EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone,

Hope everyone's doin well.

I had a rough week, one of my cats had to go into the hospital over the weekend. He's home and ok now, but I had missed my boy and was so worried about him. Even now I still have to give meds and monitor him, and I guess the meds are making him smell funny because the other cats freak out every time I try to let him out of the room. So hopefully once he's done with the meds, it'll normalize and we can get him back integrated.

This week I finished:

Equal Rites - popusgar book with a pun in the title. According to the fact I've owned it for over a decade and it was rated on goodreads via shelfari, I thoughtI'd read it. But it didn't feel familiar at all! I'm wondering if I read Wyrd Sisters and rated the wrong one when I added to Shelfari way back when. Anyhow, I liked it!

Bingo Love Volume 1: Jackpot Edition- this was on an anti-racist comics list, and hoopla had it so I checked it out. I liked it! Very sweet story, I feel like I have never read queer Black grandma protagonists before.

The Fairy Godmother - When we had to rush Teddy to the hospital, I needed something light and distracting to read while we waited for him to come home so I just re-read this for probably the 20th time.

Between the World and Me - once he was home, could get back into more serious reading. This wasn't for a challenge, just general anti-racist reading. It was really heartbreaking, and his writing is moving.

Currently reading:

Akata Warrior - this will be read harder's YA book set in a country that isn't the US or UK. I like the series, and Nnedi's writing.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - slogging through the audiobook still. I'm liking it even less the second time around, kinda debating if I should just quit and try to do the discussion based on what i remember. But i'll probably still keep slogging, if only to be able to articulate why I don't like it. I think it's losing stars on this read-through. One of those books that was like "meh ok" the first time around but on previous discussion, points out even more flaws and now on a read through all I can think about are those and so it just gets worse.

QOTW:

It's end of June, middle of the year, how about a progress report? How's your year of reading going? Doesn't have to be challenge related, can just be general. Are you reading as much as you wanted? more? less? Enjoying the books, or keep finding duds?

I'm doing two challenges this year, Popsugar and Read harder. I'm at 44/50 for Popsugar, 12/24 for Read Harder. I'm at the point of the year where I'm always ready to be done with challenges haha. I think I at least have an idea what to read for the last few popsugar, and then I can focus on getting read harder wrapped up.

With the whole pandemic you'd think I'd be reading more, but it feels like it's maybe a little less or abut the same. But while I'm not an essential worker, I've always worked from home for the last decade. And my fitness classes switched to live virtual very quickly so I'm still doing those, book club switched virtual, still have that. The main thing not happening is a social life, but we've kinda replaced that with projects. I am doing more audio books than usual though, because it's easy to have one on while painting trim or cleaning something.

I'm glad your furbaby is back home and doing better - that must have been nerve wracking, especially now! I got Bingo Love back when she did the Kickstarter, and I loved it, too. I hope she's able to do more in the series eventually.

I checked in so late last week that there hasn't been much change since then - I finished The Calculating Stars and loved it, so thank you to everyone here who's recommended it. I tend to let all the free download books collect, but all of the good reviews prompted me to not wait - so I still have a day or two to get others to download it while it's free! :)

I'm now about 1/3 of the way into The Fifth Season and loving it - another one I'm glad this group has prompted me to move up the list.

I also had to drive somewhere last night for the first time in forever, so I listened to the first hour of the audio book I've been waiting for that came out yesterday - The End of my Heart. Gayle Forman did a presentation about it in the online BookCon this year, and I signed back up for Audible that day to pre-order (because of course it's an Audible Original). I'll have to find excuses to drive more places or get into the groove of listening to audiobooks at home, because the way things are going it seems like we're going to be working from home for quite a while, so the commute will not resume in the near future.

QOTW: I'm way ahead on my Goodreads challenge for the year - 72/100. Not having the travel time to and from work and the cancellation of all of the plays, concerts, etc. that we usually do has freed up lots of reading time! I've had a few streaks of not-great books that were tough, but I've also read lots of great ones! My top 15 for the year so far (that I've read this year, not that were released this year!) are probably:
Britt-Marie Was Here
The Starless Sea
Swipe Right for Murder
The Outsider
Ophelia
Half of a Yellow Sun
Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving
Just One Day
The Diviners
The Long Earth
The Power of One
Across the Universe
Joyland
The Swans of Fifth Avenue
The Calculating Stars

I tried to cut the list down, but all of these were so great that I didn't want to take any of them off! So there has been plenty of good reading in 2020 already and still half of it to go. :)

Megan,

It was! It made me so sad I couldn't go in with him to reassure him in the scary place. Also he was there for several days, i don't know if they normally let visitors in, but certainly not right now.

