EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello everyone,
We are finally past the massive heat wave earlier this week. It was hard to take walks and listen to my audiobooks in the heat. I did a lot of short walks early and late in the day. We are at week 26, halfway through the year.

My reading was a bit subdued this week, for reasons. I really only listened to my audiobook, One Word Kill. I am nearly halfway through and enjoying it so far. It is more YA and D&D is a big part of the plot. Although I don't play D&D most of my kids do (my daughter and SIL met DM'ing online games (for $$ even!)) so I've recommended they consider this book.

I finished the short story Abscond on my Kindle. It was meh for me. I enjoyed learning some about Indian culture but the story was just surface-level. But the short story format is hard and it takes a special author to succeed.

QOTW:
Has a book ever changed your life?

Maybe? Sort of? All the books I can think of are non-fiction. In particular food related. Long ago I read Michael Pollan's books and his 7 word mantra has stuck with me "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants". I also regularly use recipes from any of the 3 Good Eats books (early-seasons, mid-seasons, late-seasons). Similarly, with pre-diabetes, I have read the Glucose Goddess and have incorporated her "hacks" into my daily life. The science seems to support them but not definitively. But they're not harmful so I try to do them.

Sorry, it was kind of a busy week and I didn't get around to posting. Belated reviews ahead!

Owls Don't Blink - This is from a series pseudonymously written by the author of the Perry Mason books. I liked it. There were some fairly far-fetched scenarios, but I like his writing style. I had seen some reviews mention that the e-book had a lot of errors, and indeed there were extraneous commas and other OCR errors like "hen" for "her", which would have bothered me a lot more if I'd paid for it, but I got it from Hoopla.

Murder By Multiples - This was a free e-book from a romance list, but it's really just a between-the-wars mystery. It has a couple of married women, one of whom is pretending to be a man (but does not seem to be actually trans and uses she/her), but no romance plot elements. I would rate it "mostly fine" as a novel, but it suffered from self-pub editing syndrome. Mostly it was comma issues and that sort of thing, although when the detective lamented being called away from his vacation to deal with this "grizzly business", I couldn't help thinking, "If it's bears, that ought to let Scotland Yard out of it."

QOTW: I mean, this is cheesy, but every book changes my life? I am in some small way different for having read it.