EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone's doing well this week!

This week I finished:

The Glass Hotel - did this one on audio, kinda wish i'd just read it. Narrator was fine and everything, there was just a lot of perspective and time hopping. It was hard to keep track, and not very easy to try to go back and get re-situated. I liked it, but I feel like maybe if I'd read it, i'd have liked it more.

Lovecraft Country - this is my books & brew pick for august, got a bit of head start. I liked it, not as scary as I was worried it'd be. I'm looking forward to the show. Although HBO might up the scare factor, hopefully I can still watch it, being a wuss haha.

Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China - popsugar book recommended by favorite online book club, this was a recent pick for Our Shared Shelf. It was a pretty rough listen, really. Really drives home how hard it is to get a social justice movement going when your posts are constantly censored, protestors and demonstrators are arrested, families are threatened, etc. It was sobering, considering the kind of state America's in right now. Doesn't feel that implausible things could slide that way here, given current trends.

Parable of the Sower - counting this for popsugar book I meant to read last year. I use last year loosely, i've been meaning to read for several years, but kept not getting around to it. Honestly the last few years has made me lose my taste for dystopia/apocolyptic fiction. But I did read this one, felt timely and important to do. It was really good, if somewhat harrowing to read the near-2020 dates listed. I'll still read Parable of the Talents, but maybe take a little break first.

Currently reading:

Equal Rites - need a bit of a break with the sort of heavier reads going on. I'm counting this as my book with a pun in the title. I apparently read it at some point, it's been on my shelf, but I honestly don't remember anything about it. Pratchett's always been a little hit or miss for me, some I love and some I'm kinda meh about. Back when I got into him was before I'd heard about suggested reading orders and stuff, I'd been just reading in publication order. I think just in general, there's different arcs I like better.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - going to be audio-re-reading this one, for my july book& brew. I didn't like it that much the first time around, but i don't remember enough to discuss. Audio's at least good for that, can have it on in the background but don't need to worry about 100% following.

QOTW:

Who's your all-time favorite book character?

I really love Odile in The Black Swan. I like that she's learning magic herself, and that she learns to break free from her father's control, opinions and using.

This is also kind of a weird pick but I love Jude from the The Cruel Prince series. She's not really a likeable character, being ruthless and manipulative. But in spite of all that, her manipulations aren't just to give herself power or protect herself. She's really trying to walk the line of faerie politics to protect the culture that never really accepted her from it's own elements, namely her foster father. So while she might do ruthless and terrible things, it never feels like she's doing them to BE terrible. She also accepts her mistakes, and doesn't try to pretend they're not her fault.

I'm doing okay this week. Work's gotten busier, so I haven't had a whole lot of time to read. I don't have any finishes this week. I'm still plugging away at There Will Come a Darkness, my Popsugar book by an author with flora or fauna in their name (Katy Rose Pool). It was a little bit slow to start, and I didn't realize how long it was when I started - the perils of ebooks, I guess. You can't see the size of the 500-page tome in your hands. :D But now that the character connections are starting to form, I'm getting into it more.

QOTW: Ooh, that's a tough one! (I can't say my own, that would be cheating. ^_^) I feel like I tend to have a favorite from every book or series I read, and not necessarily an overall favorite.

I guess I would say Aerin from The Hero and the Crown, since she's been a consistent favorite from childhood. That was probably the first full novel I read growing up. Even now, I can just fall so easily into Aerin's struggles with not fitting in and feeling different, and fighting to be seen and heard. She was a pretty big influence on me, both as a person and as a fantasy reader.

The news just doesn't stop! My "topical" reading keeps ending up like three news stories behind.

After the JKR thing I picked out Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity because it directly addresses the issue of trans women in feminism. It was fairly academic and gender-studies-y, despite the author's stated desire to make it accessible to the lay reader, and I'm not sure I followed all the arguments. Also, since it's from 2007, I think some of the ideas and terminology are no longer current. (There's a 2nd edition from 2016, but that's not the one my library had.) My understanding of the author's argument is that feminists, while trying to make space for a broader range of traits and behavior in women, can end up devaluing traditional expressions of femininity and considering those who are drawn to them (like trans women) as harmful to the cause. I do think I personally fall into the trap, as a not-very-feminine woman, of allowing my frustration at being pushed toward the pink-and-frilly to spill over into contempt for the pink-and-frilly itself, so that reminder is what I'll be trying to take away from this book.

Next I finished The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London, which had been on my list waiting for the library to reopen. This was fun: part corvid facts, part British history, part "weird jobs" memoir. The author is an entertaining storyteller, which is good because it's part of his day job.