The version I read of had a few pages of Bingo Love vol 2 in the back of it! It at least was supposed to release in 2020, although I have no idea if that's on track with everything going on.

I'm glad kitty's OK! I also noticed some rage-quits on the FoE Facebook group recently, but I missed whatever occasioned them, so I hope we're all good here.

I am not a Harry Potter person, but I know some Harry Potter people, and it's been a rough time for them. Jackson Bird is a Harry Potter person, as evidenced by the title of Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place. I have watched some of his YouTube videos and thought I would read this book out of some combination of, like, solidarity and karmic re-balancing. It was enjoyable, although I felt it was apparent in the writing that he is fairly young and a self-described overthinker. There are a lot of sidebars with introductions to trans-related topics that I'm sure are helpful to some but which I probably could have skipped. I did learn more about the role of Harry Potter fandom in his life, a reminder that the good that has come from it it will remain, regardless of how he and others decide to relate to the property going forward.

Next I finally read Sing, Unburied, Sing, in keeping with my pattern of being unfashionably late to hyped books. It reminded me in some ways of The Lovely Bones, and I felt similarly about it, although I am still kind of processing it. It does speak to issues of race and the criminal justice system, so this turned out to be a good time to read it. I would recommend this one.

My last finish this week was Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil, the third book in the series. I'm not sure I'll continue with these. They aren't the type of clued mystery I like, I'm not too interested in the characters' theological musings, and in this one there were some relationship dynamics that I didn't love. (I will say, for anyone who's watched the Grantchester TV series, that the storylines diverge widely after the first book/season, and that Sidney is a much better priest in the books.) After Megan mentioned reading C. S. Lewis last week, I was amused to read about Sidney Chambers attending his funeral in this book.

QOTW: I have been reading more this year since working from home. Normally I would leave books in the office and just read them on breaks, but now they're available all the time, and we've had some work slowdowns and temporary furloughs providing more reading time. I'd kind of like to cut back to my normal levels, because I don't want to be doing frequent library runs right now.
I have also been doing more issue-related reading, and I think that's a good change. I have always done pretty well at reading female authors, but not as well at diversity of race, sexual identity, ability, and such. (Some of this is due to my preferred genre, the traditional whodunit, being a largely Anglo tradition, with even the non-English/American authors often coming from India, Singapore, and other formerly British places.) I'd like to continue to keep an eye on diversity going forward.

I'm so glad your cat's okay, Sheri!

I had a crazy week at work, and didn't get a whole lot of reading done this week.

I finished There Will Come a Darkness, my Popsugar book by an author with flora or fauna in their name. I enjoyed it well enough. The plot was a little bit predictable, but the characters were at least interesting. I'd be willing to give the sequel a shot when it comes out.

I'm currently reading Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II, which will be my Popsugar book on a subject you know nothing about. It's a nonfiction book about female code-breakers in World War II, and some of the history of cryptography. I think it's interesting so far, but I'm not too far in yet. Cryptography is a subject that I don't know a lot about, but that I've always found vaguely fascinating and wanted to know more about.

QOTW:
I'm reading about the same amount since the pandemic started, honestly. I've been working from home since March. I mostly read on my lunch/meal breaks and slow periods while working, and occasionally on quiet weekend mornings.

I'm at 51/52 for my Goodreads challenge, and 24/50 for Popsugar. I'm going to exceed my GR challenge, which I do every year - I always set it for 52 at first, but I read a lot of comics and manga which bumps that up. I'm right about on pace for Popsugar, so I think I'm in a good spot. I have most of my Popsugar reads mapped out in a spreadsheet and a lot of them on hold as ebooks from the library. So far, my reading has been pretty good this year. Not too many duds.

I swear everything seems to be sliding into each other day-wise. Well that was until the UK hit a heat wave. Nothing like some places, but I still don't cope well. It should cool down over the next day or two, thank goodness.

Since my last check in (two weeks ago) I've finished:

Othello, you know I'm not such a fan of the backstabby ones or the ones with super manipulative villains. It was impressively convoluted though.

The Fifth Season I started it before it was decided on for book club. It was SO GOOD. A rarity for me but I would actually like to discuss a book in detail, so I'm looking forward to the discussion boards. I also need to get my hands on the other two ASAP!

