EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone is hanging in there ok.

Time is just so weird this year, alternating between "how is it mid June?" and "can this year just be over yet?"

BOOK CLUB: I have posted a new thread in the book club folder for selecting the book for July. Figure if we start now, it might actually get selected and posted by then haha. I'll send a message out to everyone as well.

This week I finished:

The Price of Paradise - popsugar book set in a country beginning with C, Cuba. I just ended up finding this ok. The writing was good, and it was easy to get through, but I just really didn't like the male lead. Patricio was kind of a jerk, so I had a hard time really rooting for him or having sympathy. Gloria deserved better all around.

The Count of Monte Cristo - AHHH I FINISHED THIS! FINALLYYYYY! Whew. I started end of January, was reading a few chapters in between books. Took forever! I liked it ok, better than some classics. Definitely had the feel of "got paid by the issue", felt like there was a LOT of fluff. Glad I read unabridged to say I did, but I certainly didn't feel like all 1100 pages were totally necessary and vital to the plot.

This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work - read harder nonfiction YA. It might actually be aimed younger, it was kind of hard to tell. Description said it was for teens, which to me is YA, but in the publisher info it was classified as childrens. I'm counting it anyhow because it's timely and it was a good starter guide for anti-racist action. Maybe a bit simplistic for an adult, but it still had some information about systemic racism areas I hadn't heard of, and history bits I hadn't come across. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with kids they want to start talking to about racism and how to counter it.

Dumplin' - i really enjoyed to the movie for this so was looking forward to it. Was kinda bummed that this was a rare case of "i liked the movie way more". I hate love triangles, glad the movie cut that part out. Willowdean seemed a lot meaner and a way worse friend in the book too. Counting it for Read Harder book set in a rural setting.

Currently reading:

Lovecraft Country - This will eventually be a books & brew read for August, getting an early start. I am excited for the show, couldn't wait haha. Not super far yet, but I like it so far. Not sure it'll count for any challenge.

The Glass Hotel - audio book, i like it but I wish i'd just waited longer for the print version. I have trouble following audio books, and this one keeps jumping around in time and perspective so it's hard to follow. I'll probably have to re-read it again later in print just to really grasp everything going on.

QOTW:

We did diversity recommendations last week, but maybe a focus on LGBTQ+ recommendations for pride this week? If anyone has any good pride reads by black authors I'd be interested!

I really enjoyed Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, They Both Die at the End, Dress Codes for Small Towns to name a few. I also love Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway series which has a pretty large range of sexualities represented in the series.

I'm currently in the headspace of being over 2020 altogether. I wish they would just cancel or reschedule the convention I'm due to go to in late August, so I can cancel or reschedule my flight and hotel. I hate having that nebulous feeling of something undone that's hanging over my head.

Last week I finished:

Stormsong, which I loved but it just kind of ended... not on a cliffhanger necessarily, but I thought it could have gone on a little longer and given some kind of closure to Grace's part of the story. Eagerly awaiting book 3, which is supposed to be about Robin, next year. This was my Popsugar book that passes the Bechdel test.

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex, the new short story in the same universe as Gideon the Ninth. Despite the lurid name, which is good for a few jokes in the story, this was a short about Sextus and Camilla, two of the secondary characters from Gideon. It was a fun little piece, not super substantial, but still fun to get back into the world ahead of the sequel coming out later this year.

Amid everything else going on, I wanted to read something by a black author which had been on my to-read list, so I borrowed Slay from the library. This is my Popsugar book with at least a four-star rating on Goodreads (as of this writing, 4.26 stars). The main character, Kiera, is a 17 year old black girl who codes and runs a free-to-play MMO celebrating black culture in all its forms. The game is played in VR, and has half a million accounts. I had some trouble with suspending my disbelief around the game itself (my review), but I liked it overall. It had several excellent women characters, all of them feminist and strong in different ways.

I also snuck a manga in there: A Witch's Printing Office, Vol. 1. The story is about a girl from Earth who winds up in a fantasy world where almost everyone can do magic. In this world, she has the ability to copy anything written. She runs a print shop and starts a magic user's convention in order to try and find a spell that can send her home. It's a parody of the famous Japanese comic convention Comiket. I liked the story well enough, but the art was really fanservice-y, focusing a lot on women's butts or the large breasts of one of the characters. Not sure I want to continue the series, but I may check out the second volume after the library re-opens.

I'm just starting There Will Come a Darkness, which will be my Popsugar book by an author with flora or fauna in their name (Katy Rose Pool). I'm not far enough for an initial opinion yet, but ensemble-cast fantasy novels are kind of my jam, so I'm looking forward to it.

QOTW:
I loved Aristotle and Dante, Sheri! The same author wrote another book I absolutely loved: The Inexplicable Logic of My Life. I also second the Seanan McGuire recommendation. I'll check out the others you recommended.

