abuse/animal death when used as a cheap way to make a villain unlikable/evil.

I was on a vacation where I thought I would read a lot but didn't. Too many interesting people to talk to. Then our youngest, a senior in college was home for a week, the only time this summer, and left this morning. So my update is small.

I started reading a mindless romance novel after the heavy content from Melinda Gates' Moment of Lift. I'm reading Wallbanger. It is the needed relief it is intended.

I've also started Good Morning, Midnight. This is interesting so far and I look forward to seeing where this story goes. It is a bit like Station Eleven so far in the dystopian end of the world sense, but I'm not too far in yet.

I like strong female leads, realistic communication and characters I can relate to. I cringe or avoid things dealing with abuse of anyone or anything. I find it is too often gratuitous and just unpleasant. I read because I want an enjoyable escape for a while.

Life is starting to settle into fall here, but it'll a a slow reading week while I get my quack project finished up. It's headed for Australia, so it needs to be done early to allow for extra shipping time.

Read The Calculating Stars this week. I had super high hopes for this, after all the awards that it's won. It started out increasingly strong, with a beautifully written catastrophic meteor strike off the coast of the US in the early 1950s. After that, it became more of a historical fiction as the characters dealing with the aftermath closely mirrored Hidden Figures in many ways. I like the setting and story, but unfortunately the characters were too much of caricatures of the racial and gender politics of that era (speaking of tropes...), making the social justice overtones of the book come on way too strong for the story to feel in any way smooth and natural. I'll plan to read the sequel, and I hope that once the author is back on more a solid science fiction setting it will be a stronger book.

Working on Doomsday Book. I'm about 70 pages in, and liking it quite a lot so far! Also have the next Spider Gwen queued up for over the weekend.

QOTW- I'll save everyone another rant on my opinion of the "historical names" trope. The Toll comes out in two months, and you'll probably get another one then!

I'm typically not a fan of over-used tropes in general, I think it's too often just lazy writing on the author's part; but I do appreciate them when they're used creatively, or turned on their head somehow. Overall, give me something that goes in an unexpected direction, please- I really do love a good plot twist!

I like strong women in my books too, but they really need to be written well- for me there's definitely a line between a great "strong" character, and one who winds up just being constantly bossy, arrogant, domineering, rude, or otherwise obnoxious under the pretext of being "strong" without any other character development.

After the last check in, I finished Louisiana Longshot for IRL book club #1 - it was a lot of fun, and I'll definitely seek out the rest of the series one of these days.

Next I read Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, which is the current selection for the online alumni book club at the school I went to. It's really well done - the author definitely got too close to be objective with some of the sources, but it's one of the more comprehensive looks at the epidemic that I've seen so far. The conclusion that treatment isn't a finite thing is daunting, but makes sense given the failure of most things that have been tried.

After that, I wanted something lighter, so I picked up Romanov, which had been sitting on my TBR pile for quite a while. I'm not sure why I thought that would be lighter - at least it was a different kind of heavy! It's a strange book, and even after finishing it and thinking about it for a while, I'm not 100% sure that it works - but the author clearly put quite a bit of research into it, and I was intrigued enough by her writing style that I want to check out some of her other books. Especially if she has some that are not based on real people.....

Wanting something quicker after that, I moved on to Dates! Volume 3, which recently arrived in the mail. It's the same format as the previous two installments, with a mix of comics, prose stories, and stand-alone artwork. I really enjoy these, so I hope they're able to continue the series in the future, although I know from the Kickstarter updates that they're a lot of work for everyone involved.

I'm currently reading Undying, which I'd been meaning to get to since it came out, because I loved Unearthed. It picks up right where the first one left off, and gets right back into the action. I'm about halfway through, and I'm still not entirely sure how it's going to end, so that's nice. I really hope these get made into movies or a TV show someday - they definitely lend themselves to that.

As for the QOTW, I seem to be drawn to the most heavily trope-y genres: cozy mysteries, YA, sci-fi, memoirs...so I guess I must enjoy (or at least tolerate) tropes as a category more than most. I do enjoy the found family stories that Jennifer mentioned, and the strong female characters that everyone pointed out. The main trope that makes me stabby is the old "bury the gays." I know that not every story has a happy ending - but some do, and those should be told, too. As I think about it, that's probably a big part of what draws me to the genres I like - despite the trope-heaviness, they are where stories about people who aren't thin, healthy, rich, English-speaking, cis White men get told - and that somehow takes the cliche out of some of those tropes.