Macbeth I've studied it for exam purposes, twice as it happens, but not in almost two decades(?). I remembered the overall plot but I was definitely forgetting some details. I do like it though. I also found a speech that included at least four well-known phrases or things that inspired other works etc. within about 10 lines! It was rather staggering. I know Shakespeare is the first recorded use of a LOT of things, but that was a particularly packed few lines.

I'm now reading/listening to:
Dune Unfortunately I've not listened to much. The hot weather is making my phone prone to overheating and I like to listen and do something at the same time and it's not working out for me.

Early Riser I'm a big Jasper Fforde fan, but since I don't do hardbacks I've had to wait a while for this one. It's as bizarre as ever. Despite having been to Fforde Fiesta (fan weekend thing) last year that heavily featured the book I am pretty unspoiled beyond knowing some character names and non-contextual details.

QOTW: I'm doing well on my targets for the year. Macbeth completed my 4/4 Shakespeare plays. I'm 2 ahead on books on Goodreads and I've done one each of my 'academic' and 'from the 100 books list' personal challenges. Not sure how I'm actually doing on the non-white and non-male authors tracking but my recent book purchase choices have definitely done a fair amount of leaning to help. I'll see how that goes at the end of the year more tbh.

A single finish this week: Everything is Figureoutable: How One Simple Belief Can Help Us Overcome Any Obstacle and Create Unstoppable Success, which was pretty much exactly how I expected it to be.

I've now gotten my hands on The Fifth Season from my library hold, so that will be up next, although I may get a chance to slip another audiobook or two in next week.

QOTW: That brings me to 40 books read this year, 38 of which count towards the One PHRC (Potterhead Running Club) challenge, out of 60 prompts. I'm also tracking a half dozen other challenges including ATY, and fitting thirty odd prompts in each.

My total reading goal is 80 books, but I might stretch to 100, so I'm either right on target or a tad behind. This is my average rate compared to the past three years, although since the SO moved in from 8 hours away, I get fewer audiobooks in.

I've had some great surprises along the way and I've gotten angry at an author for the first time. I try to read as broad a range as I can while remaining interested, so it can be hit or miss.

I did a quick comparison of the authors I've read this year with the demographics of Quebec and Canada to see how I was doing in terms of representation. Turns out I've read Black and Latino authors above and beyond their ratio in Canada, but I'm a bit behind overall in terms of women authors and indigenous and Asian voices. In terms of LGBTQ+ voices, I can see a single author clearly stated, but I didn't really go digging too much.

Considering I try to sprinkle in English classics that I never read in high school because I attended school in French, I'm not overly surprised at the breakdown and the higher ratio of men. It's an interesting exercise to keep in mind for the second half of the year!

Daniel, how are you tracking? Goodreads doesn’t really track that unless you make shelves and are good about using them. Do you enter everting you read into a spreadsheet? I do that for challenge books but not Imgur my entire reading list. Maybe I should!

Hi everyone! I spent most of last week ripping through the second arc (books 6-10) of the Wings of Fire series. I think I said this before, but I haven't read much middle grade fiction before becoming a parent of a middle grade reader, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed these and how well-written they were. My 9-year-old and I are now reading The Lightning Thief together and I'm excited to finally see what all the fuss is about.

I wanted something different after Wings of Fire, so I picked up Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean, one of my favorite nonfiction writers. He makes the science into a story, and the stories of the scientists behind the new discoveries and inventions are both fascinating and often funny. I've read most of his other books and this might be my favorite one so far!

QOTW: I don't do the challenge thing, not due to lack of interest but due to lack of mental energy to organize it. But I'm happy with my reading so far this year - I'm FINALLY starting to get back to pre-parenthood levels. Before the kiddos I regularly read between 75-80 books per year...two years ago I only read 38, last year I was back up with 65. I'm on book #42 right now so I'm happy about that!

Shel, if you’re interested but don’t want to organize, you could always just check one of the lists near the end of the year and see how you did without trying. I did that with around the year once, managed to fill all but three with stuff I already read!

Sheri wrote: "Shel, if you’re interested but don’t want to organize, you could always just check one of the lists near the end of the year and see how you did without trying. I did that with around the year once..."

Never thought of that - that's a good idea :)

I do have a spreadsheet to track reading challenges, so I do miss out on the books that don't fit prompts if I don't double check with "My Books" on here. I'm awful at using shelves!