Detour - I may be biased as I know the authors. Two young men falling in love on a road trip, while working through their past trauma. I loved this book.

Gideon the Ninth - lesbian necromancers in space. Gideon is just a great character with a great voice. The world-building is a weird mix of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi.

Witchmark is a gas-lamp, Victorian-style fantasy, a slow-burn m/m romance and a mystery. The sequel is a f/f romance + political intrigue.

Ohh yeah Gideon the Ninth is one of my favorite books of the year, and I gave it to my floodee for the bookflood this year!

This week I finished up A Fete Worse Than Death, which was another "saw a favorable review of a later series entry" pick. I think the best thing about it was the title (which is not to say it was bad, because that's a superb title). The main character, a crime-solving mystery writer, didn't really grab me, but I might try one of the later ones to see if he gets fleshed out a bit more.

Then it was on to ACTUAL LIBRARY BOOKS grglfadkksajj!!!!

I started with The Whole Okra: A Seed to Stem Celebration. I heard about this because the main contributing photographer is local to me, and it turns out the author is not far away, either. I was hoping for an explanation of how okra made its way across multiple continents, but it turns out there's not even a consensus on where it originated, so no dice on that. Much of the book is about ways to use the entire plant, which was less relevant to someone who will not be growing any okra on an apartment balcony. It was still really interesting, and I'll be trying some of the recipes once I'm able to pick out my own produce again. (I was able to stave off severe okra deprivation during the reading by ordering food from a Black-owned restaurant, win-win!)

Next I read The Chinese Orange Mystery, because I love citrus fruits and mysteries. There are actual tangerines featured briefly, but their appearances were greatly dwarfed by red herrings. Seriously, this story followed so many blind alleys (one of which seemed to be heading toward the supremely racist before mostly veering off) that it felt like a short story with a bunch of padding thrown in.

QOTW: I will recommend Check, Please! I recently read it as a webcomic (www.checkpleasecomic.com), so I didn't mention it here, but it's available in graphic novel form as well. Black author, diverse characters, m/m romance, many pies. There's not very much actual hockey in it, which you may consider a plus or a minus depending on your feelings about the sport.

Oh, I love Check, Please! Great suggestion, Rebecca!

I also echo the general sentiment that time has lost all meaning this year. I went from always having things scheduled months out to not planning beyond the current day for most things, and even as things open back up, this might be a permanent change. I totally feel you, Jennifer, on wishing that things that are very obviously going to be cancelled or dramatically altered would be more upfront about it so people can plan. I say that as someone who lives in a city that revolves around college football, too.

Since I checked in so late last week and work has been crazy this week, all I've done is finish up Far From True and start The Twenty-Three, which is the actual IRL book club #3 book, so at least I'm on the home stretch. I really cannot wait to hear the story behind it from the person who chose it, because it is just such an aggressively mediocre series. It's not terrible, but it's like someone who academically understands how a mystery is supposed to work held a focus group to get suggestions on characters and events and clunkily put them all together into one giant book that the publisher then inexplicably decided to split into thirds. Knowing the person who picked it, this may literally be the first mystery he's read, so it might seem a lot more original to him - I think his mind might be blown if he ever picked up a James Patterson, John Grisham, etc.

QOTW: I read a lot of LGBTQ+ authors, both individually and in one of the IRL book clubs, but I could definitely do better at including more Black authors in the regular rotation. I love all the classics, of course - Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, etc.; I'm pretty good on comics/graphic novels Goldie Vance Vol. 1, Bingo Love, Moonstruck, Vol. 1: Magic to Brew, The Backstagers, Vol. 1: Rebels Without Applause (it's hard to tag authors for comics, since so many people work on them!). But I need to read more of the catalogs of the younger, current authors like Nic Stone, Kacen Callender, L. L. McKinney, Elizabeth Acevedo, Rivers Solomon that I've enjoyed but never gotten around to going back to. Filling up the TBR is never the problem!

I've been having a rough time and after some emotionally difficult reads last week (never mind current events) I needed some escapism, so I pulled an old favorite Discworld volume off the shelf and re-read Wyrd Sisters. I can always count on Granny Weatherwax for a good laugh!

I was waiting for my husband to be done with the kindle, so then I read the first few chapters of The Secret Lives of Boys - I'd picked it up used years ago and never gotten around to reading it. It's mildly interesting, but given that it focuses on teenage boys and it was written in 2009, a lot is outdated. I don't know that I'll go back to it.

Now I'm on Gods of Jade and Shadow, for my other Goodreads group.

QOTW: Have to mention the classic The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as many of Ursula K. Le Guin's short stories. She plays around a lot with gender roles and expectations. Mercedes Lackey's entire set of Valdemar/Velgarth novels is full of positively portrayed gay and lesbian characters, although I can't remember any who are trans - then again, society in general was much less enlightened on the topic of gender identity when she was writing them.

