jen.e.moore digs away at Mount TBR
Talk ROOT - 2014 Read Our Own Tomes
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1jen.e.moore
I can't stop borrowing library books (I'm a librarian, they're everywhere, they follow me home, what am I supposed to do?) but I can make an effort to read some of the books I've already acquired, too. I've set my goal at 30, and I hope I'll go over it.
In addition, I've got some unofficial smaller goals - I want to focus on ebooks, since those don't take up space and therefore go unread for much longer. I want to keep the list of currently-checked-out library books to less than ten. And I want to remove one book from the house for every new book I bring in. (This is the one I'm pretty sure I'll fail, but. It's good to have goals, right?)
Edited to add my "300 books in a year" challenge ticker, and to up my ROOT goal from 30 to 50. Onward and upward!
In addition, I've got some unofficial smaller goals - I want to focus on ebooks, since those don't take up space and therefore go unread for much longer. I want to keep the list of currently-checked-out library books to less than ten. And I want to remove one book from the house for every new book I bring in. (This is the one I'm pretty sure I'll fail, but. It's good to have goals, right?)
Edited to add my "300 books in a year" challenge ticker, and to up my ROOT goal from 30 to 50. Onward and upward!
2jen.e.moore
ROOT books read:
1. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin - (so this hardly counts as I bought it on Christmas and finished it the evening of the 1st, but STILL.)
2. The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris - This is clearly an ancestor of Narnia, what with the evil queen and her dwarf servant, and also the title which I keep remembering as The Wood Between The Worlds, which is what it is in The Magician's Nephew. As a reading experience it's rather weird, but as literary history it's fascinating. (An ebook.)
3. The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch - I feel about this series the way other people feel about A Song of Ice and Fire, albeit with a little more sympathy for the poor author, so there was no way I wan't going to like this. Locke and Sabetha still bore me to tears, but I'm in this for Jean, and Jean was as great as he always is. (Also: surprise!Chains! I never thought I'd see him again! *squishes him*)
4. Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward - a very useful little book based on the authors' workshop, full of ideas and strategies for how to write about people who are not like you without being an asshole.
5. The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh - wow, I did not expect to inhale that book so quickly. Really excellent rural noir by a debut author, highly recommended for fans of Daniel Woodrell and the like.
o. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - this one only half counts, since I got a copy of the ebook specifically to read for my book club, so I'll record it here but not add it to my ticker. I had a huge amount of fun reading this book, but I do have some problems with the actual story. Should be an interesting discussion.
6. A Touch of Evil by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp - I don't like paranormal romance, I don't like urban fantasy, I don't know why I keep trying to read it. *sigh* At least it's out of my life now. (An ebook.)
7. Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion - I wanted to like this book. I ought to like this book. I do not like this book. I am bored by this book. A hundred-odd pages in I am giving up and donating this book to the library book sale. It is out of my life, so it's a completed ROOT, right?
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8. The Mad Scientist Affair by John T. Phillifent, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in book - I love these ridiculous little things, they fill me with utter joy. This one wasn't great as MUNCLE tie-ins go - the author didn't know what to do with Illya at all - but still, it was a fun little break.
9. Two Princes of Calabar by Randy J. Sparks - interesting but extremely short book about two young men of an African slave-trading family who were themselves sold into slavery and eventually freed. A nice illustration of the complexities of the slave trade, but entirely too short. I could've read another hundred pages easily.
10. Portable MFA in Creative Writing by The New York Writer's Workshop - pretty hit or miss, like most writing books, but fortunately the chapters I was interested in (fiction, and to an extent article writing and poetry) were pretty solid. (An ebook.)
o. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - Okay, I'm putting this in here because I genuinely do not know whether or not I've read this before, but once again it's an ebook I've acquired for a specific purpose and read right away (this time for a Coursera course).
o. Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll - I'm actually fairly sure I haven't read this before. It's much stranger than the first one, and rather upsettingly so sometimes.
11. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink - a galley I had shoved into my hands at ALA this summer, which I finally managed to convince myself to read. It was a little like reading a really, really long Washington Post article - interesting, but not as gripping as I might have wished.
12. The Fog by Scott Allie - I'm torn. Plus a couple of points for it not actually being an Ancient Chinese Curse? Minus a couple of points for needing it to be a Chinese curse in any way? But I like the art, I like the storytelling, and I like the creepy pages. And it made me want to see the movie, which is the point of a tie-in comic, right?
13. What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton - Like hanging out with a really intelligent, really well-read friend who won't stop talking about the great book she just finished. In the best possible way.
14. Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw - reading my way through Janis Ian's "Welcome Home" (not to mention Jo Walton mentions this book all the time), a truly fascinating take on the development of the surveillance state, from before it developed. Forget 1984, this is the book everyone should be reading. Pity it's so out of print.
15. X'ed Out by Charles Burns - I picked this up as an ARC at an ALA conference in 2010 and carried it around for four years and this morning I read it in fifteen minutes. And I didn't much like it. Such is life, I suppose.
16. Salt by Amy K. Marshall - received a while ago through Early Reviewers, my last February ROOT squeezed in at the last minute last night. Not quite what I was expecting, but enjoyable enough. (An ebook.)
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17. Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins - a pretty solid horror novel, actually, despite the gimmicky add-ons. I enjoyed it.
18. Old Man's War by John Scalzi - polished this off on the plane ride home from Arizona. Good, solid milsf - not usually my favorite subgenre, but I think I'll read the rest of this series.
19. Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow - fun, but I hated the main character all the way through, so hard to have as much fun as I felt like I should have been having.
20. The Story of Frithiof the Bold translated from the Icelandic by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson - It's got that wonky Victorian thing where sometimes you have to read a sentence five or six times to understand it, but I'm always gonna love a story about guys who sing during a storm at sea. Also, Biorn is the best. (An ebook.)
21. The Hollow Land by William Morris - okay, I enjoyed The Wood Beyond the World as a curiosity, but I loved this wholly and entirely for itself. A magical, wonderful book about fairyland - the first few paragraphs make my heart beat faster - and I know I'll read it again and again. (An ebook.)
22. The Girl with All the Gifts by M. J. Carey - This was an outstanding, heartwrenchingly wonderful book. I stayed up late to finish it last night, and I can't stop thinking about the ending. An e-arc, out in June. (An ebook.)
23. J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu - A couple of moralistic ghost stories, a couple of old-fashioned fairy stories - mostly interesting as a curiosity. (An ebook.)
24. A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay by Watkin Tench - apparently it's time to read this pile of Australian history I have lying around. Sure, why not? An interesting little book, for the point of view of the author as much as anything. (An ebook.)
25. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman - an interesting anthology of pulp-era domestic suspense short stories. Interesting, but ultimately trivial: I can't see myself rereading this any time soon, so it goes in the to-sell pile.
26. Deadpool Pulp by Mike Benson - Deadpool Pulp, how could that not be awesome?! By being boring, predictable, and not nearly pulpy enough, that's how. Another for the sale pile.
27. Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic by Jeff Smith - I'm really glad I had this all in one volume, because I found the first couple of sections pretty boring, and then it got GREAT. The rat-creatures are my favorite part.
28. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear - why did I wait so long to read this? It's got the shape of standard epic fantasy, but with all the ingredients upgraded to be more awesome.
29. A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson by Watkin Tench - this one's about the colonists trying to make friends with the natives and resorting to kidnapping and assassination when that doesn't work. You gotta wonder what's wrong with people, sometimes. (An ebook.)
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30. The Devil of Echo Lake by Douglas Wynne - a deeply mediocre horror novel about rock musicians. Meh. (An ebook.)
31. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 74 - hey, it's in my TBR, I'm counting it. A nice little collection of stories on the theme of connection and exploration, an essay on Asimov's psychohistory, an interview with the author of Prince of Thorns (which I really do have to read), and a plea for more queer characters in SFF. (An ebook.)
32. The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said by Padraic Colum - Irish Literary Revival-era fairy tales, on the theme of birds. Rather charming, really. (An ebook.)
33. Shattered Pillars by Elizabeth Bear - despite my utter inability to focus on anything (hence the low reading count this month), this series continues to be utterly amazing.
34. Doctor Who: The Highlanders by Gerry Davis - the writing in these little books is terrible, but I wanted some Jaime. Now I'm going to have to see if I can't track down a copy of The Underwater Menace (or as much of it as exists...)
35. The Vampire Affair by David McDaniel - easily the best M.U.N.C.L.E. tie-in book so far. A little creepy, a lot of fun, and - wonder of wonders! - the writer could write both Napoleon and Illya!
36. Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - I usually try to give books at least 50 pages before I give up on them, but it only took me 34 in this one to realize that these cardboard-cutout characters were not going to do anything interesting enough to keep me engaged for a whole novel. Goodbye.
37. Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny - I have been trying to read this book for years. Which is pretty sad, when you consider how short it is. But hooray, now I get to read the rest of the series!
38. Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny - and to be honest, I liked this even better than the first one. It's a bit weird, I feel like if it were published today this whole series would be one fat novel, but it is a great deal of fun.
39. The Helix and the Hard Road, the Guest of Honor book from last year's WisCon. I read the Jo Walton half of it while waiting for the awards ceremony to start; I finally sat down and read the Joan Slonczewski half.
40. The Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny - yep, keeps on getting better. Hopefully I'll be able to finish up the series this weekend.
41. The Writing Life: A Writer's Journal: Volume 1 by C.J. Cherryh - Not actually a book but a minimally formatted copy of a year of the author's blog. Very little writing related content, but if you're into figure skating you may well be interested. (An ebook.)
42. The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny - I KNEW {spoiler redacted} WASN'T WHAT {spoilery pronoun redacted} APPEARED TO BE. (now, how many times while reading did I say that....)
43. Ill-Starred Captains by Anthony J. Brown - I really wanted to enjoy this, but after a month of trying, I have to admit that it isn't happening. Oh, well - at least it can go back to the used bookstore and I can replace it with something more interesting.
44. The Defense of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris - squeezing in one more for April at the last minute! I liked the title poem well enough, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre. Morris should stick to prose. (An ebook.)
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45. Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear - what an astonishingly, outrageously good series. I will want to reread it - I always want to reread something of this scope, once I've had a chance to absorb a little of it.
46. Rupetta by Nike Sulway - Amazing. Incredible. Everyone go buy it (the ebook is like $7 direct from publisher) and read it right now. (Also, woo! I've now completed all my WisCon reading! With almost a week to go!) (An ebook.)
47. The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin - I want N.K. Jemisin to live forever and write a thousand books and all of them will be this wonderful and everyone will love her. That's not too much to ask, right?
48. The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin - oh, I did not expect that ending to make me cry. But I did cry. *sniffle*
49. Here I Come and Other Stories by Alex Jennings - Everyone needs to drop what they're doing and go read everything they can find by Alex Jennings, right. now.
50. Shadow Walkers by Brent Hartinger - a mediocre YA paranormal adventure with a little bit of gay romance. But also - my 50th ROOT! Woohoo!
51. The Heroine's Bookshelf by Erin Blakemore - another one abandoned but removed from the TBR shelf at least. Very disappointingly superficial.
52. Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert and the Deadly Blotter by Edward Gorey - utterly brilliant little experiments in storytelling.
53. The Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski - I liked it enough to want to read the rest of the run (however I'm going to find that), but it really isn't as good as I wanted it to be.
54. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 80 - two very good stories, one pretty good one, and one meh. I'll take it. (An ebook.)
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55. Bloodchildren - an anthology from the Carl Brandon Society, a truly fantastic collection. One or two weak ones, many more great ones, including one truly outstanding steampunk airship adventure I'd love to see more of. (An ebook.)
56. It's Complicated by danah boyd - an ethnography of teens and their use of social media. TL;DR: teens just want to be able to hang out with their friends without somebody watching them all the time. Kind of like grownups, really. (An ebook.)
57. Smudge's Mark by Claudia Osmond - I thought it was going to be interesting, but no, that's just really bad worldbuilding masquerading as interesting. Oh, well.
58. Three Classic Children's Stories by James Donnelly and Edward Gorey - delightful retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, and Rumplestiltskin, with equally delightful illustrations.
59. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot - I was really surprised at how well I managed to avoid getting the songs from "Cats" stuck in my head.
60. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carre - Well, I gave it a try - but it turns out Le Carre is not for me. The prose is too stark, the plot too nihilistic, and quite frankly I find Cold War espionage to be a little silly on the best of days.
61. The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart - A delightful collection of plant history and trivia, growing tips, recipes - and the histories behind pretty much every variety of fermented drinkables you can imagine. (An ebook.)
62. Treasury of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin - There is only one word for this collection: pulptastic. The stories in here were old when this book was published. Fifty years ago. (Sometimes charming. Sometimes offensive. Almost always way more obsessed with nuclear war than I'm used to.)
63. The Resurrectionist by E. B. Hudspeth - This is beautiful, half a horror story about a demented Victorian anatomist and half an art book of lovingly detailed anatomical sketches of mythological beings.
64. The Twins by Saskia Sarginson - The back cover blurb compared it to Gone Girl. It was nothing like Gone Girl. Moderately disappointing.
65. DayBlack vol. 1 by Keef Cross - The adventures of a black vampire tattoo artist and his adopted Mexican vampire-hunter son. THIS. IS. AWESOME.
66. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81 - a slightly higher proportion of stories I didn't care for than usual, but this is the one with "Mongoose," and I love that universe more than I love life itself. So. (An ebook.)
67. The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald translated by William Morris and Eirikur Mangusson - Bleak as it was - and it was pretty bleak, in the end - it was nice to read a story about skalds instead of warriors for once. (An ebook.)
68. Jerlyane: The Short Story by Lynn Abbey - a high-fantasy story about reasonably interesting elven biology - but it didn't really grab me, for some reason, so I don't think I'll bother with the novel it grew into. (An e-short.)
69. The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen - I've been meaning to read this for years - it's a horror classic, and of that cosmic horror school that gets its effectiveness by never quite telling you exactly what all the horrible things are. (An ebook.)
70. Piracy, Turtles & Flying Foxes by William Dampier - extracts from his A New Voyage Round the World, terribly interesting and piratical, at some point I shall have to track down the whole thing.
71. Ashton's Memorial by John Barnard - I admit, I skimmed the sermons at the end. But the core story - which is a source for Robinson Crusoe - is fascinating.
72. How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff - a little bit inspiring but ultimately rather thin.
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73. Carpathia by Matt Forbeck - I really really wanted to like this book but it was not good. Like, I was stuck at the mechanic's for two and a half hours and I had to find something else to do other than read this book. Not finished, but off my TBR shelf at least.
74. Doctor Who: Logopolis by Christopher H. Bidmead - or, when I feel like I haven't read a ROOT in a long time, I grab a Doctor Who novelization off the shelf. (And then become overwhelmed with the desire to watch all of Five's stories in order. Well, there are worse uses of your time.)
75. Through Wolf's Eyes by Jane Lindskold - After two weeks of opening this book up, reading a paragraph, and putting it down again, it's time to admit that I'll never actually read it. It comes off the TBR list, at least.
76. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura - an interesting little Victorian-era book on Zen and the Japanese aesthetic. I liked it; I'll probably read it again.
77. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! by Richard Ned Lebow - an Early Reviewers book, I liked it more than a lot of reviewers seemed to, but it was still pretty thin. Could have benefited from another hundred pages' worth of expansion of his ideas.
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78. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco - at last! I have finished this monstrous tome! I did enjoy it, really - like The Name of the Rose is a book for medievalist geeks, this is a book for mysticism geeks.
79. Deadbeat: Makes You Stronger by Guy Adams - a nifty zombie novel borrowed from a friend. I kind of liked it; I might read the second one.
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80. Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey - finally I continue on with this series; it's fantastic demon noir, a lot of fun and a lot of grit.
81. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - I wanted to like this a lot more than I did; I think it's dated badly in just a couple of years, which is a little depressing. (Comparing techno-protest to Ferguson is an exercise in futility, but I can't help it.)
82. Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey - this one felt a little incoherent; the first half has almost nothing to do with the second half. But there also clearly wasn't enough going on for there to be a whole book of Stark Rules Hell Badly, which is a little sad; I would have liked that.
o. Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix - I never actually added this to my TBR, so I won't count it as a ROOT. A slightly cheesy horror novel, set in an Ikea knockoff. Not terrible, but definitely not great either. Might make a fun movie. (An ebook.)
83. Ringworld by Larry Niven - Everything I hate about 70s sf, all in one convenient book.
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84. The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan - a series of early twentieth century horror stories about Scotland, Buchan works rather too hard at vanquishing evil for these to be really horrifying. Alas. (An ebook.)
85. Gambit: Hath No Fury by John Layman - picked this up for something fluffy instead of the depressing history I've been reading. It was indeed fluffy, but otherwise not very good.
86. Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild - an account of the abolition movement as an early PAC; it's fairly tedious in a lot of places, but an interesting look at eighteenth century society's utter and complete acceptance of slavery and the slow process of changing that.
o. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James - I really wanted to like this, but it was just too Victorian for me to take seriously. Not really a ROOT, just an ebook I downloaded because I wanted something creepy. Alas.
87. The Dark and Hollow Places by Carrie Ryan - incredibly disappointing, emotionally flat, and overall boring. Blech.
88. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King - definitely from King's "help I'm not high all the time and I don't know what to do" phase. In other words, sub-par, but not entirely hopeless.
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89. The Hair Wreath by Halli Villegas - a couple of good stories, a couple of predictable ones, and a whole bunch that never seem to get anywhere.
90. The Girl in 6E by Alessandra Torre - trash, but fun trash. (I probably would have been more offended if it hadn't been written by a woman.)
91. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay - Roxane is my new hero. Strong, powerful, thoughtful writing on a whole range of subjects, not least on the importance of imperfection and the awareness of it at the same time.
92. People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess - I'm not sure what this was. Horror? Gothic? Just plain gore and psychological torture? I didn't like it.
93. Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué - Another short ebook from Project Gutenberg, a marginally unusual fairy wife story.
o. The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger - not really a ROOT, a book received through Early Reviewers just a few days ago, but I wanted something fluffy and this was ideal. Epistolary fiction set in the late 90s. I had a great time. Lots of wonderful insults - I like "you're such a schmuck you're the world's second biggest schmuck."
