2025 Reading Challenge discussion

This thread is to discuss Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third book in the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers.

Pages: 359 pages

Length: 1 months (March)

Participants:SarahKat, Dominique, Rebecca, Jessica, Truitt_T

Everyone reads at their own pace during a Buddy Read. Because participants can be at different parts of the book at different times, it is extremely important to mark spoilers so that the book is not ruined for someone who is not as far along as others!!!

Mark spoilers by placing {spoiler} before the text and {/spoiler} after the text but use the < and > instead of the { and }.

I am about halfway through this on audio. Definitely not grabbing my attention like the first 2 did. I am invested in a few characters but not all of them. I'm hoping things start coming together soon.

Sawyer: (view spoiler)[Pretty sure he's on a pirate ship. Poor naïve young man. (hide spoiler)]

Putting my review under spoilers. Anyone else going to pick this one up? I'm still going to read the last one even though this was not my favorite.

(view spoiler)[
2.5 stars. The last third of the book got really interesting after things actually happen and I finally started getting a feel for who everyone was. I thought perhaps some of my issue was the audio being a little harder to follow than the first 2, with so many human characters in one place, some with similar names. It was hard to keep everyone straight for quite a while. However, I scrolled through some reviews and realized I wasn't the only one who wasn't thrilled with this one.

Something was just missing from this one that I enjoyed in the first and second ones. The first one gave us glimpses of other very different alien cultures. They look different, communicated different, and lived different. All told through dynamic and likeable characters who interacted with each other throughout the book. The second one had the insight into living as or with a sentient AI and really delved into the 2 main characters' feelings and past. This book gave us 5 characters, all human, all part of the same culture, who almost never interact with each other. Nothing about any of these characters was particularly memorable or interesting.

Isabel: (view spoiler)[I honestly had no idea what she actually did for a living until the very end. I knew she had Ghuh-loloan, her colleague, visiting her. Some of that was okay because we got to see how the Exodan culture was viewed through the eyes of a Harmagian. I did like Tamsin (Isabel's wife) and Ghuh-loloan's conversation at the end about first impressions. However, most of their story was very dry. (hide spoiler)]

Tessa: (view spoiler)[While I can relate to raising a toddler and an older child and the struggles that come with that, this was just that and it happened to be set in space. Like it was fine, but not why I'm reading this series. I did like the end for them, deciding to go live on a planet where Aya felt safer. I wouldn't be able to handle living in space with a window between me and the vacuum of endless night either! (hide spoiler)]

Kip: (view spoiler)[Again, run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story with Kip doing stupid teenage boy things at the behest of his stupid teenage boy friend. They overhear about the murder of Sawyer and he alerts the police (or whatever they are called). At the end he apprentices with Isabel as an Archivist. I am not sure why. I honestly thought he would become a caretaker like Eyas. (hide spoiler)]

Eyas: (view spoiler)[Probably the most interesting storyline. However at the beginning I was confused because I though her and Aya were the same (on audio they sound very similar) and I kept thinking, is Tessa's 9-year-old visiting a sex worker?! So I was a bit distracted by that for a while. Her story was interesting just because her job as a caretaker, caring for bodies and grieving families and the respect and stuff surrounding that was interesting. (hide spoiler)]

Sawyer: (view spoiler)[Very predictable and sad. I didn't think he would die. I thought he would probably end up in jail or something. But also, I am a pretty sheltered person but I could see that these people were bad news from a mile away. Too bad Sawyer didn't. (hide spoiler)]

Exodans in general: (view spoiler)[Some of the cultural stuff was interesting, but it just sounded like a commune. Which is fine. But there just wasn't anything surprising or interesting about the culture itself. Like yes, it's weird as an American to wrap my head around people actually working as a team for the Greater Good. But it's not unheard of. And in this case especially, if you don't want to live like that you can go live somewhere else in the galaxy. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

I read this a while ago and enjoyed it. I wrote a review then and just now stumbled across this thread. I thought it would be apropos here, so here it is (apologies if it is too old).

I'm glad I continued with this series even though the second one wasn't really for me. The fun and sense of adventure and kaleidoscopic Galactic Commons all came back, and since those are what made the first book so enjoyable for me, I liked this one a lot as well. Plus, I felt like there was an actual story line in which the characters actually got things accomplished and learned from their experiences (something I couldn't really see in Book 2).

(view spoiler)[I was a little disappointed in the ending, though. Based on the story of how the Exodus Fleet was made, I thought it would have been great if the Exodans had found a planet and, in an example of things coming full circle, had dismantled the ships to build new cities. There's no reason they couldn't have retained most of their unique customs and value system that way either, and Kip could just as easily welcomed the baby into a newly-founded city. I think that would have been much better than still keeping the decaying ships and their inhabitants in orbit, with (as Ghuh'loloan pointed out) another Oxomoco-type disaster being only a matter of time. (hide spoiler)]

Jennifer wrote: "I read this a while ago and enjoyed it. I wrote a review then and just now stumbled across this thread. I thought it would be apropos here, so here it is (apologies if it is too old).

I'm glad I c..."

Thanks for sharing Jennifer! I agree the end (view spoiler)[ wasn't very satisfying. But for me, I didn't care for most of the book (hide spoiler)]

SarahKat wrote: "I am about halfway through this on audio. Definitely not grabbing my attention like the first 2 did. I am invested in a few characters but not all of them. I'm hoping things start coming together s..."

(view spoiler)[ poor him, you knew right away that his situation was going to end up badly (hide spoiler)]