EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello everyone,
We were super busy on our trip last week so I missed getting a post out. We are finally home. Hopefully I get to stay home for a little while. Apparently we missed a big heat wave here, while it was cool enough to wear pants where we were. My two grandsons are super cute and we miss them already.

I have several finishes and a couple new starts. On the long flight I listened to three short stories from the Forward Collection. Apparently this collection was put together by Blake Crouch (who also wrote one of the stories). There are three more to go. They are Ark, Summer Frost and Emergency Skin. These were all pretty good for short stories.

I also finished Woman on the Verge. This was from an Amazon First Reads. It was pretty interesting although was at a place I could not relate to for motherhood. But then at about 80% of the way through it took a strange left turn. The turn is explained and dealt with but was kind of unsatisfying and weird to me.

Neighborhood book club was last night and we discussed and I officially finished The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars. The meeting was delicious as the host had all kinds of chocolate samples, not only the various Hershey mini bars and Mars' M&Ms, but Taza, Lindt and even raw cacao beans from a trip to Belize.

I am so far enjoying my current reads. Just today I started listening to Book Lovers. It feels like the light read I need. Looking forward to my upcoming walks alone!

I'm reading a recent Amazon First Read that I'm also engaged with. The Women of Arlington Hall. I'm about 25% through. It is about "government girl" women going to Washington DC in the late 1940s to work on cryptography. My 96 YO mother went to DC at that same time to be a secretary. Or that is what she has told us (and what the characters in the books are required to say). Now I need to ask her more about this and recommend she read this book.

QOTW:
You’ve been transported to the setting of your current book. Where are you and what are you doing?

Since I'm reading 2 books, I'll pick Washington DC in the late 1940s. I'm doing puzzles and helping to break codes and look for patterns in encrypted messages. I'm living in a dormitory style building.

Interestingly my daughter lived in a similar place in 2016 during an engineering internship in NYC. It provided 2 meals a day, had shared bathrooms, no men were allowed beyond the lobby (even my husband could not come up and help her move, only me) and was inexpensive.

I survived the heat! And then we had a week of unseasonably cool temperatures and rain and honestly it was great.

When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance - Very much in the style of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, but about the interplay between plant and animal evolution. I liked that aspect of it, but I still don't love the format of telling a little nature-documentary-type story and then putting more info in an appendix at the end.

The Adventures of Mary Darling - The mom from Peter Pan is the niece of Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories and goes on an adventure to rescue her kids. This was fun, clever, and also trying way too hard. A just-so story for every source aspect, a backstory for every minor character, a tell for every show... I might still recommend it, but it would probably benefit from losing a hundred pages.

Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All - Middle grade about anti-Asian racism, finding community, and lost socks. It was cute and fun, enhanced by the author's somewhat goofy illustrations, and I'd recommend it for the target age group.

Sharing Space: An Astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change - This is a memoir that covers general going-to-space topics but also the additional challenges of being a woman in that environment. Each section ends with applicable general life lessons to be learned, which could have been cheesy but actually felt genuine, so I thought it worked.

QOTW: I have just started Marble Hall Murders, in which the frame story narrator has just moved into a garden flat in London, although presumably she will visit the titular mansion at some point, and the book within the book is set in the French Riviera. I guess I'm either freelance editing for a publishing company or being a detective, suspect, criminal, or murder victim. If I hadn't finished the previous book, I'd be in space, which would be more interesting but less personally desirable (unless I was the criminal or victim, I suppose).

Hello! It's supposed to get hot again this week here, so I'm not looking forward to it.

Finished:
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg - 3 stars - for Popsugar's book that features a character going through menopause. I don't have strong feelings about it. It was fine. I'm glad that I read it. I'm not in a rush to read any sequels, though.

Comics/manga:
Magus of the Library, Vol. 8

Currently reading:
First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston - not currently for a prompt. I'm really enjoying this so far. I love con artist stories.

Upcoming/Planned:
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu - not currently for a prompt.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan - not currently for a prompt.

QOTW:
I've been transported to a little town in Louisiana and I'm possibly a con woman, so, considering I'm a terrible liar, I'd probably blow it right away! *lol*