94. A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson - talked my SF book group into reading a book from my TBR shelf, hooray! Unfortunately I didn't like it very much; oh, well.
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95. The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber - an interesting short novella, old SF but not hugely dated, about murder and what culture is made of. I enjoyed it more than I expected to from the first few pages. (An ebook.)
96. Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters by John Langan - a collection of horror stories which, unfortunately, I enjoyed less and less as the stories went on. He's doing interesting things, just - not with subject matter that particularly interests me.
97. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - shockingly enough, I don't think I've ever read this whole book through. I enjoyed it a great deal (I think Sherlock Holmes improves through not being read for high school English classes). (An ebook.)
98. A Dream of John Ball, and A King's Lesson by William Morris - Holy romanticized Middle Ages, Batman! Plus a healthy dose of anarchism and anti-industrialism. Not nearly as fun to read as his romances. (An ebook.)
99. The Rose and the Ring by William Makepeace Thackeray - I didn't realize this was a Christmas pantomime when I picked it to read next! And very fun, too. (An ebook.)
100. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker - ugh. Ugh. I got this because of the incredible hype before it came out, but the way it sank like a stone should have been a clue to me. It was awful. (An ebook.)
101. Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling - this was much more enjoyable, adding to the slew of Victorian fantasy stories I wish I'd read when I was a kid. (An ebook.)
1. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin - (so this hardly counts as I bought it on Christmas and finished it the evening of the 1st, but STILL.)
2. The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris - This is clearly an ancestor of Narnia, what with the evil queen and her dwarf servant, and also the title which I keep remembering as The Wood Between The Worlds, which is what it is in The Magician's Nephew. As a reading experience it's rather weird, but as literary history it's fascinating. (An ebook.)
3. The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch - I feel about this series the way other people feel about A Song of Ice and Fire, albeit with a little more sympathy for the poor author, so there was no way I wan't going to like this. Locke and Sabetha still bore me to tears, but I'm in this for Jean, and Jean was as great as he always is. (Also: surprise!Chains! I never thought I'd see him again! *squishes him*)
4. Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward - a very useful little book based on the authors' workshop, full of ideas and strategies for how to write about people who are not like you without being an asshole.
5. The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh - wow, I did not expect to inhale that book so quickly. Really excellent rural noir by a debut author, highly recommended for fans of Daniel Woodrell and the like.
o. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - this one only half counts, since I got a copy of the ebook specifically to read for my book club, so I'll record it here but not add it to my ticker. I had a huge amount of fun reading this book, but I do have some problems with the actual story. Should be an interesting discussion.
6. A Touch of Evil by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp - I don't like paranormal romance, I don't like urban fantasy, I don't know why I keep trying to read it. *sigh* At least it's out of my life now. (An ebook.)
7. Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion - I wanted to like this book. I ought to like this book. I do not like this book. I am bored by this book. A hundred-odd pages in I am giving up and donating this book to the library book sale. It is out of my life, so it's a completed ROOT, right?
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8. The Mad Scientist Affair by John T. Phillifent, a Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in book - I love these ridiculous little things, they fill me with utter joy. This one wasn't great as MUNCLE tie-ins go - the author didn't know what to do with Illya at all - but still, it was a fun little break.
9. Two Princes of Calabar by Randy J. Sparks - interesting but extremely short book about two young men of an African slave-trading family who were themselves sold into slavery and eventually freed. A nice illustration of the complexities of the slave trade, but entirely too short. I could've read another hundred pages easily.
10. Portable MFA in Creative Writing by The New York Writer's Workshop - pretty hit or miss, like most writing books, but fortunately the chapters I was interested in (fiction, and to an extent article writing and poetry) were pretty solid. (An ebook.)
o. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - Okay, I'm putting this in here because I genuinely do not know whether or not I've read this before, but once again it's an ebook I've acquired for a specific purpose and read right away (this time for a Coursera course).
o. Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll - I'm actually fairly sure I haven't read this before. It's much stranger than the first one, and rather upsettingly so sometimes.
11. Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink - a galley I had shoved into my hands at ALA this summer, which I finally managed to convince myself to read. It was a little like reading a really, really long Washington Post article - interesting, but not as gripping as I might have wished.
12. The Fog by Scott Allie - I'm torn. Plus a couple of points for it not actually being an Ancient Chinese Curse? Minus a couple of points for needing it to be a Chinese curse in any way? But I like the art, I like the storytelling, and I like the creepy pages. And it made me want to see the movie, which is the point of a tie-in comic, right?
13. What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton - Like hanging out with a really intelligent, really well-read friend who won't stop talking about the great book she just finished. In the best possible way.
14. Other Days, Other Eyes by Bob Shaw - reading my way through Janis Ian's "Welcome Home" (not to mention Jo Walton mentions this book all the time), a truly fascinating take on the development of the surveillance state, from before it developed. Forget 1984, this is the book everyone should be reading. Pity it's so out of print.
15. X'ed Out by Charles Burns - I picked this up as an ARC at an ALA conference in 2010 and carried it around for four years and this morning I read it in fifteen minutes. And I didn't much like it. Such is life, I suppose.
16. Salt by Amy K. Marshall - received a while ago through Early Reviewers, my last February ROOT squeezed in at the last minute last night. Not quite what I was expecting, but enjoyable enough. (An ebook.)
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17. Personal Effects: Dark Art by J.C. Hutchins - a pretty solid horror novel, actually, despite the gimmicky add-ons. I enjoyed it.
18. Old Man's War by John Scalzi - polished this off on the plane ride home from Arizona. Good, solid milsf - not usually my favorite subgenre, but I think I'll read the rest of this series.
19. Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow - fun, but I hated the main character all the way through, so hard to have as much fun as I felt like I should have been having.
20. The Story of Frithiof the Bold translated from the Icelandic by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson - It's got that wonky Victorian thing where sometimes you have to read a sentence five or six times to understand it, but I'm always gonna love a story about guys who sing during a storm at sea. Also, Biorn is the best. (An ebook.)
21. The Hollow Land by William Morris - okay, I enjoyed The Wood Beyond the World as a curiosity, but I loved this wholly and entirely for itself. A magical, wonderful book about fairyland - the first few paragraphs make my heart beat faster - and I know I'll read it again and again. (An ebook.)
22. The Girl with All the Gifts by M. J. Carey - This was an outstanding, heartwrenchingly wonderful book. I stayed up late to finish it last night, and I can't stop thinking about the ending. An e-arc, out in June. (An ebook.)
23. J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu - A couple of moralistic ghost stories, a couple of old-fashioned fairy stories - mostly interesting as a curiosity. (An ebook.)
24. A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay by Watkin Tench - apparently it's time to read this pile of Australian history I have lying around. Sure, why not? An interesting little book, for the point of view of the author as much as anything. (An ebook.)
25. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman - an interesting anthology of pulp-era domestic suspense short stories. Interesting, but ultimately trivial: I can't see myself rereading this any time soon, so it goes in the to-sell pile.
26. Deadpool Pulp by Mike Benson - Deadpool Pulp, how could that not be awesome?! By being boring, predictable, and not nearly pulpy enough, that's how. Another for the sale pile.
27. Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic by Jeff Smith - I'm really glad I had this all in one volume, because I found the first couple of sections pretty boring, and then it got GREAT. The rat-creatures are my favorite part.
28. Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear - why did I wait so long to read this? It's got the shape of standard epic fantasy, but with all the ingredients upgraded to be more awesome.
29. A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson by Watkin Tench - this one's about the colonists trying to make friends with the natives and resorting to kidnapping and assassination when that doesn't work. You gotta wonder what's wrong with people, sometimes. (An ebook.)
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30. The Devil of Echo Lake by Douglas Wynne - a deeply mediocre horror novel about rock musicians. Meh. (An ebook.)
31. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 74 - hey, it's in my TBR, I'm counting it. A nice little collection of stories on the theme of connection and exploration, an essay on Asimov's psychohistory, an interview with the author of Prince of Thorns (which I really do have to read), and a plea for more queer characters in SFF. (An ebook.)
32. The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said by Padraic Colum - Irish Literary Revival-era fairy tales, on the theme of birds. Rather charming, really. (An ebook.)
33. Shattered Pillars by Elizabeth Bear - despite my utter inability to focus on anything (hence the low reading count this month), this series continues to be utterly amazing.
34. Doctor Who: The Highlanders by Gerry Davis - the writing in these little books is terrible, but I wanted some Jaime. Now I'm going to have to see if I can't track down a copy of The Underwater Menace (or as much of it as exists...)
35. The Vampire Affair by David McDaniel - easily the best M.U.N.C.L.E. tie-in book so far. A little creepy, a lot of fun, and - wonder of wonders! - the writer could write both Napoleon and Illya!
36. Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - I usually try to give books at least 50 pages before I give up on them, but it only took me 34 in this one to realize that these cardboard-cutout characters were not going to do anything interesting enough to keep me engaged for a whole novel. Goodbye.
37. Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny - I have been trying to read this book for years. Which is pretty sad, when you consider how short it is. But hooray, now I get to read the rest of the series!
38. Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny - and to be honest, I liked this even better than the first one. It's a bit weird, I feel like if it were published today this whole series would be one fat novel, but it is a great deal of fun.
39. The Helix and the Hard Road, the Guest of Honor book from last year's WisCon. I read the Jo Walton half of it while waiting for the awards ceremony to start; I finally sat down and read the Joan Slonczewski half.
40. The Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny - yep, keeps on getting better. Hopefully I'll be able to finish up the series this weekend.
41. The Writing Life: A Writer's Journal: Volume 1 by C.J. Cherryh - Not actually a book but a minimally formatted copy of a year of the author's blog. Very little writing related content, but if you're into figure skating you may well be interested. (An ebook.)
42. The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny - I KNEW {spoiler redacted} WASN'T WHAT {spoilery pronoun redacted} APPEARED TO BE. (now, how many times while reading did I say that....)
43. Ill-Starred Captains by Anthony J. Brown - I really wanted to enjoy this, but after a month of trying, I have to admit that it isn't happening. Oh, well - at least it can go back to the used bookstore and I can replace it with something more interesting.
44. The Defense of Guenevere and Other Poems by William Morris - squeezing in one more for April at the last minute! I liked the title poem well enough, but the rest of it was pretty mediocre. Morris should stick to prose. (An ebook.)
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45. Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear - what an astonishingly, outrageously good series. I will want to reread it - I always want to reread something of this scope, once I've had a chance to absorb a little of it.
46. Rupetta by Nike Sulway - Amazing. Incredible. Everyone go buy it (the ebook is like $7 direct from publisher) and read it right now. (Also, woo! I've now completed all my WisCon reading! With almost a week to go!) (An ebook.)
47. The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin - I want N.K. Jemisin to live forever and write a thousand books and all of them will be this wonderful and everyone will love her. That's not too much to ask, right?
48. The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin - oh, I did not expect that ending to make me cry. But I did cry. *sniffle*
49. Here I Come and Other Stories by Alex Jennings - Everyone needs to drop what they're doing and go read everything they can find by Alex Jennings, right. now.
50. Shadow Walkers by Brent Hartinger - a mediocre YA paranormal adventure with a little bit of gay romance. But also - my 50th ROOT! Woohoo!
51. The Heroine's Bookshelf by Erin Blakemore - another one abandoned but removed from the TBR shelf at least. Very disappointingly superficial.
52. Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert and the Deadly Blotter by Edward Gorey - utterly brilliant little experiments in storytelling.
53. The Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski - I liked it enough to want to read the rest of the run (however I'm going to find that), but it really isn't as good as I wanted it to be.
54. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 80 - two very good stories, one pretty good one, and one meh. I'll take it. (An ebook.)
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55. Bloodchildren - an anthology from the Carl Brandon Society, a truly fantastic collection. One or two weak ones, many more great ones, including one truly outstanding steampunk airship adventure I'd love to see more of. (An ebook.)
56. It's Complicated by danah boyd - an ethnography of teens and their use of social media. TL;DR: teens just want to be able to hang out with their friends without somebody watching them all the time. Kind of like grownups, really. (An ebook.)
57. Smudge's Mark by Claudia Osmond - I thought it was going to be interesting, but no, that's just really bad worldbuilding masquerading as interesting. Oh, well.
58. Three Classic Children's Stories by James Donnelly and Edward Gorey - delightful retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, and Rumplestiltskin, with equally delightful illustrations.
59. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot - I was really surprised at how well I managed to avoid getting the songs from "Cats" stuck in my head.
60. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carre - Well, I gave it a try - but it turns out Le Carre is not for me. The prose is too stark, the plot too nihilistic, and quite frankly I find Cold War espionage to be a little silly on the best of days.
61. The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart - A delightful collection of plant history and trivia, growing tips, recipes - and the histories behind pretty much every variety of fermented drinkables you can imagine. (An ebook.)
62. Treasury of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin - There is only one word for this collection: pulptastic. The stories in here were old when this book was published. Fifty years ago. (Sometimes charming. Sometimes offensive. Almost always way more obsessed with nuclear war than I'm used to.)
63. The Resurrectionist by E. B. Hudspeth - This is beautiful, half a horror story about a demented Victorian anatomist and half an art book of lovingly detailed anatomical sketches of mythological beings.
64. The Twins by Saskia Sarginson - The back cover blurb compared it to Gone Girl. It was nothing like Gone Girl. Moderately disappointing.
65. DayBlack vol. 1 by Keef Cross - The adventures of a black vampire tattoo artist and his adopted Mexican vampire-hunter son. THIS. IS. AWESOME.
66. Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81 - a slightly higher proportion of stories I didn't care for than usual, but this is the one with "Mongoose," and I love that universe more than I love life itself. So. (An ebook.)
67. The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald translated by William Morris and Eirikur Mangusson - Bleak as it was - and it was pretty bleak, in the end - it was nice to read a story about skalds instead of warriors for once. (An ebook.)
68. Jerlyane: The Short Story by Lynn Abbey - a high-fantasy story about reasonably interesting elven biology - but it didn't really grab me, for some reason, so I don't think I'll bother with the novel it grew into. (An e-short.)
69. The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen - I've been meaning to read this for years - it's a horror classic, and of that cosmic horror school that gets its effectiveness by never quite telling you exactly what all the horrible things are. (An ebook.)
70. Piracy, Turtles & Flying Foxes by William Dampier - extracts from his A New Voyage Round the World, terribly interesting and piratical, at some point I shall have to track down the whole thing.
71. Ashton's Memorial by John Barnard - I admit, I skimmed the sermons at the end. But the core story - which is a source for Robinson Crusoe - is fascinating.
72. How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff - a little bit inspiring but ultimately rather thin.
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73. Carpathia by Matt Forbeck - I really really wanted to like this book but it was not good. Like, I was stuck at the mechanic's for two and a half hours and I had to find something else to do other than read this book. Not finished, but off my TBR shelf at least.
74. Doctor Who: Logopolis by Christopher H. Bidmead - or, when I feel like I haven't read a ROOT in a long time, I grab a Doctor Who novelization off the shelf. (And then become overwhelmed with the desire to watch all of Five's stories in order. Well, there are worse uses of your time.)
75. Through Wolf's Eyes by Jane Lindskold - After two weeks of opening this book up, reading a paragraph, and putting it down again, it's time to admit that I'll never actually read it. It comes off the TBR list, at least.
76. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura - an interesting little Victorian-era book on Zen and the Japanese aesthetic. I liked it; I'll probably read it again.
77. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! by Richard Ned Lebow - an Early Reviewers book, I liked it more than a lot of reviewers seemed to, but it was still pretty thin. Could have benefited from another hundred pages' worth of expansion of his ideas.
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78. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco - at last! I have finished this monstrous tome! I did enjoy it, really - like The Name of the Rose is a book for medievalist geeks, this is a book for mysticism geeks.
79. Deadbeat: Makes You Stronger by Guy Adams - a nifty zombie novel borrowed from a friend. I kind of liked it; I might read the second one.
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80. Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey - finally I continue on with this series; it's fantastic demon noir, a lot of fun and a lot of grit.
81. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow - I wanted to like this a lot more than I did; I think it's dated badly in just a couple of years, which is a little depressing. (Comparing techno-protest to Ferguson is an exercise in futility, but I can't help it.)
82. Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey - this one felt a little incoherent; the first half has almost nothing to do with the second half. But there also clearly wasn't enough going on for there to be a whole book of Stark Rules Hell Badly, which is a little sad; I would have liked that.
o. Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix - I never actually added this to my TBR, so I won't count it as a ROOT. A slightly cheesy horror novel, set in an Ikea knockoff. Not terrible, but definitely not great either. Might make a fun movie. (An ebook.)
83. Ringworld by Larry Niven - Everything I hate about 70s sf, all in one convenient book.
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84. The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan - a series of early twentieth century horror stories about Scotland, Buchan works rather too hard at vanquishing evil for these to be really horrifying. Alas. (An ebook.)
85. Gambit: Hath No Fury by John Layman - picked this up for something fluffy instead of the depressing history I've been reading. It was indeed fluffy, but otherwise not very good.
86. Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild - an account of the abolition movement as an early PAC; it's fairly tedious in a lot of places, but an interesting look at eighteenth century society's utter and complete acceptance of slavery and the slow process of changing that.
o. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James - I really wanted to like this, but it was just too Victorian for me to take seriously. Not really a ROOT, just an ebook I downloaded because I wanted something creepy. Alas.
87. The Dark and Hollow Places by Carrie Ryan - incredibly disappointing, emotionally flat, and overall boring. Blech.
88. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King - definitely from King's "help I'm not high all the time and I don't know what to do" phase. In other words, sub-par, but not entirely hopeless.
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89. The Hair Wreath by Halli Villegas - a couple of good stories, a couple of predictable ones, and a whole bunch that never seem to get anywhere.
90. The Girl in 6E by Alessandra Torre - trash, but fun trash. (I probably would have been more offended if it hadn't been written by a woman.)
91. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay - Roxane is my new hero. Strong, powerful, thoughtful writing on a whole range of subjects, not least on the importance of imperfection and the awareness of it at the same time.
92. People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess - I'm not sure what this was. Horror? Gothic? Just plain gore and psychological torture? I didn't like it.
93. Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué - Another short ebook from Project Gutenberg, a marginally unusual fairy wife story.
o. The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger - not really a ROOT, a book received through Early Reviewers just a few days ago, but I wanted something fluffy and this was ideal. Epistolary fiction set in the late 90s. I had a great time. Lots of wonderful insults - I like "you're such a schmuck you're the world's second biggest schmuck."
94. A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson - talked my SF book group into reading a book from my TBR shelf, hooray! Unfortunately I didn't like it very much; oh, well.
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95. The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber - an interesting short novella, old SF but not hugely dated, about murder and what culture is made of. I enjoyed it more than I expected to from the first few pages. (An ebook.)
96. Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters by John Langan - a collection of horror stories which, unfortunately, I enjoyed less and less as the stories went on. He's doing interesting things, just - not with subject matter that particularly interests me.
97. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - shockingly enough, I don't think I've ever read this whole book through. I enjoyed it a great deal (I think Sherlock Holmes improves through not being read for high school English classes). (An ebook.)
98. A Dream of John Ball, and A King's Lesson by William Morris - Holy romanticized Middle Ages, Batman! Plus a healthy dose of anarchism and anti-industrialism. Not nearly as fun to read as his romances. (An ebook.)
99. The Rose and the Ring by William Makepeace Thackeray - I didn't realize this was a Christmas pantomime when I picked it to read next! And very fun, too. (An ebook.)
100. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker - ugh. Ugh. I got this because of the incredible hype before it came out, but the way it sank like a stone should have been a clue to me. It was awful. (An ebook.)
101. Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling - this was much more enjoyable, adding to the slew of Victorian fantasy stories I wish I'd read when I was a kid. (An ebook.)
3jen.e.moore
Library books read (might as well):
1. War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft - an academic study of Tolkien's works as they relate to war, referring to his own biography and to the body of WWI and WWII literature as a whole. Interesting stuff, although I feel like a lot of it was a little obvious to someone who's spent a lot of time reading academic studies of Tolkien.
2. The Silence of Mockingbirds by Karen Spears Zacharias - I like to read true crime when I'm depressed. Partly it plays off my sense that the world is a horrible place, half reinforcing it and half undercutting it with the reminder that people don't always get away with it. And partly I think it's because it makes me feel something, even if that something is sadness on behalf of someone else. This did the trick.
3. Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth - a truly fantastic biography of J.R.R. Tolkien focusing on the years around the First World War. Garth follows both historical events and Tolkien's mythology closely, making sure to note occasions where the one impacted the other. Probably completely incomprehensible to someone who hasn't read The Silmarillion, since most of the writing happening is on the ancestor of that book, The Book of Lost Tales.
4. A Season of Darkness by Doug Jones - I woke up yesterday morning with a craving for a true crime story. This was pretty mediocre as true crime goes, but it scratched the itch. (Also, thank goodness for library ebooks, eh?)
5-10. Attack on Titan volumes 1-5 by Hajime Isayama - Well, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I liked it enough to keep reading, but not enough to get as obsessed by it as everyone else seems to be. Oh, well.
11. Beauty Queens by Libba Bray - Rather more didactic than I generally like my satire, but enjoyable enough.
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12. Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja - this book was absolutely beautiful, a dark and moving love story plus puppets and political intrigue. Everything I enjoy - but the writing style, a kind of stream-of-consciousness third person, was difficult. I'm looking forward to some light reads now, to take a break.
13. Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter - I've been bitten by the Inspector Morse bug, and now I have a whole new series to read. This book had some pretty appalling opinions about rape, but other than that it was enjoyable enough and I'll definitely keep reading.
14. Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link - I love a good short story collection. This one was...pretty good. Link's style is a little more literary than I prefer, so a whole collection at once was a bit much. I did like the title story a lot, though.
15. Bravo! A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed by Barrymore Laurence Scherer - a prett solid introduction to the history of opera and the major composers and titles, with practically no discussion of the actual music itself, which was kind of what I wanted. Oh, well.
16. Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter - the ending was much weaker than Last Bus to Woodstock, too convoluted for too long, but I love Lewis's exasperation with Morse's theories.
17. Locke and Key Volume 6 by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez - I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this ending. There was at least one cheat, and that always annoys me. Someday soon I'll probably reread the whole series again, to see how it feels now there's an end.
18. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf - an interesting story about Jeff Dahmer as a weird, isolated high school kid, by one of his less weird, less isolated high school friends. Not my favorite art style, but I'm a sucker for this kind of story.
19. Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James - I keep thinking I should like P.D. James and I keep on not doing it. I'm about to give up.
20. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter - Definitely less convoluted than the first two Morse mysteries; I'm not sure if that means I liked it better, or not as much. I'll have to think about that.
21. Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black by Karl Bollers - basically just as awesome as I wanted this to be. Watson and Holmes as black guys in Harlem. Incredibly awesome. There needs to be more of this, stat.
22. Keeping the Castle by Patrice Kindl - an utterly adorable, fluffy Regency romance, which was just what I wanted. (The seediness of the Morse books was getting to me; I needed something happy, which was guaranteed not to include pornography of any kind.)
23. Ultimate Spider-Man, Vol. 5 by Brian Michael Bendis - I don't read a lot of superhero books but Miles Morales is my favorite Spider-man of all time, so. Alas, there just wasn't a lot of Miles in this one. Oh, well.
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24. The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter - let me just say. Cyberpunk lesbians! Telepathic whales! African utopias! This book was amazing.
25. Territory by Emma Bull - slightly weird in that I never could get a handle on what the main plotline was, completely wonderful in the characters, as Emma Bull always is. Now I want to go to Tombstone.
26. Service of All the Dead by Colin Dexter - now that was a satisfying detective story. I think I'm taking a break from Morse books for a while, though, to catch up on the show.
27. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi - goddamn but this series is awesome. Mildly unfortunate spoiler on account of the title of one of the later books - but whatever, I still loved it.
28. The Grave Doug Freshley by Josh Hechinger and mpMann - the tagline is "A yarn about friendship, vengeance and not letting fatal head wounds interfere with your most solemn promises," and that sums it up pretty well.
29. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler - a delightfully weird mystery. I shall most certainly be reading the rest of this series.
30. The Water Room by Christopher Fowler - the second of the Bryant & May mysteries, which I enjoyed even more because this time it's 100% Crotchety Old Men Solving Wacky Crimes. I didn't realize that this was something that I needed in my life.
31. The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely - I always enjoy Ariely's work, even though I continue to be skeptical of the broad applicability of many psychology experiments.
32. The Last Colony by John Scalzi - John Perry for President of Earth. Failing that, John Scalzi for President of Everything. This is a great, great series.
33. Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman - I no longer remember why I wanted to interlibrary-loan this book, but wherever I got the recommendation from, I appreciate it. My favorite story in this collection was "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," a ghost story about responsibility.
34. Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith - it's an Andrew Smith book, so of course it's gross and full of sex, but it's also pulpy and hilarious and wonderful. (I wish I could recommend these to people at my library without causing a massive moral panic.)
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35. Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler - moving right through the Bryant & May series. This one's deeply, deeply weird and implausible. I loved it.
36. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - I couldn't wait for my copy to arrive; I read the library's. And it was wonderful. I'll probably read mine when it comes too, actually.
37. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi - I was very disappointed in this one; it was basically a rehash of The Last Colony with a different POV, and I don't think Scalzi pulled it off very well.
38. In Dreams Begin by Skyler White - I honestly don't know how I feel about this book. It had a lot of things I love - Irish Revival mysticism! Melodramatic romance! Yeats! - and a lot of things I hate - time-travel romance, angst about being married, magic is a thing that was stopped in the past and doesn't exist any more. It was beautifully written, though.
39. Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler - another week, another Bryant & May mystery about crotchety old men running around London solving crime.
40. The Human Division by John Scalzi - The thing about reading a lot of Scalzi in a row is that sooner or later you realize that all the main characters have Scalzi's sense of humor. This isn't quite as bad as Joss Whedon's sense of humor, but it is a little repetitive.
41. White Corridor by Christopher Fowler - some Unfortunate Implications with female characters (and oh how I hate that), but I do like Stranded In Snowstorm as a trope, so.
42. Genesis by Bernard Beckett - one off my endless TBR list of library books, a novella about consciousness, intelligence, and the creation of a perfect society. Interesting, if not brilliant.
43. The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny - That was a profoundly vague ending. I know there's five more books, but I'd always heard they weren't very good, so I was going to skip them. Apparently not.
44. Johannes Cabal, The Detective by Jonathan L. Howard - I read the first of these last year around Halloween and loved it, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to get to the next one. I love Johannes Cabal. He's so *annoyed* by his own conscience.
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45. The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler - another delightfully implausible mystery
46. Ammonite by Nicola Griffith - one off my endless list of library books I ought to read: a planet-of-women scifi full of intriguing biology and complex social structures. Reminded me a bit of A Door Into Ocean, which isn't terribly surprising.
47. A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane - man, I love me some good modern noir, and Lehane is the best. Funny story: I read Moonlight Mile when it first came out and I went around telling everyone how great it was and how there should be a whole series of these until someone finally took pity on me and told me that there was, and now I've finally gotten around to reading them.
48. The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto - I wanted to have read at least one thing by each of the WisCon guests of honor before I went, this year, and so I did. An interesting Japanese-Canadian magical realism story - not something I would have read on my own, but I enjoyed it.
49. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - I decided I had to read this when it started getting nominated for every SF award ever. (Yes, it really is that good.) Now I wish I'd finished it before WisCon so I would've had something to say to Ann Leckie when I found myself standing beside her in the line for the bathroom.
50. The Caretaker of Lorne Field by David Zeltserman - the last page was terrific, but unfortunately everything leading up to that was merely mediocre.
51. Saga Volume 3 by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan - still awesome.
52. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison - turns out I'd read half of these before I actually got my hands on the book. Great essays, though. Highly recommended.
53. Bryant & May On the Loose by Christopher Fowler - took me a long time to get into this one - I think I'm done with this series, at least for a little while.
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54. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett - I feel like this might have worked better as two books? It seemed very rushed.
55. Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane - I dunno why messy noir makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it does. This was great.
56. My Real Children by Jo Walton - oh, I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time. I'm very sorry my library's book discussion groups can't deal with alternate history at all, because this is a *great* discussion book.
57. The Three by Sarah Lotz - so it was a bad idea to stay up late and finish this before bed. Because holy shit that was a creepy ending.
58. Sacred by Dennis Lehane - Still awesome, but I thought this one was a little bit too twisty, and the Florida bits not as good as the Boston bits. But. Still awesome.
59. Johannes Cabal the Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard - I didn't realize how emotionally attached I'd gotten to this series until the last page. But I am seriously emotionally attached now. *sniff*
60. The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter - very similar to the TV episode, so I'm finding it hard to have an opinion. (I do still love Morse's "Sophocles did it!" solution, though. Overeducated bastard.)
61. Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler - so aside from "Speech Sounds" in the Bloodchildren anthology this is the first Butler I've actually read, and I've gotta say...I like it. Give me more.
62. Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers - I felt like I ought to read at least one book before the movie came out. And this was fun - although I did like the collection of character introductions at the back more than the main story. Better art, too.
63. Pet Sematary by Stephen King - I've actually never read this one before. I did enjoy the heck out of it - it's a terrific story. But it's a Stephen King book, so the ending is pretty meh. Better than some, for sure, but still meh.
64. How To Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ - a truly excellent analysis of the various (conscious and subconscious) techniques used to dismiss the relevance of women and minority artists. Everyone should read this.
65. The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell - this book had no idea what it really wanted to be, and it suffered terribly by it.
66. Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane - I think this one was probably the weakest of the series - something about the whole conspiracy seems both over-dramatic and unresolved.
67. The Fever by Megan Abbott - an extremely powerful book about high school and what it is to be a teenage girl, through the lens of an unexplained pandemic sweeping through the school. Good, but wrenching.
68. Adaptation by Malinda Lo - turns out I dislike teenage love triangles a lot less when they're not wholly heterosexual teenage love triangles. Good to know.
69. Inheritance by Malinda Lo - I want more teenage love triangles to resolve into polyamorous bisexual relationships, and I want them *now.*
70. Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey - I was kind of meh on the first half of the book, really loved the second half. Not bad for a six hundred page brick I wasn't sure about reading in the first place.
71. The Other by Thomas Tryon - and this one I really was not expecting to be anywhere near as good as it was. Quality psychological thriller, highly recommended.
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72. Sister by Rosamund Lupton - a thoroughly emotional thriller, I enjoyed it up until the end, which I felt was not telegraphed well and was a little, well, mean.
73. Sedition by Katharine Grant - if this was supposed to be a farce, it failed. If it wasn't, well...I have no idea what it was supposed to be.
74. Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer - I have no idea why I finished this, because I did not enjoy it. I never like that air of superiority that so many skeptics get.
75. How Not to be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg - I loved this book. I stayed up until 2am reading this book. About math. I'm as boggled as you are.
76. Afterparty by Daryl Gregory - I love Daryl Gregory, he has the best ideas. This one I felt was a little less - let me put it this way, it's a better book if you've read a lot of Daryl Gregory and know what he tends to do in his books.
77. The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule - apparently one of her earlier books, and not a very good one. Also, way more graphic descriptions of rape than I was comfortable with.
78. The Quick by Lauren Owen - Man, I really wanted to love this. Victorian gay vampires! What's not to love? Well, when three-fifths of the book is not about the vampires at all. Or at least, not the ones you like. Disappointing ending, too.
79. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Cruise - a little slow to get started, but it really picked up once the dead bodies started turning up. I may well read more from Cruise.
80. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta - I wanted to like this. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Nothing ever did.
81. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon - a delightfully bizarre pseudo-horror novel (it's supposed to be horror, but I didn't find it scary in the least) about an isolated New England farming community with A Terrible Secret. Highly enjoyable.
82. Virtual Unreality by Charles Seife - a screed about the unreliability of the Internet, it has some good descriptions of ways to determine if what you're seeing is true, but unfortunately the rest of it is pretty reactionary and hysterical.
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83. The Bargain by Mary Jo Putney - my first actual honest-to-god romance novel. I needed something fluffy, and this fit the bill nicely.
84. Doll Bones by Holly Black - and then I wanted something a little bit creepy, and this was perfect. Creepy dolls, mildly benevolent ghosts, and an adventure!
85. Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica - I used to read the blog eons ago, and I think I liked that better. It just seems odd to me for half the book to be about getting the book deal for the book you're reading.
86. Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal - why did I wait so long to read this, it was delightful! I am so happy there are sequels, I can't wait to read more.
87. Rat Queens volume 1 - quality tasteless D&D comedy, this. I love it.
88. Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion - you know, I think I liked the movie better. Which is weird for me. But one of the things I liked a lot about the movie was General Grigio, and he's much different in the book.
89. Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal - even better than the first one, I think, with war and spies and actual adult humans in an actual adult relationship.
90. Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal - I am stressing out so bad about moving right now this is all I can read. Jane and Vincent are terribly comforting.
91. The Good House by Tananarive Due - utterly wonderful horror by an African-American author with an African-American cast. I will definitely be reading more of her.
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92. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith - a perfectly reasonable followup to The Cuckoo's Calling, but I thought the gothic symbolism was too bland in the end and the resolution came much too quickly.
93. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe - turns out I'd already read most of these on the blog, but it was delightful to read them again. I think 'what if everyone on the planet stood together and jumped' might be my favorite.
94. Aloha From Hell by Richard Kadrey - still enjoying the heck out of this series; at this rate I'll be all caught up by the end of the month.
95. Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal - and now I'm caught up with this series, and utterly delighted with it. Jane and Vincent are so much fun.
96. We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory - much darker than Gregory's usual stories, but I absolutely adored it. It also feels like the beginning of a series. An awesome series.
97. The Auctioneer by Joan Samson - I'm honestly not sure what that was about. I mean, it was a story, I enjoyed it well enough, but there was something missing.
98. Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore - Some classic horror comics for the beginning of fall.
99. Gulp by Mary Roach - definitely grosser than her other books by a long shot, but still massively entertaining.
100. Swamp Thing: Infernal Triangles - trippy.
101. Swamp Thing: Healing the Breach by Joshua Dysart - Lovecraftian monsters as the spawn of exploitative capitalists? I love it. (I did not love the art of the creepy baby things, though. Ew.)
102. Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones by Scott Snyder - well, Snyder is a horror writer, and it shows - but oh my god the awful predictable doomed romance angle. Also, I don't think the new mythology makes sense at all. DC, is there anything you can't fuck up?
103. Feynman by Jim Ottaviani - now this was delightful. I love reading biographies of people who are obsessed with things I can't understand, plus Feynman is great just on his own merits.
104. Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey - I could see he was trying to do a haunted house thing with the abandoned mall (which is a GREAT idea), but I just didn't find it all that creepy. Fortunately Stark and Candy punching things is enough for me.
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105. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty - a memoir of working in a crematory and a call to arms for Americans to pull themselves together and start reacting to death like reasonable adults. I read it in one day and enjoyed it very much.
106. Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro - a rather delightful short urban fantasy graphic novel which begs to be an entire series, but unfortunately I don't think that it is.
107. Rex Libris: I, Librarian by James Turner - I should have loved this, but I didn't. Disappointing.
108. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - And the opposite of disappointing: an utterly fantastic urban fantasy with unique worldbuilding and a fantastic mystery. Why is Lauren Beukes not absurdly famous?
109. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter - picking up on the Morse series again at last with a murder mystery where the mystery isn't so much who the murderer is as who's been murdered. I think I've seen the TV version of this one; I liked it a lot.
110. The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket - I don't think I've read this one before, but I could be wrong. Still creepy.
111. The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket - now I'm sure I haven't read this one before - there's a larger plot emerging! Very exciting. (And yes, I read four of these in one day. What can I say, they're addictive.)
112. The Erstaz Elevator by Lemony Snicket - okay, this one was loaded with weird asides and puns that I'm pretty sure are not targeted toward the overall target audience of these books. Which I love, of course.
113. The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket - oooh, it's getting meta. Hooray for meta! (Also hooray for Sunny, my favorite of the Baudelaire children.)
114. Dead Boy Detectives by Jill Thompson - an adorable manga-style adventure with Edwin and Charles, everyone's favorite murdered boarding school best friends. Apparently it's being reissued (or rebooted?) so I finally picked it up.