I have read Walter Mosley in the past, but I started under the misconception that he writes mystery novels. He in fact writes classic-style hardboiled detective novels. You will not solve the mystery; the protagonist will not so much solve the mystery as doggedly follow lead after lead until eventually stumbling into the truth. Along the way he will be: seduced by a woman in the case; forced into a car by armed underlings; beaten, stabbed, drugged, or otherwise injured; and betrayed by someone he considers his friend. Coming to Down the River Unto the Sea with that expectation, I did enjoy it. It's a contemporary setting, unlike the ones I read previously, but while it deals with the unfair treatment of Black people by the police, it's not so much general systemic racism as a specific corrupt conspiracy.

I just finished up Cyborg Detective, a foray back into poetry after previous failures. I saw this recommended as a book by a queer, disabled author, and although the reviewer was both of those things and I am neither, I thought I'd give it a try. I would call this one a success, although I don't think I fully got everything, partly because of the sometimes inscrutable nature of poetry and partly because there are a lot of references to other works. (All the blurbs mentioned "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver so I did go ahead and read that one first.) I'll probably be going back and looking at this again; I think it would reward re-contemplation.

QOTW: Ooh, Aerin is great, and I liked Hari in The Blue Sword as well. (On rereading as an adult, I realized the narrator uses Harry, but it's been Hari in my head for years.) I also really liked Cimorene from Dealing with Dragons et al.

But. My answer to this question is absolutely Sherlock Holmes. I have read all of the original novels and stories at least twice, and I will read pretty much any pastiche or adaptation or re-imagining that comes my way. I am kind of obsessed.

Three finishes for me this week! I quite enjoyed Gods of Jade and Shadow - there were a few things I didn't love about the style in which it was written - too much telling instead of showing - but I loved learning more about Mayan mythology and the setting was really well drawn (Mexico during the jazz age). After that I continued with the third book in the Old Man's War series, The Last Colony, for my other GR group series read.

My third grader has been after me to continue with the Wings of Fire series, so I just whipped through Moon Rising to make him happy and am about to start the next book.

QOTW: ooooooh this is a tough one. I have so many! Incomplete list: Alanna of Trebond, Loren Silvercloak (from the Fionavar Tapestry), Eowyn, and in a completely different vein, the antihero Gerald Tarrant in C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy.

Two finishes this week:

I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, which, while not a favourite, was a worthwhile read. I stretched the Gryffindor/McGonagall/about a teacher or school prompt a bit, but not much, since Malala's father ran a school and instilled in her the value of education.

Of Mice and Men, in a mostly lovely audiobook format read by actor Gary Sinise. I say almost, because the intro is overlaid with a musical track that is screechy and almost drowns out the narrator. Fortunately, it fades out fairly quickly. I used this for Ravenclaw/Restricted section/banned book.

37/60

QOTW: I guess I'll go with Belgarath the Sorcerer. I seem to get along well with clever old curmudgeons IRL, and I have none of his daughter's maternal instincts, so yeah.

It's interesting that my favourite character doesn't come from my very favourite book! But what I love about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the prose and the story, much more than any of the ragtag bunch of characters, none of whom are particularly endearing :)

Ooh, good pick. I adore Belgarath :)

At last check-in, I was reading The Twenty-Three for IRL Book Club #3. I was actually thinking that the author had improved from the first book, but then the whole thing concluded with most of the major threads unresolved. There is apparently now a fourth book, but reviewers agree that it still doesn't clear anything up, so I'm really not sure what the point of the whole series was supposed to be. So I would give that one a pass - there are so many better mysteries out there!

After that, I decided to revisit What Christians Believe since it had been many years since I last read it, and someone was talking about it recently that had a very different impression than I did. My impression remained unchanged upon re-reading - I love C.S. Lewisand his writing style.

After that, I randomly pulled one from my TBR - Not a Drop to Drink. I just finished, and I'm still processing how I feel about it - the main character is great, and the central storyline is really compelling, but (spoiler and also trigger warning), there is an absolutely ridiculous amount of non-graphic sexual violence in the background. It's not directly relevant to the plot, and it is never explained why society's collapse caused every male except two on the planet to immediately become an unrepentant sexual predator, or why women have not collectively fought back. Even in light of the many non-great things happening in the real world right now, it just struck me as a very odd thing to set as a baseline assumption. Everything else about the book is thought-provoking and intentional, so I really can't explain that aspect of it - if anyone else has read it, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Having made it through that, I got the free ebook of The Calculating Stars from Tor this week and decided to start right into it instead of letting it languish in the TBR. I've only read one chapter, so it's too early to have thoughts, but I'm hopeful based on what I've heard!

QOTW: I really like Aiden from Swipe Right for Murder - he makes typically awful teenager decisions, makes everything all about him, is snarky - and all of that, I'm sure is way more charming in written form than it would be in person. But he's real in a way that many characters aren't, and his thoughts are both hilarious and spot on. I hope things settle down for him, and he meets someone other than [spoiler] who appreciates him for who he is.

I have taken the opposite tack and am hoarding the free Tor books like a literary squirrel. I have experienced library scarcity and I must prepare for its possible return! Bury these Murderbots in the earth, against the time of need!