Robin Hobb's Rain Wild Chronicles feature some LGBT characters in the ensemble cast (but don't read them without reading the other Realms of the Elderlings books first).

The Adorned was a good one.

I haven't read Gideon the Ninth yet, but it's the July read for my other club so I have it on reserve from the library - who knows when my loan will come up though, I'm still waiting for Space Opera!

In the Tarma and Kethry books, one of the Tayledras was described as being “perfectly balanced between male and female”, so that could possibly be interpreted as nonbianary or gender fluid, before such terms were as widely used. At least was a nonstandard gender representation, to me.

I haven't checked in for a few weeks. Our library has been closed and only opened for curbside a couple days ago.

I finished my audiobook, book 2 of The Expanse, Caliban's War. I'm still doing a lot of solo pandemic walking so this 18 hour book went pretty quickly for me. Now I'm listening to the "book 2.5" novella, Gods of Risk. This is only about 2.5 hours long and I only have about 45 minutes left to go.

I'm still reading The Brothers K that my daughter recommended me and lent me her book. She raves about it so much that I'm sticking with it. So far, about 120 pages in, it is only meh for me. If it weren't for her enthusiasm about it, I would have probably DNF it after 100 pages. I'm hoping it gets better for me and I understand why she liked it so much.

Generally I mostly read non-fiction so other than listening to Aristotle and Dante, I haven't paid much attention to these areas.

I can't say I want the year to be over, because I know that's too arbitrary a date. I want this feeling of waiting in a holding pattern to be over.

Just one finish this week: The Ballad of Black Tom, which was a wonderfully creative and far richer alternate-POV take on Lovecraft's The Horror at Red Hook, which I quickly reread to refresh my memory. The complete works of Lovecraft is available at my library, but I don't know I want to commit to 1,100+ pages of it.

I slotted Black Tom in the Slytherin/Malfoy/bad boy or anti-hero prompt.

35/60

Currently about halfway through I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. It is beautifully written and heartbreaking in its content.

Starting to get to the point in my main reading challenge where simply picking up a book makes it harder and harder to fit the remaining prompts, so we'll see where that goes.

QOTW: Aristotle and Dante of course, and Seanan McGuire (can I be annoyed for a minute that my library has books 1, 2, 3 and 5 of her Wayward Children series??!?!). I'll add author Sarah Gailey to the list. How can you go wrong with a hippopotamus western like River of Teeth?

After last week's impressive amount of reading I did almost none this week.

I've read some of Othello, but I was watching the National Theatre's free Coriolanus and didn't want to confuse my Shakespeare.
Saturday I started reading The Fifth Season. New books arrived on Friday and I needed something to read while sitting in the car waiting for mum to do the shopping (one chain we use for some things heavily prefers one adult only where possible, but I'm needed for visiting the independent bakery etc. to save mum's legs thanks to her arthritis). I needed something much smaller than my complete Shakespeare! I was so overwhelmed by choice I had to random number generate.

I've also listened to a bit of Dune while playing some games on my phone.

QOTW: I realised when the question was asked that I could make myself a shelf for that, so I did. I included all the stories or series that had at least one significant lgbtq+ character. Most of them are white authors, but I have some that aren't, I'll point those out first.

I echo the suggestion for Check, Please! I have the kickstarter versions of the individual years but there are also regular purchasable-in-shops versions now. Check, Please! Book 1: # Hockey is the first two years.

The Color Purple is a classic that is fantastic but includes sensitive content.

Other non-black POC authors:
CB Lee's Not Your Sidekick is fab. A fun YA adventure with superpowers and the first in a series. Different parts of the LGBTQ umbrella take focus in different books of the series as far as I can gather.

This comes with a disclaimer: I've known Cecilia personally for over a decade, but I do love her writing. Plus she's said that unless otherwise specified all of her characters are bisexual. Magic University: The Complete Series Best described as if Harry Potter was an adult book where they study sex magic. One of the books is an official collection of fanworks.

Now the white people, although I do know several are also in the lgbtq community.

In the graphic novels/comics area I love the Khaos Komix series starting with Steve And Mark. They're all available online too. It's really great coming of age stuff, UK based and covers a nice range of different identities. There are also some sensitivity issues that Tab warns for on the website and the series link here on goodreads.

Book that actually made me sob, but is so incredibly good. My Real Children Another one with several content sensitivities, I'll share if people want. It's happy and sad and frustrating and joyful and so much.

All things Gail Carriger, most have at least one lgbtq character. Also if you're looking for more recs and like her work she's doing at least a rec a day for pride month on her instagram feed. She's got a fair selection of black authors in there too.