115. The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket - seriously nasty, but also epic, and now with even more meta!
116. Hawk by Steven Brust - I cannot express to you how happy I am that this book finally exists, and how long I've been waiting for it. Particularly that end scene. The next one is going to be interesting, for "ancient Chinese curse" definitions of interesting.
117. The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket - oooh, moral quandaries!
118. Rocannon's World by Ursula K. LeGuin - after rereading The Dispossessed, I thought I'd go back and read all the Hainish novels. This is actually LeGuin's first, and it shows.
119. The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket - I'm really rocking through these - only three left to go!
120. Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick - a rather wonderful postapocalyptic survival story, with zombies (rather than a zombie apocalypse story). Tragically I didn't realize it was the first part of a trilogy until I was nearly at the end, though, so...more next week!
121. Loki, Agent of Asgard: Trust Me by Al Ewing - okay, so this is basically MCU fanfiction, but I don't care, I love it. I love the circularity of Marvel Asgard, I love Loki vs. Loki, I love Verity, I love all of it.
122. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes - amazing, drop what you're doing and go read it right now.
123 - Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves - the endnote says that they originally conceived this as a TV show, and it shows. I think it'd make a good TV show, though.
124. The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket - Plot twist!
125. The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket - all right, it's time to admit it: yes, part of the reason I read this series is because "penultimate" is one of my favorite words and I love to see it used correctly.
126. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - oh, this was amazing. And terrifying. I'm amazed I slept at all last night.
127. The End by Lemony Snicket - That was - unexpected. And wonderful. A fantastic series; I must find more of the author's work. (I know he's published another series as Lemony Snicket and a couple of novels under his real name...)
128. The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill - a rather amusing book of weird laws, which I always find entertaining.
129. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - I've had this recommended to me more times than I can count, and now that I've read it I see why. It is fantastic.
130. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore - okay, I did not know this was about Nemo's badass daughter, that is much better than I was anticipating.
131. Nemo: Roses of Berlin by Alan Moore - and this one I didn't even know was a thing until I saw it in the library. I'm generally less enthused about WWII stories, but this one is German expressionist film dystopia! How could I not?
132. Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors by Toby Litt - still more adventures of Charles and Edwin, entirely delightful if this time much, much creepier. Which is delightful in its own way.
133. The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman - a powerful psychological story, almost like a folktale, with beautiful illustrations. I love Neil Gaiman.
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134. The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard - continuing the delightful saga of Johannes Cabal, Necromancer, and his brother Horst, unwilling vampire. I'm so glad Horst is back; he's a delight, and it's great fun to watch him needle Johannes.
135. Echopraxia by Peter Watts - another fantastic, mind-blowing philosophical science fiction novel from Watts; I found it less depressing than Blindsight, which is another bonus, because man, if you ever want a book to make you feel unimportant? That is the one.
136. Evil Librarian by Michelle Knudsen - I put this on hold when I started seeing ads for it all over The Toast, and sure enough, it was exactly as much fun as it sounded. All Buffy fans want to read this book right now.
137. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie - I loved this even more than the first one. Breq's complete lack of patience with all the bullshit she has to put up with is pretty wonderful. And Lieutenant Tisarwat was a fascinating character; I look forward to seeing more of her in book three.
138. The Getaway God by Richard Kadrey - a very nice end to the series, ties up just enough and leaves just enough going. (If there were going to be more I wouldn't complain, but this was a great resolution.)
139. M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman - the YA-marketed collection of Gaiman stories, I didn't realize until I'd started it that I've actually read all these stories before, if not in this package. Oh woe, oh hardship, rereading Gaiman stories.
140. Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. LeGuin - carrying on with the Hainish cycle, I read Planet of Exile and City of Illusion, having already read Rocannon's World. Interesting stuff, if not as outstanding as her later work.
141. Rooms by Lauren Oliver - not as gothic as I wanted it to be, but still interesting.
142. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - still loving everything Beukes has ever done; now in the process of tracking down her other media because I'm not patient enough to wait for the next novel.
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143. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - a fascinating, moving book about a chunk of American history I knew virtually nothing about: the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South during the Jim Crow era. Highly recommended.
o. Haven by Kay Hooper - a paperback thriller I picked up from the library and found just utterly non-compelling. I read about half of it but I just can't carry on; I won't count it as read.
144. The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker - an interesting book about how to assess the risk of violence in face-to-face situations - a little dated, from 1997, but still largely useful.
145. The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood - is there such a thing as a cozy thriller? If there is, this is it, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
146. Shadows by Ilsa J. Bick - the sequel to Ashes, this one was harder going because by this point there are just a ton of characters and I was having a hard time keeping them all straight, but it's still great action-y fun. I'll try not to leave such a big gap between this book and the final one in the trilogy, next time.
147. Clean by Alex Hughes - a fun science-fictiony telepath police procedural. I liked the main character for the most part, but I could have done without the awkward romantic tension, and I felt that the worldbuilding wasn't very well fleshed out. I'll probably read the rest of the series.
148 & 149. Avatar The Last Airbender: The Search parts two and three by Gene Luen Yang - aaaand that just made me hate Ozai more than I ever thought possible. Wow.
150. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield - inspiring, but not as useful as I might have hoped.
151. Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-man: Revival by Brian Michael Bendis - oh, so they brought Peter back to life? Oh. (I'm still only in this for Miles. Bendis continues to be endlessly frustrating.)
152. Saga 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples - this series continues to be great, although in an increasingly heartbreaking way. Prince Robot IV is still a dick.
153-155. Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift by Gene Luen Yang - Toph! Toph's dad! Toph and Aang fighting and then coming to understand one another! Compromise! Sympathy! I love this series.
156. Queen Victoria's Book of Spells edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling - a friend recommended this entirely on the strength of "Phosphorous," which indeed turned out to be my favorite story in the collection, although there were some other great ones, too.
157. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay - I hope Roxane appreciates what I do for her. That was brutal.
158. Homicide Trinity by Rex Stout - well, it's official - I have read every single Nero Wolfe story in existence. I...don't know how I feel about this.
159. As You Wish by Cary Elwes - adorable, full of ridiculously happy stories (my favorite is Rob Reiner being terrified for his life when a mobster quoted Inigo Montoya at him), and reminded me that it's been far too long since I saw The Princess Bride.
160-165. The Green Mile by Stephen King - you bet your ass I'm counting each of these as a separate book, as that's how I read them. All in two days, so not the most accurate way to do it - but I do love serialized fiction, and this was pretty good. It's also interesting to watch Stephen King constructing a plot as he goes along. He's not great at it, but it's just transparent enough that you can see the process, which is fascinating.
166. Living With a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich - oh my god, this was amazing. A memoir, an exploration of mysticism, a deconstruction of theism and atheism in the context of science - anyone interested in any one of those topics should definitely read this.
167. My Life in Grey Gardens by Lois
1. War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft - an academic study of Tolkien's works as they relate to war, referring to his own biography and to the body of WWI and WWII literature as a whole. Interesting stuff, although I feel like a lot of it was a little obvious to someone who's spent a lot of time reading academic studies of Tolkien.
2. The Silence of Mockingbirds by Karen Spears Zacharias - I like to read true crime when I'm depressed. Partly it plays off my sense that the world is a horrible place, half reinforcing it and half undercutting it with the reminder that people don't always get away with it. And partly I think it's because it makes me feel something, even if that something is sadness on behalf of someone else. This did the trick.
3. Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth - a truly fantastic biography of J.R.R. Tolkien focusing on the years around the First World War. Garth follows both historical events and Tolkien's mythology closely, making sure to note occasions where the one impacted the other. Probably completely incomprehensible to someone who hasn't read The Silmarillion, since most of the writing happening is on the ancestor of that book, The Book of Lost Tales.
4. A Season of Darkness by Doug Jones - I woke up yesterday morning with a craving for a true crime story. This was pretty mediocre as true crime goes, but it scratched the itch. (Also, thank goodness for library ebooks, eh?)
5-10. Attack on Titan volumes 1-5 by Hajime Isayama - Well, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I liked it enough to keep reading, but not enough to get as obsessed by it as everyone else seems to be. Oh, well.
11. Beauty Queens by Libba Bray - Rather more didactic than I generally like my satire, but enjoyable enough.
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12. Under the Poppy by Kathe Koja - this book was absolutely beautiful, a dark and moving love story plus puppets and political intrigue. Everything I enjoy - but the writing style, a kind of stream-of-consciousness third person, was difficult. I'm looking forward to some light reads now, to take a break.
13. Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter - I've been bitten by the Inspector Morse bug, and now I have a whole new series to read. This book had some pretty appalling opinions about rape, but other than that it was enjoyable enough and I'll definitely keep reading.
14. Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link - I love a good short story collection. This one was...pretty good. Link's style is a little more literary than I prefer, so a whole collection at once was a bit much. I did like the title story a lot, though.
15. Bravo! A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed by Barrymore Laurence Scherer - a prett solid introduction to the history of opera and the major composers and titles, with practically no discussion of the actual music itself, which was kind of what I wanted. Oh, well.
16. Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter - the ending was much weaker than Last Bus to Woodstock, too convoluted for too long, but I love Lewis's exasperation with Morse's theories.
17. Locke and Key Volume 6 by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez - I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this ending. There was at least one cheat, and that always annoys me. Someday soon I'll probably reread the whole series again, to see how it feels now there's an end.
18. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf - an interesting story about Jeff Dahmer as a weird, isolated high school kid, by one of his less weird, less isolated high school friends. Not my favorite art style, but I'm a sucker for this kind of story.
19. Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James - I keep thinking I should like P.D. James and I keep on not doing it. I'm about to give up.
20. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter - Definitely less convoluted than the first two Morse mysteries; I'm not sure if that means I liked it better, or not as much. I'll have to think about that.
21. Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black by Karl Bollers - basically just as awesome as I wanted this to be. Watson and Holmes as black guys in Harlem. Incredibly awesome. There needs to be more of this, stat.
22. Keeping the Castle by Patrice Kindl - an utterly adorable, fluffy Regency romance, which was just what I wanted. (The seediness of the Morse books was getting to me; I needed something happy, which was guaranteed not to include pornography of any kind.)
23. Ultimate Spider-Man, Vol. 5 by Brian Michael Bendis - I don't read a lot of superhero books but Miles Morales is my favorite Spider-man of all time, so. Alas, there just wasn't a lot of Miles in this one. Oh, well.
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24. The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter - let me just say. Cyberpunk lesbians! Telepathic whales! African utopias! This book was amazing.
25. Territory by Emma Bull - slightly weird in that I never could get a handle on what the main plotline was, completely wonderful in the characters, as Emma Bull always is. Now I want to go to Tombstone.
26. Service of All the Dead by Colin Dexter - now that was a satisfying detective story. I think I'm taking a break from Morse books for a while, though, to catch up on the show.
27. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi - goddamn but this series is awesome. Mildly unfortunate spoiler on account of the title of one of the later books - but whatever, I still loved it.
28. The Grave Doug Freshley by Josh Hechinger and mpMann - the tagline is "A yarn about friendship, vengeance and not letting fatal head wounds interfere with your most solemn promises," and that sums it up pretty well.
29. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler - a delightfully weird mystery. I shall most certainly be reading the rest of this series.
30. The Water Room by Christopher Fowler - the second of the Bryant & May mysteries, which I enjoyed even more because this time it's 100% Crotchety Old Men Solving Wacky Crimes. I didn't realize that this was something that I needed in my life.
31. The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely - I always enjoy Ariely's work, even though I continue to be skeptical of the broad applicability of many psychology experiments.
32. The Last Colony by John Scalzi - John Perry for President of Earth. Failing that, John Scalzi for President of Everything. This is a great, great series.
33. Paradise Tales by Geoff Ryman - I no longer remember why I wanted to interlibrary-loan this book, but wherever I got the recommendation from, I appreciate it. My favorite story in this collection was "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," a ghost story about responsibility.
34. Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith - it's an Andrew Smith book, so of course it's gross and full of sex, but it's also pulpy and hilarious and wonderful. (I wish I could recommend these to people at my library without causing a massive moral panic.)
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35. Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler - moving right through the Bryant & May series. This one's deeply, deeply weird and implausible. I loved it.
36. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - I couldn't wait for my copy to arrive; I read the library's. And it was wonderful. I'll probably read mine when it comes too, actually.
37. Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi - I was very disappointed in this one; it was basically a rehash of The Last Colony with a different POV, and I don't think Scalzi pulled it off very well.
38. In Dreams Begin by Skyler White - I honestly don't know how I feel about this book. It had a lot of things I love - Irish Revival mysticism! Melodramatic romance! Yeats! - and a lot of things I hate - time-travel romance, angst about being married, magic is a thing that was stopped in the past and doesn't exist any more. It was beautifully written, though.
39. Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler - another week, another Bryant & May mystery about crotchety old men running around London solving crime.
40. The Human Division by John Scalzi - The thing about reading a lot of Scalzi in a row is that sooner or later you realize that all the main characters have Scalzi's sense of humor. This isn't quite as bad as Joss Whedon's sense of humor, but it is a little repetitive.
41. White Corridor by Christopher Fowler - some Unfortunate Implications with female characters (and oh how I hate that), but I do like Stranded In Snowstorm as a trope, so.
42. Genesis by Bernard Beckett - one off my endless TBR list of library books, a novella about consciousness, intelligence, and the creation of a perfect society. Interesting, if not brilliant.
43. The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny - That was a profoundly vague ending. I know there's five more books, but I'd always heard they weren't very good, so I was going to skip them. Apparently not.
44. Johannes Cabal, The Detective by Jonathan L. Howard - I read the first of these last year around Halloween and loved it, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to get to the next one. I love Johannes Cabal. He's so *annoyed* by his own conscience.
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45. The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler - another delightfully implausible mystery
46. Ammonite by Nicola Griffith - one off my endless list of library books I ought to read: a planet-of-women scifi full of intriguing biology and complex social structures. Reminded me a bit of A Door Into Ocean, which isn't terribly surprising.
47. A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane - man, I love me some good modern noir, and Lehane is the best. Funny story: I read Moonlight Mile when it first came out and I went around telling everyone how great it was and how there should be a whole series of these until someone finally took pity on me and told me that there was, and now I've finally gotten around to reading them.
48. The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto - I wanted to have read at least one thing by each of the WisCon guests of honor before I went, this year, and so I did. An interesting Japanese-Canadian magical realism story - not something I would have read on my own, but I enjoyed it.
49. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - I decided I had to read this when it started getting nominated for every SF award ever. (Yes, it really is that good.) Now I wish I'd finished it before WisCon so I would've had something to say to Ann Leckie when I found myself standing beside her in the line for the bathroom.
50. The Caretaker of Lorne Field by David Zeltserman - the last page was terrific, but unfortunately everything leading up to that was merely mediocre.
51. Saga Volume 3 by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan - still awesome.
52. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison - turns out I'd read half of these before I actually got my hands on the book. Great essays, though. Highly recommended.
53. Bryant & May On the Loose by Christopher Fowler - took me a long time to get into this one - I think I'm done with this series, at least for a little while.
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54. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett - I feel like this might have worked better as two books? It seemed very rushed.
55. Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane - I dunno why messy noir makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it does. This was great.
56. My Real Children by Jo Walton - oh, I am going to be thinking about this book for a long time. I'm very sorry my library's book discussion groups can't deal with alternate history at all, because this is a *great* discussion book.
57. The Three by Sarah Lotz - so it was a bad idea to stay up late and finish this before bed. Because holy shit that was a creepy ending.
58. Sacred by Dennis Lehane - Still awesome, but I thought this one was a little bit too twisty, and the Florida bits not as good as the Boston bits. But. Still awesome.
59. Johannes Cabal the Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard - I didn't realize how emotionally attached I'd gotten to this series until the last page. But I am seriously emotionally attached now. *sniff*
60. The Dead of Jericho by Colin Dexter - very similar to the TV episode, so I'm finding it hard to have an opinion. (I do still love Morse's "Sophocles did it!" solution, though. Overeducated bastard.)
61. Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler - so aside from "Speech Sounds" in the Bloodchildren anthology this is the first Butler I've actually read, and I've gotta say...I like it. Give me more.
62. Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1: Cosmic Avengers - I felt like I ought to read at least one book before the movie came out. And this was fun - although I did like the collection of character introductions at the back more than the main story. Better art, too.
63. Pet Sematary by Stephen King - I've actually never read this one before. I did enjoy the heck out of it - it's a terrific story. But it's a Stephen King book, so the ending is pretty meh. Better than some, for sure, but still meh.
64. How To Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ - a truly excellent analysis of the various (conscious and subconscious) techniques used to dismiss the relevance of women and minority artists. Everyone should read this.
65. The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell - this book had no idea what it really wanted to be, and it suffered terribly by it.
66. Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane - I think this one was probably the weakest of the series - something about the whole conspiracy seems both over-dramatic and unresolved.
67. The Fever by Megan Abbott - an extremely powerful book about high school and what it is to be a teenage girl, through the lens of an unexplained pandemic sweeping through the school. Good, but wrenching.
68. Adaptation by Malinda Lo - turns out I dislike teenage love triangles a lot less when they're not wholly heterosexual teenage love triangles. Good to know.
69. Inheritance by Malinda Lo - I want more teenage love triangles to resolve into polyamorous bisexual relationships, and I want them *now.*
70. Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey - I was kind of meh on the first half of the book, really loved the second half. Not bad for a six hundred page brick I wasn't sure about reading in the first place.
71. The Other by Thomas Tryon - and this one I really was not expecting to be anywhere near as good as it was. Quality psychological thriller, highly recommended.
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72. Sister by Rosamund Lupton - a thoroughly emotional thriller, I enjoyed it up until the end, which I felt was not telegraphed well and was a little, well, mean.
73. Sedition by Katharine Grant - if this was supposed to be a farce, it failed. If it wasn't, well...I have no idea what it was supposed to be.
74. Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer - I have no idea why I finished this, because I did not enjoy it. I never like that air of superiority that so many skeptics get.
75. How Not to be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg - I loved this book. I stayed up until 2am reading this book. About math. I'm as boggled as you are.
76. Afterparty by Daryl Gregory - I love Daryl Gregory, he has the best ideas. This one I felt was a little less - let me put it this way, it's a better book if you've read a lot of Daryl Gregory and know what he tends to do in his books.
77. The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule - apparently one of her earlier books, and not a very good one. Also, way more graphic descriptions of rape than I was comfortable with.
78. The Quick by Lauren Owen - Man, I really wanted to love this. Victorian gay vampires! What's not to love? Well, when three-fifths of the book is not about the vampires at all. Or at least, not the ones you like. Disappointing ending, too.
79. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Cruise - a little slow to get started, but it really picked up once the dead bodies started turning up. I may well read more from Cruise.
80. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta - I wanted to like this. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Nothing ever did.
81. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon - a delightfully bizarre pseudo-horror novel (it's supposed to be horror, but I didn't find it scary in the least) about an isolated New England farming community with A Terrible Secret. Highly enjoyable.
82. Virtual Unreality by Charles Seife - a screed about the unreliability of the Internet, it has some good descriptions of ways to determine if what you're seeing is true, but unfortunately the rest of it is pretty reactionary and hysterical.
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83. The Bargain by Mary Jo Putney - my first actual honest-to-god romance novel. I needed something fluffy, and this fit the bill nicely.
84. Doll Bones by Holly Black - and then I wanted something a little bit creepy, and this was perfect. Creepy dolls, mildly benevolent ghosts, and an adventure!
85. Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica - I used to read the blog eons ago, and I think I liked that better. It just seems odd to me for half the book to be about getting the book deal for the book you're reading.
86. Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal - why did I wait so long to read this, it was delightful! I am so happy there are sequels, I can't wait to read more.
87. Rat Queens volume 1 - quality tasteless D&D comedy, this. I love it.
88. Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion - you know, I think I liked the movie better. Which is weird for me. But one of the things I liked a lot about the movie was General Grigio, and he's much different in the book.
89. Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal - even better than the first one, I think, with war and spies and actual adult humans in an actual adult relationship.
90. Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal - I am stressing out so bad about moving right now this is all I can read. Jane and Vincent are terribly comforting.
91. The Good House by Tananarive Due - utterly wonderful horror by an African-American author with an African-American cast. I will definitely be reading more of her.
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92. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith - a perfectly reasonable followup to The Cuckoo's Calling, but I thought the gothic symbolism was too bland in the end and the resolution came much too quickly.
93. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe - turns out I'd already read most of these on the blog, but it was delightful to read them again. I think 'what if everyone on the planet stood together and jumped' might be my favorite.
94. Aloha From Hell by Richard Kadrey - still enjoying the heck out of this series; at this rate I'll be all caught up by the end of the month.
95. Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal - and now I'm caught up with this series, and utterly delighted with it. Jane and Vincent are so much fun.
96. We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory - much darker than Gregory's usual stories, but I absolutely adored it. It also feels like the beginning of a series. An awesome series.
97. The Auctioneer by Joan Samson - I'm honestly not sure what that was about. I mean, it was a story, I enjoyed it well enough, but there was something missing.
98. Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore - Some classic horror comics for the beginning of fall.
99. Gulp by Mary Roach - definitely grosser than her other books by a long shot, but still massively entertaining.
100. Swamp Thing: Infernal Triangles - trippy.
101. Swamp Thing: Healing the Breach by Joshua Dysart - Lovecraftian monsters as the spawn of exploitative capitalists? I love it. (I did not love the art of the creepy baby things, though. Ew.)
102. Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones by Scott Snyder - well, Snyder is a horror writer, and it shows - but oh my god the awful predictable doomed romance angle. Also, I don't think the new mythology makes sense at all. DC, is there anything you can't fuck up?
103. Feynman by Jim Ottaviani - now this was delightful. I love reading biographies of people who are obsessed with things I can't understand, plus Feynman is great just on his own merits.
104. Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey - I could see he was trying to do a haunted house thing with the abandoned mall (which is a GREAT idea), but I just didn't find it all that creepy. Fortunately Stark and Candy punching things is enough for me.
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105. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty - a memoir of working in a crematory and a call to arms for Americans to pull themselves together and start reacting to death like reasonable adults. I read it in one day and enjoyed it very much.
106. Foiled by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro - a rather delightful short urban fantasy graphic novel which begs to be an entire series, but unfortunately I don't think that it is.
107. Rex Libris: I, Librarian by James Turner - I should have loved this, but I didn't. Disappointing.
108. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - And the opposite of disappointing: an utterly fantastic urban fantasy with unique worldbuilding and a fantastic mystery. Why is Lauren Beukes not absurdly famous?
109. The Riddle of the Third Mile by Colin Dexter - picking up on the Morse series again at last with a murder mystery where the mystery isn't so much who the murderer is as who's been murdered. I think I've seen the TV version of this one; I liked it a lot.
110. The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket - I don't think I've read this one before, but I could be wrong. Still creepy.
111. The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket - now I'm sure I haven't read this one before - there's a larger plot emerging! Very exciting. (And yes, I read four of these in one day. What can I say, they're addictive.)
112. The Erstaz Elevator by Lemony Snicket - okay, this one was loaded with weird asides and puns that I'm pretty sure are not targeted toward the overall target audience of these books. Which I love, of course.
113. The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket - oooh, it's getting meta. Hooray for meta! (Also hooray for Sunny, my favorite of the Baudelaire children.)
114. Dead Boy Detectives by Jill Thompson - an adorable manga-style adventure with Edwin and Charles, everyone's favorite murdered boarding school best friends. Apparently it's being reissued (or rebooted?) so I finally picked it up.
115. The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket - seriously nasty, but also epic, and now with even more meta!
116. Hawk by Steven Brust - I cannot express to you how happy I am that this book finally exists, and how long I've been waiting for it. Particularly that end scene. The next one is going to be interesting, for "ancient Chinese curse" definitions of interesting.
117. The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket - oooh, moral quandaries!
118. Rocannon's World by Ursula K. LeGuin - after rereading The Dispossessed, I thought I'd go back and read all the Hainish novels. This is actually LeGuin's first, and it shows.
119. The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket - I'm really rocking through these - only three left to go!
120. Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick - a rather wonderful postapocalyptic survival story, with zombies (rather than a zombie apocalypse story). Tragically I didn't realize it was the first part of a trilogy until I was nearly at the end, though, so...more next week!
121. Loki, Agent of Asgard: Trust Me by Al Ewing - okay, so this is basically MCU fanfiction, but I don't care, I love it. I love the circularity of Marvel Asgard, I love Loki vs. Loki, I love Verity, I love all of it.
122. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes - amazing, drop what you're doing and go read it right now.
123 - Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves - the endnote says that they originally conceived this as a TV show, and it shows. I think it'd make a good TV show, though.
124. The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket - Plot twist!
125. The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket - all right, it's time to admit it: yes, part of the reason I read this series is because "penultimate" is one of my favorite words and I love to see it used correctly.
126. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters - oh, this was amazing. And terrifying. I'm amazed I slept at all last night.
127. The End by Lemony Snicket - That was - unexpected. And wonderful. A fantastic series; I must find more of the author's work. (I know he's published another series as Lemony Snicket and a couple of novels under his real name...)
128. The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill - a rather amusing book of weird laws, which I always find entertaining.
129. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - I've had this recommended to me more times than I can count, and now that I've read it I see why. It is fantastic.
130. Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore - okay, I did not know this was about Nemo's badass daughter, that is much better than I was anticipating.
131. Nemo: Roses of Berlin by Alan Moore - and this one I didn't even know was a thing until I saw it in the library. I'm generally less enthused about WWII stories, but this one is German expressionist film dystopia! How could I not?
132. Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors by Toby Litt - still more adventures of Charles and Edwin, entirely delightful if this time much, much creepier. Which is delightful in its own way.
133. The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman - a powerful psychological story, almost like a folktale, with beautiful illustrations. I love Neil Gaiman.
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134. The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard - continuing the delightful saga of Johannes Cabal, Necromancer, and his brother Horst, unwilling vampire. I'm so glad Horst is back; he's a delight, and it's great fun to watch him needle Johannes.
135. Echopraxia by Peter Watts - another fantastic, mind-blowing philosophical science fiction novel from Watts; I found it less depressing than Blindsight, which is another bonus, because man, if you ever want a book to make you feel unimportant? That is the one.
136. Evil Librarian by Michelle Knudsen - I put this on hold when I started seeing ads for it all over The Toast, and sure enough, it was exactly as much fun as it sounded. All Buffy fans want to read this book right now.
137. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie - I loved this even more than the first one. Breq's complete lack of patience with all the bullshit she has to put up with is pretty wonderful. And Lieutenant Tisarwat was a fascinating character; I look forward to seeing more of her in book three.
138. The Getaway God by Richard Kadrey - a very nice end to the series, ties up just enough and leaves just enough going. (If there were going to be more I wouldn't complain, but this was a great resolution.)
139. M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman - the YA-marketed collection of Gaiman stories, I didn't realize until I'd started it that I've actually read all these stories before, if not in this package. Oh woe, oh hardship, rereading Gaiman stories.
140. Worlds of Exile and Illusion by Ursula K. LeGuin - carrying on with the Hainish cycle, I read Planet of Exile and City of Illusion, having already read Rocannon's World. Interesting stuff, if not as outstanding as her later work.
141. Rooms by Lauren Oliver - not as gothic as I wanted it to be, but still interesting.
142. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - still loving everything Beukes has ever done; now in the process of tracking down her other media because I'm not patient enough to wait for the next novel.
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143. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - a fascinating, moving book about a chunk of American history I knew virtually nothing about: the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South during the Jim Crow era. Highly recommended.
o. Haven by Kay Hooper - a paperback thriller I picked up from the library and found just utterly non-compelling. I read about half of it but I just can't carry on; I won't count it as read.
144. The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker - an interesting book about how to assess the risk of violence in face-to-face situations - a little dated, from 1997, but still largely useful.
145. The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood - is there such a thing as a cozy thriller? If there is, this is it, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
146. Shadows by Ilsa J. Bick - the sequel to Ashes, this one was harder going because by this point there are just a ton of characters and I was having a hard time keeping them all straight, but it's still great action-y fun. I'll try not to leave such a big gap between this book and the final one in the trilogy, next time.
147. Clean by Alex Hughes - a fun science-fictiony telepath police procedural. I liked the main character for the most part, but I could have done without the awkward romantic tension, and I felt that the worldbuilding wasn't very well fleshed out. I'll probably read the rest of the series.
148 & 149. Avatar The Last Airbender: The Search parts two and three by Gene Luen Yang - aaaand that just made me hate Ozai more than I ever thought possible. Wow.
150. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield - inspiring, but not as useful as I might have hoped.
151. Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-man: Revival by Brian Michael Bendis - oh, so they brought Peter back to life? Oh. (I'm still only in this for Miles. Bendis continues to be endlessly frustrating.)
152. Saga 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples - this series continues to be great, although in an increasingly heartbreaking way. Prince Robot IV is still a dick.
153-155. Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift by Gene Luen Yang - Toph! Toph's dad! Toph and Aang fighting and then coming to understand one another! Compromise! Sympathy! I love this series.
156. Queen Victoria's Book of Spells edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling - a friend recommended this entirely on the strength of "Phosphorous," which indeed turned out to be my favorite story in the collection, although there were some other great ones, too.
157. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay - I hope Roxane appreciates what I do for her. That was brutal.
158. Homicide Trinity by Rex Stout - well, it's official - I have read every single Nero Wolfe story in existence. I...don't know how I feel about this.
159. As You Wish by Cary Elwes - adorable, full of ridiculously happy stories (my favorite is Rob Reiner being terrified for his life when a mobster quoted Inigo Montoya at him), and reminded me that it's been far too long since I saw The Princess Bride.
160-165. The Green Mile by Stephen King - you bet your ass I'm counting each of these as a separate book, as that's how I read them. All in two days, so not the most accurate way to do it - but I do love serialized fiction, and this was pretty good. It's also interesting to watch Stephen King constructing a plot as he goes along. He's not great at it, but it's just transparent enough that you can see the process, which is fascinating.
166. Living With a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich - oh my god, this was amazing. A memoir, an exploration of mysticism, a deconstruction of theism and atheism in the context of science - anyone interested in any one of those topics should definitely read this.
167. My Life in Grey Gardens by Lois
4jen.e.moore
Books bought and removed:
Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - not purchased but received from Penguin's Debut Authors program, but since I think I'll actually read this one, it counts. / Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion - donated to the library booksale
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! by Richard Ned Lebow - received through LT Early Reviewers (well, promised, but I might as well start deciding what it's going to replace now) / what is this old thesaurus doing on my shelf? When was the last time I looked at a thesaurus? Goodbye.
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton - bought because it's been a horrible week and I needed to buy a book / The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells - it's not a great copy anyway, and if I desperately need to read it, I can get it online.
Three Classic Children's Stories by James Donnelly and Edward Gorey - a belated Christmas present/ Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner - huh, I completely forgot I had a spare copy of this up for sale. Well then.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot - another belated Christmas present / Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink - a mediocre ARC, dumped into the library book recycling service.
Thoughtful Alphabets by Edward Gorey - one last from the Christmas present pile / X'ed Out by Charles Burns - an ARC returned to the library's recycling service
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - from Penguin's Debut Authors program / Old Man's War by John Scalzi - old library withdrawn paperback, donated to the flight stewards after I finished reading it.
Made a trip to the bookstore today. :)
King Arthur in Legend and History by Richard White / Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman - going to the used bookstore next time I make a trip
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney / Deadpool Pulp by Mike Benson - another for the used bookstore sale
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse / Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - I upgraded to a hardcover, and gave my paperback to a friend who tragically owns no Wodehouse
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. / The Babylon File by Andy Lane - an ancient and useless episode guide, going to the book sale (and probably thence to recycling, but I'll let them decide that)
Stories of King Arthur by Blanche Winder / Babylon 5: Point of No Return by Jane Killick - another old episode guide supplanted by the Internet, to be sold
and a pile from the library booksale (I've been keeping them hoarded at work so I could pretend I didn't really acquire new books) -
Collier's 1966 Year Book / Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an omnibus edition with terrible print, to be sold
Collier's 1967 Year Book / The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in a terrible onionskin paper edition, to be sold
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin / The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, which it's time to admit I'll never read again (although it is indeed very horrid), to be sold
Skull Wars by David Hurst Thomas / Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, which I enjoyed but will also likely never read again, to be sold
The Fated Sky by Benson Bobrick / The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate which has, quite frankly, been annoying me ever since it was given to me as a gift, to be sold
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - preordered because, well, Sarah Monette is the best / Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - turned out not to be worth reading after all. To the library recycling!
Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear - I got myself hooked on this series, so I had to preorder the new one / Hard Magic by Larry Correia - look, I support the right of people to have whatever political opinions they want, but I also support my right to avoid supporting people whose politics I find offensive. To the library booksale it goes.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King - Look, it's not my fault, okay, a guy at my writing club was giving books away, and this one is amazing, I couldn't help myself / Ill-Starred Captains by Anthony J. Brown, into the to-sell pile
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch, from Penguin's First Author program / The Witches by Roald Dahl (I'm finally getting to the point where I can get rid of some of my favorite childhood books, knowing that this particular copy doesn't mean much to me, and I can always find them again...)
DayBlack by Keef Cross - from the WisCon dealer's room / The Two Princes of Calabar by Randy J. Sparks - not impressive enough to keep
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar - from the WisCon dealer's room (I've been wanting to read this since I picked up a preview of it at WisCon a couple years ago!) / Beowulf: A Verse Translation, the Norton Critical Edition - since I just bought a nice hardcover of the Heaney translation and I already own Beowulf and the Critics, this is kind of redundant.
Cry Murder! In a Small Voice by Greer Ilene Gilman - from the WisCon dealer's room (reviewed glowingly on Tor.com) / Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare - old interests no longer relevant
Sarah Court by Craig Davidson - ChiZine was giving away free books at WisCon. This is unfair. / The Time Machine by H.G. Wells - still working on getting rid of sub-par paperbacks of classics
The Hair Wreath by Halli Villegas - another ChiZine giveaway / The Heroine's Bookshelf by Erin Blakemore - mediocre old ARC, to the recycling pile
Things Withered by Susie Moloney - another ChiZine giveaway / Smudge's Mark by Claudia Osmond - a disgraceful ARC gone to the library's recycling pile
The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip - a friend was paring down her library / The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carre - a seriously degraded paperback I rescued from the library's recycling, going back to it
Dune by Frank Herbert - look, the only way I'm going to read it is if it goes on the TBR shelf and guilts me for years / How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff - freebie from ALA, not worth keeping around, going to the library's paperback exchange
Ordeal by Hunger by George R. Stewart - I continue to be fascinated by disaster stories. / Carpathia by Matt Forbeck - this book had so much potential. But it's so terrible.
The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton - a Ronald Hutton book of my very own! *squeezes it* / Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey - donated to a friend who wanted to read it when I was done; I don't need to keep it, she can have it.
The Reader: War for the Oaks by Tim Cooper - an art book of photographs of people reading War for the Oaks in places mentioned in War for the Oaks? I had to Kickstarter it. /
The Barter by Siobhan Adcock - another from Penguin's first authors program /
At the Point of a Cutlass by Gregory N. Flemming - from Early Reviewers /
One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear - look, I've been waiting for this book since 2007, you can't take this away from me /
And this, I think, is the point where I stop keeping track, as I just took two huge boxes (three full shelves' worth) to the book store to sell. Of course I didn't mark them to be sold in LT before I took them out, so I'll have to double-check everything when I unpack. *sigh*
Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - not purchased but received from Penguin's Debut Authors program, but since I think I'll actually read this one, it counts. / Saxon's Bane by Geoffrey Gudgion - donated to the library booksale
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! by Richard Ned Lebow - received through LT Early Reviewers (well, promised, but I might as well start deciding what it's going to replace now) / what is this old thesaurus doing on my shelf? When was the last time I looked at a thesaurus? Goodbye.
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton - bought because it's been a horrible week and I needed to buy a book / The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells - it's not a great copy anyway, and if I desperately need to read it, I can get it online.
Three Classic Children's Stories by James Donnelly and Edward Gorey - a belated Christmas present/ Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner - huh, I completely forgot I had a spare copy of this up for sale. Well then.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot - another belated Christmas present / Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink - a mediocre ARC, dumped into the library book recycling service.
Thoughtful Alphabets by Edward Gorey - one last from the Christmas present pile / X'ed Out by Charles Burns - an ARC returned to the library's recycling service
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - from Penguin's Debut Authors program / Old Man's War by John Scalzi - old library withdrawn paperback, donated to the flight stewards after I finished reading it.
Made a trip to the bookstore today. :)
King Arthur in Legend and History by Richard White / Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman - going to the used bookstore next time I make a trip
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney / Deadpool Pulp by Mike Benson - another for the used bookstore sale
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse / Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - I upgraded to a hardcover, and gave my paperback to a friend who tragically owns no Wodehouse
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. / The Babylon File by Andy Lane - an ancient and useless episode guide, going to the book sale (and probably thence to recycling, but I'll let them decide that)
Stories of King Arthur by Blanche Winder / Babylon 5: Point of No Return by Jane Killick - another old episode guide supplanted by the Internet, to be sold
and a pile from the library booksale (I've been keeping them hoarded at work so I could pretend I didn't really acquire new books) -
Collier's 1966 Year Book / Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an omnibus edition with terrible print, to be sold
Collier's 1967 Year Book / The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer in a terrible onionskin paper edition, to be sold
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin / The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, which it's time to admit I'll never read again (although it is indeed very horrid), to be sold
Skull Wars by David Hurst Thomas / Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, which I enjoyed but will also likely never read again, to be sold
The Fated Sky by Benson Bobrick / The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate which has, quite frankly, been annoying me ever since it was given to me as a gift, to be sold
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - preordered because, well, Sarah Monette is the best / Deep Winter by Samuel W. Gailey - turned out not to be worth reading after all. To the library recycling!
Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear - I got myself hooked on this series, so I had to preorder the new one / Hard Magic by Larry Correia - look, I support the right of people to have whatever political opinions they want, but I also support my right to avoid supporting people whose politics I find offensive. To the library booksale it goes.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King - Look, it's not my fault, okay, a guy at my writing club was giving books away, and this one is amazing, I couldn't help myself / Ill-Starred Captains by Anthony J. Brown, into the to-sell pile
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch, from Penguin's First Author program / The Witches by Roald Dahl (I'm finally getting to the point where I can get rid of some of my favorite childhood books, knowing that this particular copy doesn't mean much to me, and I can always find them again...)
DayBlack by Keef Cross - from the WisCon dealer's room / The Two Princes of Calabar by Randy J. Sparks - not impressive enough to keep
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar - from the WisCon dealer's room (I've been wanting to read this since I picked up a preview of it at WisCon a couple years ago!) / Beowulf: A Verse Translation, the Norton Critical Edition - since I just bought a nice hardcover of the Heaney translation and I already own Beowulf and the Critics, this is kind of redundant.
Cry Murder! In a Small Voice by Greer Ilene Gilman - from the WisCon dealer's room (reviewed glowingly on Tor.com) / Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare - old interests no longer relevant
Sarah Court by Craig Davidson - ChiZine was giving away free books at WisCon. This is unfair. / The Time Machine by H.G. Wells - still working on getting rid of sub-par paperbacks of classics
The Hair Wreath by Halli Villegas - another ChiZine giveaway / The Heroine's Bookshelf by Erin Blakemore - mediocre old ARC, to the recycling pile
Things Withered by Susie Moloney - another ChiZine giveaway / Smudge's Mark by Claudia Osmond - a disgraceful ARC gone to the library's recycling pile
The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip - a friend was paring down her library / The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John Le Carre - a seriously degraded paperback I rescued from the library's recycling, going back to it
Dune by Frank Herbert - look, the only way I'm going to read it is if it goes on the TBR shelf and guilts me for years / How to Change the World by John-Paul Flintoff - freebie from ALA, not worth keeping around, going to the library's paperback exchange
Ordeal by Hunger by George R. Stewart - I continue to be fascinated by disaster stories. / Carpathia by Matt Forbeck - this book had so much potential. But it's so terrible.
The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton - a Ronald Hutton book of my very own! *squeezes it* / Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey - donated to a friend who wanted to read it when I was done; I don't need to keep it, she can have it.
The Reader: War for the Oaks by Tim Cooper - an art book of photographs of people reading War for the Oaks in places mentioned in War for the Oaks? I had to Kickstarter it. /
The Barter by Siobhan Adcock - another from Penguin's first authors program /
At the Point of a Cutlass by Gregory N. Flemming - from Early Reviewers /
One-Eyed Jack by Elizabeth Bear - look, I've been waiting for this book since 2007, you can't take this away from me /
And this, I think, is the point where I stop keeping track, as I just took two huge boxes (three full shelves' worth) to the book store to sell. Of course I didn't mark them to be sold in LT before I took them out, so I'll have to double-check everything when I unpack. *sigh*
6jen.e.moore
I think that would feel tedious - I'm not a huge fan of tickers generally. Besides, the others are less important than the overall You've Owned This For Five Years And Moved It Twice, Isn't It Time To Read It? goal. :)
7rabbitprincess
Welcome! Good luck with your challenge. :)
8SuziQoregon
Jen - I'm a big user of the library too (typically about half of the books I read every year). I really need to focus on ebooks too. I opened my calibre library on my laptop the other day and was shocked at how many unread books were hiding there.
9rainpebble
Hi Jen. Good luck with your challenge.
10jen.e.moore
Excellent news: the huge pile of late Victorian fantasy novels I downloaded from Project Gutenberg are all only around a hundred pages each! This bodes well for my TBR list.
11tymfos
I can't stop borrowing library books (I'm a librarian, they're everywhere, they follow me home, what am I supposed to do?)
I'm a library assistant, and I have the same problem! Good luck getting some books read off your own home shelves.
I'm a library assistant, and I have the same problem! Good luck getting some books read off your own home shelves.
12MissWatson
>6 jen.e.moore: Welcome. You've Owned This For Five Years And Moved It Twice, Isn't It Time To Read It? That is so nicely phrased I might borrow it as a title thread for the next challenge!
13Caramellunacy
"You've Owned This for Five Years and Moved It Twice, Isn't It Time to Read It?"
-This made me laugh out loud because it is SO TRUE for me, too!
-This made me laugh out loud because it is SO TRUE for me, too!
14jen.e.moore
I entirely forgot to add a comment for rereading. (I love rereading.)
1. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander - apparently, thanks to early childhood indoctrination, my brain thinks that Caer Dathyl and Minas Tirith are the same place. Interesting.
2. Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers - I do believe the cricket match is my favorite part of this book. I have no idea what's happening, but I love it to death.
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3. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers - this is my favorite of the pre-Harriet books, I had to reread it once I'd read MMA. ...I'm afraid I'm going to end up rereading the whole series at this point. Oh, woe.
4-8. Locke and Key volumes 1-5 by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Rereading as the final volume has just come out and I like to reread a series when finishing it off. This is really a series that benefits from being read all together, too.
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9. Digger by Ursula Vernon - this is actually the first time I've reread Digger since it finished, and I was surprised by how hard the ending still hit me. This is a great book, everyone should read it.
10. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg - a library newsletter reminded me of this book and I decided it was time to reread. Now I wish I could run away and live in the Field Museum.
11. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien - A while ago I started reading these aloud to a friend who'd never read the series. Finished up TTT today, will probably start on RotK soon.
----
12. The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander - Strangely enough, I didn't enjoy this one as much as The Book of Three. Possibly because the antagonist is just a little too...antagonistic? (He's supposed to be a decent guy with a fatal flaw, but he's just so *predictable.*) Ah well. Onward!
---
---
13. Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane - finally reaching the point in this series where I've read them before. Actually, it looks like there's one more I haven't read, and then it's back to Moonlight Mile. And then I'm all out. Woe!
---
14. Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey - I had a craving, so I decided to try this one again. It wasn't as good as I remembered - but I don't think I've ever read any of the sequels. So perhaps I'll keep going.
15. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - when Keyes died a few weeks ago I decided I ought to reread this. I didn't enjoy it as much the second time around - I think it might be a one-time-only book.
16. Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - nothing like Wodehouse to pull you out of a bad mood, and the telegram exchanges with Aunt Dahlia in the beginning are some of my favorite in the canon.
---
17. Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey - decided to reread this before I went on to read the subsequent, er, six books that have come out since I read this one.
---
18. The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - I heartily recommend Wodehouse to everyone who is stressed out by anything at all.
---
19. The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket - yes, I'm rereading the Series of Unfortunate Events. I'm hoping to make it all the way through, this time - I know I read at least the first couple, but I don't know where I left off.
20. Iorich by Steven Brust - Hawk came out yesterday, and as soon as I got it I realized I didn't remember much of anything past Jhegaala (and that not very well, but my library doesn't have that one), so I decided to do some rereading. I liked Iorich better this time; not sure why I didn't like it the first time. (Possibly because Imperial internal politics are confusing? nooooo...)
21. The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket - you know, these books really are genuinely pretty horrifying.
22. The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket - at the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I have to say I do not like Count Olaf's minion who looks like neither a man or a woman. Why is that particularly horrifying? It rubs me the wrong way every time.
23. The Ghost in the Mirror by John Bellairs - I didn't realize until I was already into it that this was a "finished by Brad Strickland" one, and I never like those as much. It was okay, I guess.
24. The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs - and this is the difference: Bellairs's characters are generally just much more unlikable than Strickland's, and therefore much more interesting.
25. The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs - This one is much creepier than the others, because the creepiness starts early and just keeps on going. I love it.
26. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - reread for my science fiction book group, I enjoyed this much more the second time around. I'm even going to read the rest of the Hainish books at last - I have Rocannon's World on order from interlibrary loan.
27. The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull by John Bellairs - Tiny evil skulls! Tiny haunted houses! Also, I just realized why I knew so many Catholic prayers as a small Methodist child.
28. The Chessmen of Doom by John Bellairs - Ahh yes, this is the one I remember so well. Nonsense rhymes! Random old ladies! I even knew the very first line when I opened the book, which is a very warm, fuzzy nostalgic feeling.
---
29, 30, & 31. Avatar the Last Airbender: The Promise parts one, two, and three by Gene Luen Yang - I love this series, but it wasn't the best thing to read right before bed, because it does make me want to shake Zuko until he stops doing stupid things.
32. Avatar the Last Airbender: The Search part one by Gene Luen Yang - as I continue to reread all the Avatar comics. (Just waiting on the last one to come in at the library!)
1. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander - apparently, thanks to early childhood indoctrination, my brain thinks that Caer Dathyl and Minas Tirith are the same place. Interesting.
2. Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers - I do believe the cricket match is my favorite part of this book. I have no idea what's happening, but I love it to death.
----
3. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers - this is my favorite of the pre-Harriet books, I had to reread it once I'd read MMA. ...I'm afraid I'm going to end up rereading the whole series at this point. Oh, woe.
4-8. Locke and Key volumes 1-5 by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. Rereading as the final volume has just come out and I like to reread a series when finishing it off. This is really a series that benefits from being read all together, too.
----
9. Digger by Ursula Vernon - this is actually the first time I've reread Digger since it finished, and I was surprised by how hard the ending still hit me. This is a great book, everyone should read it.
10. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg - a library newsletter reminded me of this book and I decided it was time to reread. Now I wish I could run away and live in the Field Museum.
11. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien - A while ago I started reading these aloud to a friend who'd never read the series. Finished up TTT today, will probably start on RotK soon.
----
12. The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander - Strangely enough, I didn't enjoy this one as much as The Book of Three. Possibly because the antagonist is just a little too...antagonistic? (He's supposed to be a decent guy with a fatal flaw, but he's just so *predictable.*) Ah well. Onward!
---
---
13. Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane - finally reaching the point in this series where I've read them before. Actually, it looks like there's one more I haven't read, and then it's back to Moonlight Mile. And then I'm all out. Woe!
---
14. Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey - I had a craving, so I decided to try this one again. It wasn't as good as I remembered - but I don't think I've ever read any of the sequels. So perhaps I'll keep going.
15. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - when Keyes died a few weeks ago I decided I ought to reread this. I didn't enjoy it as much the second time around - I think it might be a one-time-only book.
16. Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - nothing like Wodehouse to pull you out of a bad mood, and the telegram exchanges with Aunt Dahlia in the beginning are some of my favorite in the canon.
---
17. Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey - decided to reread this before I went on to read the subsequent, er, six books that have come out since I read this one.
---
18. The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - I heartily recommend Wodehouse to everyone who is stressed out by anything at all.
---
19. The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket - yes, I'm rereading the Series of Unfortunate Events. I'm hoping to make it all the way through, this time - I know I read at least the first couple, but I don't know where I left off.
20. Iorich by Steven Brust - Hawk came out yesterday, and as soon as I got it I realized I didn't remember much of anything past Jhegaala (and that not very well, but my library doesn't have that one), so I decided to do some rereading. I liked Iorich better this time; not sure why I didn't like it the first time. (Possibly because Imperial internal politics are confusing? nooooo...)
21. The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket - you know, these books really are genuinely pretty horrifying.
22. The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket - at the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I have to say I do not like Count Olaf's minion who looks like neither a man or a woman. Why is that particularly horrifying? It rubs me the wrong way every time.
23. The Ghost in the Mirror by John Bellairs - I didn't realize until I was already into it that this was a "finished by Brad Strickland" one, and I never like those as much. It was okay, I guess.
24. The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs - and this is the difference: Bellairs's characters are generally just much more unlikable than Strickland's, and therefore much more interesting.
25. The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs - This one is much creepier than the others, because the creepiness starts early and just keeps on going. I love it.
26. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - reread for my science fiction book group, I enjoyed this much more the second time around. I'm even going to read the rest of the Hainish books at last - I have Rocannon's World on order from interlibrary loan.
27. The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull by John Bellairs - Tiny evil skulls! Tiny haunted houses! Also, I just realized why I knew so many Catholic prayers as a small Methodist child.
28. The Chessmen of Doom by John Bellairs - Ahh yes, this is the one I remember so well. Nonsense rhymes! Random old ladies! I even knew the very first line when I opened the book, which is a very warm, fuzzy nostalgic feeling.
---
29, 30, & 31. Avatar the Last Airbender: The Promise parts one, two, and three by Gene Luen Yang - I love this series, but it wasn't the best thing to read right before bed, because it does make me want to shake Zuko until he stops doing stupid things.
32. Avatar the Last Airbender: The Search part one by Gene Luen Yang - as I continue to reread all the Avatar comics. (Just waiting on the last one to come in at the library!)
15Caramellunacy
I've never read The Book of Three (though I think I have it in my stacks of TBR somewhere) - did it hold up to your re-read?
16jen.e.moore
It did! It's definitely a kids' book - the characters are broadly drawn and the pace moves right along - but it's still got the thing that drew me to it in the first place, the same sense of realness that I got from Narnia or Middle Earth. But it's a lot funnier than either of those. I'm looking forward to going back to the rest of the series. (I remember buying The High King from a Scholastic book sale and finding it much more adult than the others, I wonder if that'll hold true.)
17jen.e.moore
Just a little halfway-through-January update:
I'm obviously doing a lot better than I thought I would - twice as many books already than I'd planned for the month! - but I know I'll end up slacking by later in the year so it's just as well I'm getting ahead now. I've been on a restricted library book diet since NaNoWriMo in November, so that's definitely helping.
And it also helps that some of the new books currently being pushed hard are books I have review copies of! I can't wait to get to The Weight of Blood, it looks like everything I enjoy. I'll definitely be carrying on rereading the Prydain Chronicles as well, which is easy as they're all very short little novels, until the last one. (After that, I think it's time to reread one of the other foundational books of my childhood, Dealing With Dragons.)
I'm about halfway through Tolkien and the Great War, which I think is going to fulfill my World War I quota for a while. I have learned, however, that Tolkien disappointed his schoolteachers by spending his Classics prize money on Middle English poetry and The House of the Wolfings, so I've got more late-Victorian fantasy queued up on my nook.
I also want to express my most sincere gratitude for this community. There's no denying that having a list to update is a great motivator when I'm trying to pick out what to read next. Thanks!
I'm obviously doing a lot better than I thought I would - twice as many books already than I'd planned for the month! - but I know I'll end up slacking by later in the year so it's just as well I'm getting ahead now. I've been on a restricted library book diet since NaNoWriMo in November, so that's definitely helping.
And it also helps that some of the new books currently being pushed hard are books I have review copies of! I can't wait to get to The Weight of Blood, it looks like everything I enjoy. I'll definitely be carrying on rereading the Prydain Chronicles as well, which is easy as they're all very short little novels, until the last one. (After that, I think it's time to reread one of the other foundational books of my childhood, Dealing With Dragons.)
I'm about halfway through Tolkien and the Great War, which I think is going to fulfill my World War I quota for a while. I have learned, however, that Tolkien disappointed his schoolteachers by spending his Classics prize money on Middle English poetry and The House of the Wolfings, so I've got more late-Victorian fantasy queued up on my nook.
I also want to express my most sincere gratitude for this community. There's no denying that having a list to update is a great motivator when I'm trying to pick out what to read next. Thanks!
18MissWatson
Congrats on your progress. It really is a great motivator, this sharing of books, isn't it?
19Caramellunacy
Yes, please to the Dealing with Dragons - I loved the Enchanted Forest Chronicles growing up and would love to see if they hold up for you (I made need to dig out my copy...)
20jen.e.moore
January update: So somehow I read twenty books in a month? Granted, a few of those were comic books or extremely short novels, but still. This is much more than I expected. I am quite pleased.
Deciding to work on my ebook collection also gave me the motivation to actually clean up my ebook collection. I've spent the past week updating my Calibre library and now it's all nice and tidy, with correct metadata, pretty covers, and EPUB versions of everything. This morning I loaded all my unread ebooks onto my Nook, and hopefully this evening I'll be able to make sure that everything's in LibraryThing, and then, FINALLY, I will be organized.
Temporarily, anyway.
It's all library books at the moment, I'm afraid. I'm still reading Kathe Koja's Under the Poppy; thanks to the writing style, it's taking much longer than it usually takes me to read books I enjoy.
Last week I got myself hooked on ITV's Endeavour, the prequel to the Inspector Morse series, so I have a pile of Colin Dexter novels coming in at the library. (And, er, some books on opera.) In the meantime, I'm consoling myself with Lord Peter Wimsey. With a new series to occupy my attention, I'll have to work hard in February not to forget to actually work on the ROOTs as well.
But! Since it's Black History Month in February, I decided to focus on black authors and black history. I've got a pile of slave trade histories (acquired for background for the Golden Age of Piracy novel I keep pretending I'm going to write) and no less than two N. K. Jemisin novels, as well as the Octavia Butler Scholars anthology in the queue. Should be an interesting month's reading; I can't wait.
Deciding to work on my ebook collection also gave me the motivation to actually clean up my ebook collection. I've spent the past week updating my Calibre library and now it's all nice and tidy, with correct metadata, pretty covers, and EPUB versions of everything. This morning I loaded all my unread ebooks onto my Nook, and hopefully this evening I'll be able to make sure that everything's in LibraryThing, and then, FINALLY, I will be organized.
Temporarily, anyway.
It's all library books at the moment, I'm afraid. I'm still reading Kathe Koja's Under the Poppy; thanks to the writing style, it's taking much longer than it usually takes me to read books I enjoy.
Last week I got myself hooked on ITV's Endeavour, the prequel to the Inspector Morse series, so I have a pile of Colin Dexter novels coming in at the library. (And, er, some books on opera.) In the meantime, I'm consoling myself with Lord Peter Wimsey. With a new series to occupy my attention, I'll have to work hard in February not to forget to actually work on the ROOTs as well.
But! Since it's Black History Month in February, I decided to focus on black authors and black history. I've got a pile of slave trade histories (acquired for background for the Golden Age of Piracy novel I keep pretending I'm going to write) and no less than two N. K. Jemisin novels, as well as the Octavia Butler Scholars anthology in the queue. Should be an interesting month's reading; I can't wait.
21Caramellunacy
You could definitely do worse than consoling yourself with Lord Peter! I think one of my favorites is one of the short stories/novellas where there is an impostor pretending to be Lord Peter and they have a wine tasting to suss out which!
22rainpebble
I loved reading the Chronicles of Prydain series a few years ago. Then I lent the books to my grandson & now I am ready for a reread and he can't find them. Ah.......the life of a 10 year old. lol!~! The Enchanted Forest Chronicles sounds good too. I think I need to 'add' some more Y/A to my library!
Excellent job in your January ROOTs Jen! Good luck in February.
Excellent job in your January ROOTs Jen! Good luck in February.
23rabbitprincess
Sounds like a great reading month lined up for you! I never got into Morse but am interested in seeing Endeavour, if only for Roger Allam!
24jen.e.moore
23> Roger Allam is a thing of great wonder, and his wardrobe in Endeavour is glorious - he's clearly playing somebody who's seen too many Bogart movies (if such a thing is possible...)
25rainpebble
>24 jen.e.moore:: if such a thing is possible... NOT!~!
26Merryann
>20 jen.e.moore: and Black History Month, I just came across a book that I plan to read this month: Searching for Sarah Rector. Written for kids, it's a pretty short book, but quirky and interesting sounding to me. Just thought I'd mention it. :)
27jen.e.moore
Mid-February update:
As expected, far too many library books and not nearly enough ROOTs. Woe. I expect to finish Two Princes of Calabar today, though, and then perhaps I can get started on something else. My problem is I seem to be on a detective fiction kick, and I don't have a lot of detective fiction on my TBR shelf, as I don't tend to buy it. Oooh wait, there's The Ghost Riders of Ordebec from this summer's ALA conference. So that's something.
Ebook rereading has been interrupted by the fact that apparently I don't believe in reading more than one ebook at a time (unlike paper books, which I'll pile up everywhere) and Portable MFA in Creative Writing is taking an appallingly long time to get through. Mostly this is because each chapter is written by a different person and they all have drastically different styles, so it takes a bit to adjust. Partly it's because some of the chapters just aren't very good.
This weekend I expect to plow through Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for a Coursera course I'm trying very hard to take. So that will be fun. Oh, and I bought What Makes This Book So Great yesterday - my wishlist is getting longer with almost every page, but it's worth it. I love Jo Walton.
As expected, far too many library books and not nearly enough ROOTs. Woe. I expect to finish Two Princes of Calabar today, though, and then perhaps I can get started on something else. My problem is I seem to be on a detective fiction kick, and I don't have a lot of detective fiction on my TBR shelf, as I don't tend to buy it. Oooh wait, there's The Ghost Riders of Ordebec from this summer's ALA conference. So that's something.
Ebook rereading has been interrupted by the fact that apparently I don't believe in reading more than one ebook at a time (unlike paper books, which I'll pile up everywhere) and Portable MFA in Creative Writing is taking an appallingly long time to get through. Mostly this is because each chapter is written by a different person and they all have drastically different styles, so it takes a bit to adjust. Partly it's because some of the chapters just aren't very good.
This weekend I expect to plow through Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass for a Coursera course I'm trying very hard to take. So that will be fun. Oh, and I bought What Makes This Book So Great yesterday - my wishlist is getting longer with almost every page, but it's worth it. I love Jo Walton.
28connie53
Just as long as you enjoy whatever you read, it's not that bad that it's not a ROOT. Just try the Ghost rider book!
29rabbitprincess
Added What Makes This Book So Great to the TBR -- it sounds like a dangerous but very interesting book! ;)
30jen.e.moore
And the end-of-February update:
Okay, since it's becoming obvious that I might actually make my own personal unofficial goal for the first time ever, I might as well explain it: when I was in the sixth grade, I got some kind of award from the school for reading more than 300 books in a year. And I've been wondering for a while if I might be able to do it again. I have a lot more obligations now than I used to, so I haven't been able to, but I'm off to a hell of a start this year. Obviously I'm reading a lot of small books and comic books, but hell, that's what I would have been reading then, too. (If I pull it off this year, I'll go for pages next year.) I updated my ROOT goal, too, since I'm already halfway to my original goal of 30 and it's only the end of February. With any luck, I'll have to update it again.
So. Lots of short books, lots of comic books this month. I reread Joe Hill's Locke and Key series, which was pretty great, but I don't think it was as great as Sandman (which everyone keeps comparing it to). Also started reading Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series - whew, three in one short month, no wonder I was getting burned out on them. Also I read a book right after I bought it, pretty much the first time that's happened in ages - the entirely wonderful What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton. (Since I so rarely read books as soon as I get them, I'm counting it as a ROOT anyway.)
Next week I go on vacation to sunny Arizona, and let me tell you, I cannot wait. This winter has been brutal. Plus, I'll have lots of time to work on reading my backlog of ebooks on the plane. :) I also grabbed Emma Bull's Territory from the library, since I like reading books set in places I'm visiting for the first time, and also I love War for the Oaks so much I should probably read something else she's written. Other than that, I've got The Fortunate Fall out from the library (thanks to What Makes This Book So Great) and...we'll see what turns up on the ereader.
Okay, since it's becoming obvious that I might actually make my own personal unofficial goal for the first time ever, I might as well explain it: when I was in the sixth grade, I got some kind of award from the school for reading more than 300 books in a year. And I've been wondering for a while if I might be able to do it again. I have a lot more obligations now than I used to, so I haven't been able to, but I'm off to a hell of a start this year. Obviously I'm reading a lot of small books and comic books, but hell, that's what I would have been reading then, too. (If I pull it off this year, I'll go for pages next year.) I updated my ROOT goal, too, since I'm already halfway to my original goal of 30 and it's only the end of February. With any luck, I'll have to update it again.
So. Lots of short books, lots of comic books this month. I reread Joe Hill's Locke and Key series, which was pretty great, but I don't think it was as great as Sandman (which everyone keeps comparing it to). Also started reading Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series - whew, three in one short month, no wonder I was getting burned out on them. Also I read a book right after I bought it, pretty much the first time that's happened in ages - the entirely wonderful What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton. (Since I so rarely read books as soon as I get them, I'm counting it as a ROOT anyway.)
Next week I go on vacation to sunny Arizona, and let me tell you, I cannot wait. This winter has been brutal. Plus, I'll have lots of time to work on reading my backlog of ebooks on the plane. :) I also grabbed Emma Bull's Territory from the library, since I like reading books set in places I'm visiting for the first time, and also I love War for the Oaks so much I should probably read something else she's written. Other than that, I've got The Fortunate Fall out from the library (thanks to What Makes This Book So Great) and...we'll see what turns up on the ereader.
31rabbitprincess
Enjoy your vacation! We headed back into a cold spell a couple of days ago and I've forgotten what it's like to go outside with fewer than three layers ;)
32jen.e.moore
>31 rabbitprincess: - I knooooooow. It looks so pretty outside, and it's even light out until 5:30, but then you step outside and it's straight back into hell. (Somebody posted this in the breakroom yesterday at work.)
33connie53
Have a very nice vacation, Jen! Did you announce your update in the Febr progress thread?
>32 jen.e.moore: love that picture in your link!!
>32 jen.e.moore: love that picture in your link!!
34Merryann
How exciting! 300 book in a year, PLUS the time warp of reading many books in the type you would have counted when you did the goal last. That's bound to tap into some nifty warm-and-fuzzy subconscious brain circuits and make the goal even more enjoyable.
35jen.e.moore
slightly belated Ides of March update:
Well, I didn't get as much reading done on the plane as I meant to, as the flight out was incredibly bumpy and I couldn't manage to focus. Read a whole book and a half on the way back, though, so that's something. :D I'm definitely running a little behind my 300 Books goal, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to catch up. I'm a fidgeter, you see - I work best when I have a million and one windows open on my computer, and I jump back and forth between them all. So I have an ebook open in the background, and I can get through almost one a day.
Looking over what I've read so far this month - lots of science fiction, actually. I seem to be in the mood for it right now, so I might as well take advantage. I was surprised by how much I liked Old Man's War - military science fiction isn't usually my thing, but it was so much fun. I can't wait to get into the rest of the series. Also I reread Digger, reading through my omnibus edition I got from last year's Kickstarter in about a day; now I'm sad that I don't have more comics about practical wombats and polite demon children to read. Oh, well. Such is life.
Since I've never managed to read it before, I did pick up Bone after reading Digger, but the omnibus is so huge I really need to sit and read it at home, and I haven't had much time for that. (My social calendar is unusually full this March.) I'm also working my way through an e-arc of The Girl with All the Gifts, loving it to death, and getting very frustrated whenever I have to stop reading to sleep or go to work or something. I'm going to get book hangover from this book, I can tell - so I have no idea what I'll try to read after this. Maybe some Doctor Who novels?
I've also done serious damage to my TBR shelf by stopping at my favorite tiny used bookstore last week, just because I felt like it, and buying a whole stack of books. And I plan on ordering Raising Steam and The Goblin Emperor next week, too!... Oh, well, I'll just have to read fast to catch up. :D
Well, I didn't get as much reading done on the plane as I meant to, as the flight out was incredibly bumpy and I couldn't manage to focus. Read a whole book and a half on the way back, though, so that's something. :D I'm definitely running a little behind my 300 Books goal, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to catch up. I'm a fidgeter, you see - I work best when I have a million and one windows open on my computer, and I jump back and forth between them all. So I have an ebook open in the background, and I can get through almost one a day.
Looking over what I've read so far this month - lots of science fiction, actually. I seem to be in the mood for it right now, so I might as well take advantage. I was surprised by how much I liked Old Man's War - military science fiction isn't usually my thing, but it was so much fun. I can't wait to get into the rest of the series. Also I reread Digger, reading through my omnibus edition I got from last year's Kickstarter in about a day; now I'm sad that I don't have more comics about practical wombats and polite demon children to read. Oh, well. Such is life.
Since I've never managed to read it before, I did pick up Bone after reading Digger, but the omnibus is so huge I really need to sit and read it at home, and I haven't had much time for that. (My social calendar is unusually full this March.) I'm also working my way through an e-arc of The Girl with All the Gifts, loving it to death, and getting very frustrated whenever I have to stop reading to sleep or go to work or something. I'm going to get book hangover from this book, I can tell - so I have no idea what I'll try to read after this. Maybe some Doctor Who novels?
I've also done serious damage to my TBR shelf by stopping at my favorite tiny used bookstore last week, just because I felt like it, and buying a whole stack of books. And I plan on ordering Raising Steam and The Goblin Emperor next week, too!... Oh, well, I'll just have to read fast to catch up. :D
38Merryann
Oh, that's right! Raising Steam is out now! Thanks for reminding me.
39jen.e.moore
>38 Merryann: - I'm putting off Raising Steam for as long as possible because, after all, this may very well be the last Discworld book. Of course, I thought that about Snuff, too. I'll probably cave sometime this weekend, though.
40Merryann
I'm going to try to wait for my Thingaversary. The anticipation is enough for right now. (Of course it's only a matter of weeks until my Thingaversary.)
41jen.e.moore
End of March update:
I got a slow start on the month thanks to my vacation being much busier than anticipated (as they always are), but I made up for it after. I'm now ahead of my 300 books in a year goal (woohoo!) and *well* ahead in my ROOT goal.
For ROOTs, I read a lot of Australian history (what can I say, I like primary sources) and have started Ill-Starred Captains, which will carry on chronologically from there. I find colonization fascinating; it sounds like such an idiotic thing to do, so I can't help trying to figure out why people would bother.
I also started reading Elizabeth Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy at last - I've had the first book on my shelf since before it came out (thanks to Tor sending me eternal review copies), and I got the second book signed at ALA last summer, and now I have the third one pre-ordered. It's a wonderful series, epic fantasy turned up to eleven. I can't wait to read the rest of it. (I've been pacing myself, so that I wasn't sitting around pining for the third book - I'll start Shattered Pillars tonight, I think.)
But I also got myself hooked on a couple of new series, which meant a lot of library books. Scalzi's Old Man's War was a ROOT, but it was the only one of the series that was, so I've got the last two out from the library right now, sitting there, waiting for me to jump on them. (More colonization stories, for what it's worth.)
And I started reading Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May series. I put Full Dark House on hold at the library when the new book came out at the end of last year, and I read the back and realized that it was the latest in a long series, and it finally came in for me. (I guess I wasn't the only one with that reaction.) I'm two-thirds of the way through Seventy-Seven Clocks now and loving it to pieces. Sure, it's weird and unbelievable, but that's part of the fun! I love Bryant's witch friends. They're so very much like my witch friends.
Finally, I finished reading The Two Towers (at last!). By which I mean, I've been rereading the series by reading them out loud to a friend who's never been able to find the time to sit down and read them herself, and just a couple of days ago I wrapped up the second volume. (In related news, does anyone know how the Touchstones picks likely works? Because when I put in Two Towers, it suggests The Hobbit, and then a lot of movie-related books, but I can't find the quality canonical entry for the book itself. V. frustrating.)
So right now, in addition to Ill-Starred Captains and Seventy-Seven Clocks, I finally picked up The Black Cauldron to continue my Prydain re-read. I'll probably start Shattered Pillars soon, and I have The Goblin Emperor on the way as well, and I'm sure I'll start that one as soon as the box comes in the mail. Today, though, reading has been slightly de-railed, because Endeavour is back and Fred Thursday is ruining my life again.
I got a slow start on the month thanks to my vacation being much busier than anticipated (as they always are), but I made up for it after. I'm now ahead of my 300 books in a year goal (woohoo!) and *well* ahead in my ROOT goal.
For ROOTs, I read a lot of Australian history (what can I say, I like primary sources) and have started Ill-Starred Captains, which will carry on chronologically from there. I find colonization fascinating; it sounds like such an idiotic thing to do, so I can't help trying to figure out why people would bother.
I also started reading Elizabeth Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy at last - I've had the first book on my shelf since before it came out (thanks to Tor sending me eternal review copies), and I got the second book signed at ALA last summer, and now I have the third one pre-ordered. It's a wonderful series, epic fantasy turned up to eleven. I can't wait to read the rest of it. (I've been pacing myself, so that I wasn't sitting around pining for the third book - I'll start Shattered Pillars tonight, I think.)
But I also got myself hooked on a couple of new series, which meant a lot of library books. Scalzi's Old Man's War was a ROOT, but it was the only one of the series that was, so I've got the last two out from the library right now, sitting there, waiting for me to jump on them. (More colonization stories, for what it's worth.)
And I started reading Christopher Fowler's Bryant and May series. I put Full Dark House on hold at the library when the new book came out at the end of last year, and I read the back and realized that it was the latest in a long series, and it finally came in for me. (I guess I wasn't the only one with that reaction.) I'm two-thirds of the way through Seventy-Seven Clocks now and loving it to pieces. Sure, it's weird and unbelievable, but that's part of the fun! I love Bryant's witch friends. They're so very much like my witch friends.
Finally, I finished reading The Two Towers (at last!). By which I mean, I've been rereading the series by reading them out loud to a friend who's never been able to find the time to sit down and read them herself, and just a couple of days ago I wrapped up the second volume. (In related news, does anyone know how the Touchstones picks likely works? Because when I put in Two Towers, it suggests The Hobbit, and then a lot of movie-related books, but I can't find the quality canonical entry for the book itself. V. frustrating.)
So right now, in addition to Ill-Starred Captains and Seventy-Seven Clocks, I finally picked up The Black Cauldron to continue my Prydain re-read. I'll probably start Shattered Pillars soon, and I have The Goblin Emperor on the way as well, and I'm sure I'll start that one as soon as the box comes in the mail. Today, though, reading has been slightly de-railed, because Endeavour is back and Fred Thursday is ruining my life again.
42jen.e.moore
Tax day update:
It's been a slow reading month so far. (See previous post, Thursday, Fred: Life Ruiner.) Still, I finished a few things - still making my way through Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy, still reading Bryant and May mysteries, still reading an absurd number of ebooks simply because I like to multitask. I haven't gotten very far at all in Ill-Starred Captains; guess I just haven't been in the mood for nonfiction.
Mostly I've been working through a big stack of library books (for complicated reasons, I ended up with a pile of interlibrary loans I hadn't quite planned for), but I picked up another ROOT this morning (an old Doctor Who novelization, yay Jamie!) because as much as I'm enjoying In Dreams Begin, it has too many sex scenes for me to be comfortable reading it in the break room. Great book, though.
Here's hoping I'll be able to get back on track with my 300-books-in-a-year goal in the second half of April. At least I have a weekend coming up with nothing planned! And it cannot come fast enough.
It's been a slow reading month so far. (See previous post, Thursday, Fred: Life Ruiner.) Still, I finished a few things - still making my way through Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy, still reading Bryant and May mysteries, still reading an absurd number of ebooks simply because I like to multitask. I haven't gotten very far at all in Ill-Starred Captains; guess I just haven't been in the mood for nonfiction.
Mostly I've been working through a big stack of library books (for complicated reasons, I ended up with a pile of interlibrary loans I hadn't quite planned for), but I picked up another ROOT this morning (an old Doctor Who novelization, yay Jamie!) because as much as I'm enjoying In Dreams Begin, it has too many sex scenes for me to be comfortable reading it in the break room. Great book, though.
Here's hoping I'll be able to get back on track with my 300-books-in-a-year goal in the second half of April. At least I have a weekend coming up with nothing planned! And it cannot come fast enough.
43Merryann
>42 jen.e.moore:, I remember being in my early twenties and picking up my first book by Danielle Steele. Sitting in the breakroom, eating my lunch, reading the book, and totally unprepared for THAT to start happening right there in the pages. Lol! I was VERY embarrassed, even though of course nobody knew what I had been reading.
44jen.e.moore
>43 Merryann: I know! I kept telling myself, look, half the people who work here read romance novels in the break room, and what I'm reading doesn't even look like a romance novel, they have no reason to know that these two people on the page are doing vastly inappropriate things, but still! Awkward.
45rabbitprincess
I hear you on the awkwardness! I'm always embarrassed when scenes like that come up in books I read on the bus -- I have to hold the book open only a sliver and read quickly so that people can't read over my shoulder.
46jen.e.moore
An extremely belated end-of-April update:
I'm really rocketing on toward my goal - I'm sure I'll reach it this month. Woohoo! *fist pump*
Lots of series in April - finishing up Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, reading the First Chronicles of Amber, continuing on through the Bryant & May series. I also picked up the second Johannes Cabal book at last, and I have the third sitting here waiting for me - I love antiheroes and gothic humor, so this series is perfect for me. I hope there'll be more.
Amber was the big revelation for me this month - I only knew it was a classic, and that I'd read the first couple of chapters of Nine Princes in Amber once and not really cared enough to go further. This time I stuck with it, and I found it incredibly rewarding. Someone compared it to hard-boiled detective stories, and I think that's right - it's like if Raymond Chandler wrote a fantasy epic. Which is pretty great, really. Now I'm sorry I didn't read this when I was younger; I would have imprinted on it in a pretty serious way, I'm sure.
My big goal for the month of May is to get some WisCon reading in before the con. The Tiptree winner this year is a small-press book from England (Rupetta by Nike Sulway) so I'll probably end up buying the ebook, and if I like that ordering a copy at the con. As for guests of honor - I've read plenty of N.K. Jemisin's books, but I do have two left to finish, so I'll try to get those in (both already residing on my TBR shelf, conveniently), but I haven't read anything at all by Hiromi Goto. I'm waiting for a copy of The Kappa Child to come in at the library.
I'm really rocketing on toward my goal - I'm sure I'll reach it this month. Woohoo! *fist pump*
Lots of series in April - finishing up Scalzi's Old Man's War universe, reading the First Chronicles of Amber, continuing on through the Bryant & May series. I also picked up the second Johannes Cabal book at last, and I have the third sitting here waiting for me - I love antiheroes and gothic humor, so this series is perfect for me. I hope there'll be more.
Amber was the big revelation for me this month - I only knew it was a classic, and that I'd read the first couple of chapters of Nine Princes in Amber once and not really cared enough to go further. This time I stuck with it, and I found it incredibly rewarding. Someone compared it to hard-boiled detective stories, and I think that's right - it's like if Raymond Chandler wrote a fantasy epic. Which is pretty great, really. Now I'm sorry I didn't read this when I was younger; I would have imprinted on it in a pretty serious way, I'm sure.
My big goal for the month of May is to get some WisCon reading in before the con. The Tiptree winner this year is a small-press book from England (Rupetta by Nike Sulway) so I'll probably end up buying the ebook, and if I like that ordering a copy at the con. As for guests of honor - I've read plenty of N.K. Jemisin's books, but I do have two left to finish, so I'll try to get those in (both already residing on my TBR shelf, conveniently), but I haven't read anything at all by Hiromi Goto. I'm waiting for a copy of The Kappa Child to come in at the library.
47MissWatson
Way to go!
49jen.e.moore
>47 MissWatson: Thanks!
>48 connie53: I do recommend it, although it wasn't anything at all like what I expected it to be. I still haven't decided if I'll go on to the Second Chronicles, since I've always heard they weren't nearly as good, but the last book ended so ambiguously that I am curious to see what happens next.
>48 connie53: I do recommend it, although it wasn't anything at all like what I expected it to be. I still haven't decided if I'll go on to the Second Chronicles, since I've always heard they weren't nearly as good, but the last book ended so ambiguously that I am curious to see what happens next.
50jen.e.moore
Mid-May Update:
Holy crap, is it mid-May already? I feel like I've lost the past couple of weeks entirely. At the beginning of the month I found out I'd re-injured my foot and was maybe going to have to have surgery (since found out I'm not, whew), and right after that my friend and roommate went into the hospital with heart failure. So I haven't really been able to get a lot of reading done. Watched a lot of crappy TV, though. (Roommate is now home and doing well, although she'll be off work for at least a month. *She's* probably going to get a ton of reading done.)
Oh, and my ebook library got corrupted, so now I'm trying to get that put back together. *sigh*
So now I'm trying to get my WisCon reading done. There are two guests of honor this year, N.K. Jemisin and Hiromi Goto, and while I'd read several of Jemisin's books I hadn't read any of Goto's so I got The Kappa Child through interlibrary loan. It was...interesting. Very magical realism, very - well, it felt a lot like reading manga, where I'm enjoying it but there's this whole cultural dimension that I'm just not getting.
Now I'm reading this year's Tiptree winner, Rupetta by Nike Sulway. It's gorgeous, an alternate-history (I think?) based around a clockwork woman, Rupetta, created by another woman, who then becomes the central figure of a religion. The story's told in two parts, Rupetta going forward and Henri, a history student, in the far future from Rupetta's origin, looking backward. I love it.
And before the con next weekend, I hope to finish that, plus the two Jemisins I have on my TBR shelf but haven't read yet, and maybe Alex Jennings's collection that a friend bought at WisCon last year and loaned to me, and then, if I still have any time left, maybe some of these library books that have been piling up...
Holy crap, is it mid-May already? I feel like I've lost the past couple of weeks entirely. At the beginning of the month I found out I'd re-injured my foot and was maybe going to have to have surgery (since found out I'm not, whew), and right after that my friend and roommate went into the hospital with heart failure. So I haven't really been able to get a lot of reading done. Watched a lot of crappy TV, though. (Roommate is now home and doing well, although she'll be off work for at least a month. *She's* probably going to get a ton of reading done.)
Oh, and my ebook library got corrupted, so now I'm trying to get that put back together. *sigh*
So now I'm trying to get my WisCon reading done. There are two guests of honor this year, N.K. Jemisin and Hiromi Goto, and while I'd read several of Jemisin's books I hadn't read any of Goto's so I got The Kappa Child through interlibrary loan. It was...interesting. Very magical realism, very - well, it felt a lot like reading manga, where I'm enjoying it but there's this whole cultural dimension that I'm just not getting.
Now I'm reading this year's Tiptree winner, Rupetta by Nike Sulway. It's gorgeous, an alternate-history (I think?) based around a clockwork woman, Rupetta, created by another woman, who then becomes the central figure of a religion. The story's told in two parts, Rupetta going forward and Henri, a history student, in the far future from Rupetta's origin, looking backward. I love it.
And before the con next weekend, I hope to finish that, plus the two Jemisins I have on my TBR shelf but haven't read yet, and maybe Alex Jennings's collection that a friend bought at WisCon last year and loaned to me, and then, if I still have any time left, maybe some of these library books that have been piling up...
51rabbitprincess
Wow, that sounds like a busy month! Very glad to hear you don't need surgery and that your roommate is feeling better.
52connie53
I'm glad everything turned out all right. For you and your friend. Hart failure sounds really scary!
53jen.e.moore
>51 rabbitprincess:, >52 connie53: - thanks, guys. It's been very scary, not to mention exhausting, but things are definitely on the upswing now. (As they say in Shadow Unit, now we're working on the New Normal.)
54jen.e.moore
End of May recap:
This month kind of kicked my ass in a lot of ways, so I'm not terribly surprised that I got behind on my reading too. I did finish my ROOT goal, though! And to think my original goal was only thirty books for the year.
I absolutely intend to keep updating here. My new goal is twofold: one, to get and keep my TBR list below 300. (I'm at 318 right now. I can do this. Of course, I keep buying new books, too...) Two, I want to clean up the shelves. I have a three-shelf bookcase I keep all my to-be-read books on, and I want to get it down to where the books aren't stacked sideways on top of one another. I figure that's about twenty books - maybe less, if I get to some of these longer ones. But I've got quite a few books scattered around, too, that I've decided to read and then haven't gotten to yet. So that could take some time. (Hopefully I manage that before I move - in either July or September, depending on how this job application goes down.)
It's Summer Reading time at the library now, and I try to stick to library books for that - which is good because I'm back on my Dennis Lehane kick after finishing Darkness, Take My Hand last night. I'm wrapping up Jo Walton's My Real Children today and I have a few piles of SFF short stories to get through as well. I'm hoping that things will settle down for a bit, and I'll be able to get caught back up on my 300-books-a-year goal.
This month kind of kicked my ass in a lot of ways, so I'm not terribly surprised that I got behind on my reading too. I did finish my ROOT goal, though! And to think my original goal was only thirty books for the year.
I absolutely intend to keep updating here. My new goal is twofold: one, to get and keep my TBR list below 300. (I'm at 318 right now. I can do this. Of course, I keep buying new books, too...) Two, I want to clean up the shelves. I have a three-shelf bookcase I keep all my to-be-read books on, and I want to get it down to where the books aren't stacked sideways on top of one another. I figure that's about twenty books - maybe less, if I get to some of these longer ones. But I've got quite a few books scattered around, too, that I've decided to read and then haven't gotten to yet. So that could take some time. (Hopefully I manage that before I move - in either July or September, depending on how this job application goes down.)
It's Summer Reading time at the library now, and I try to stick to library books for that - which is good because I'm back on my Dennis Lehane kick after finishing Darkness, Take My Hand last night. I'm wrapping up Jo Walton's My Real Children today and I have a few piles of SFF short stories to get through as well. I'm hoping that things will settle down for a bit, and I'll be able to get caught back up on my 300-books-a-year goal.
55connie53
Hi Jen, Good for you! You finished and reached your goal! But your ticker doesn't say so. Are you going to add any extra ROOTs to the group total?
56jen.e.moore
Does it not? It looks like it to me...(I do have two tickers, the one for the ROOTs with a goal of 50 and the overall one for 300 books total, which I definitely have not reached yet.)
I've had much too much fun in this community to drop it now! I'll definitely keep adding ROOTs to the community total. :)
I've had much too much fun in this community to drop it now! I'll definitely keep adding ROOTs to the community total. :)
58jen.e.moore
Mid-June update:
See, I told you I wasn't going to quit! :D I started out the month trying hard to make up for a light reading month in May, and hoo boy am I doing a good job.
I have been having fun picking books to read with the power of randomness: I go to random.org, put in my total number of unread books, and it gives me a random one. Then I go back to my LT catalog, count down to that number, and read that book. I've finally gotten to some I'd been putting off for a long time (like The Resurrectionist, which was fantastic) and if some of them have turned out to be a little disappointing, well, I'm getting them off my shelves and out of my life. So that's nice.
Yesterday I executed my Book Compression Algorithm - about a dozen books went to the used book store, and only three came back with me. I call that success. (Those three being Dune, which I am going to read some day if it kills me; Ordeal by Hunger, which I've wanted for a long time; and The Stations of the Sun, because I no longer have ready access to an academic library where I can get Ronald Hutton books when I need them so clearly I have to hoard them for myself now.) That does up my TBR total by a little bit...but not too bad.
I'm going through more library books than I had for a while, too, but since I'm also reading about a book a day, I'm not going to complain too much. And according to my holds list I have two more that are due out to me sometime this week. Oh, and the interlibrary loan I'm waiting on that should be in on Monday, with any luck. Hm, maybe I should get back to that pile while I'm at it.
See, I told you I wasn't going to quit! :D I started out the month trying hard to make up for a light reading month in May, and hoo boy am I doing a good job.
I have been having fun picking books to read with the power of randomness: I go to random.org, put in my total number of unread books, and it gives me a random one. Then I go back to my LT catalog, count down to that number, and read that book. I've finally gotten to some I'd been putting off for a long time (like The Resurrectionist, which was fantastic) and if some of them have turned out to be a little disappointing, well, I'm getting them off my shelves and out of my life. So that's nice.
Yesterday I executed my Book Compression Algorithm - about a dozen books went to the used book store, and only three came back with me. I call that success. (Those three being Dune, which I am going to read some day if it kills me; Ordeal by Hunger, which I've wanted for a long time; and The Stations of the Sun, because I no longer have ready access to an academic library where I can get Ronald Hutton books when I need them so clearly I have to hoard them for myself now.) That does up my TBR total by a little bit...but not too bad.
I'm going through more library books than I had for a while, too, but since I'm also reading about a book a day, I'm not going to complain too much. And according to my holds list I have two more that are due out to me sometime this week. Oh, and the interlibrary loan I'm waiting on that should be in on Monday, with any luck. Hm, maybe I should get back to that pile while I'm at it.
60rabbitprincess
Great idea! I use random.org to choose what to borrow next from the library (and also to winnow down my TBR list -- sometimes I get a book that I decide not to read after all). Using it for books you actually own would be even better.
61ipsoivan
What a surprise! I tried random.org out and the book it chose I had actually already read and hadn't realized! One more off the TBR.
62jen.e.moore
>61 ipsoivan: Woo, exciting! I love it when you get to knock a number off without having to do any work. :D
>60 rabbitprincess: I've been trying to pick my library books using random.org, but my library list is a lot more varied than my TBR stack, and there's a lot on there I will only read if the mood strikes me right. (The library list is also a lot longer than the TBR stack...)
>60 rabbitprincess: I've been trying to pick my library books using random.org, but my library list is a lot more varied than my TBR stack, and there's a lot on there I will only read if the mood strikes me right. (The library list is also a lot longer than the TBR stack...)
63jen.e.moore
Holy crap, I read a ton of books in June. I also got a little data-happy, and made a spreadsheet so I could look at pretty graphs showing me how much I'd read. (There's a screenshot of the pretty graph sheet in my member gallery if you'd like to see it.) This also lets me make comparisons - I read 17 ROOTs this month, and eighteen library books, plus one re-read, for a total of 36 books all together (and an average of 1.2 books a day). I also didn't really do anything else this month, so I expect that number to drop. Still - pretty cool. :D
My favorite books of the month were Bloodchildren, a SF anthology released as a fundraiser for the Carl Brandon Society, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in the speculative fiction fandom; DayBlack by Keef Cross, a graphic novel about a black vampire tattoo artist and his Mexican vampire-hunter adopted son; My Real Children by Jo Walton, an utterly beautiful book about the effect our choices have on the world; Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute, the latest book in a fantastic comedic horror series about a cynical necromancer and the situations he keeps trying to get himself out of; and The Other by Thomas Tryon, a surprisingly good 70s horror novel that's really more of a psychological thriller. And I continued (and nearly completed) my read through Dennis Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro series. Only Moonlight Mile left, which is actually the first one I read.
I didn't actually cut down on the size of the TBR shelf as much as I wanted to, though - about half my ROOTs were ebooks, and the rest were mostly short. This month I've got Foucault's Pendulum ready and waiting, and I'm going to aim for the long books, to try to reduce the actual physical space it takes up. I've found out that I'm definitely moving in September, and I really want to cut down on the number of book boxes I'll be lugging around!
My favorite books of the month were Bloodchildren, a SF anthology released as a fundraiser for the Carl Brandon Society, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in the speculative fiction fandom; DayBlack by Keef Cross, a graphic novel about a black vampire tattoo artist and his Mexican vampire-hunter adopted son; My Real Children by Jo Walton, an utterly beautiful book about the effect our choices have on the world; Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute, the latest book in a fantastic comedic horror series about a cynical necromancer and the situations he keeps trying to get himself out of; and The Other by Thomas Tryon, a surprisingly good 70s horror novel that's really more of a psychological thriller. And I continued (and nearly completed) my read through Dennis Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro series. Only Moonlight Mile left, which is actually the first one I read.
I didn't actually cut down on the size of the TBR shelf as much as I wanted to, though - about half my ROOTs were ebooks, and the rest were mostly short. This month I've got Foucault's Pendulum ready and waiting, and I'm going to aim for the long books, to try to reduce the actual physical space it takes up. I've found out that I'm definitely moving in September, and I really want to cut down on the number of book boxes I'll be lugging around!
65rabbitprincess
Love the graphs!
66connie53
I don't know how to get to your member gallery! I don't see any pics in your profile, Jen. I must be doing something wrong.
67jen.e.moore
>66 connie53: Whoops, I moved it into the Junk Drawer because it was showing up as a profile picture - here it is! https://www.librarything.com/pic/4443696
68jen.e.moore
Mid-July update:
Well, after a great month in June, I've gotten a slow start to July. Only three ROOTs read - and two of those abandoned in the first fifty pages! But they've gone away, which is the most important thing.
I've been reading a great many more library books, mostly because a whole pile of holds and new releases descended on me at once. I absolutely adored How Not to be Wrong, a book about math, and Afterparty, the new(ish) Daryl Gregory. Which should surprise no one; I always love Daryl Gregory. I eagerly await his new book in - August, already? Sheesh. Some people write entirely too quickly. (I kid, I kid. What's there to complain about when you get two new books by your favorite author in one year?)
On a meta scale, I've been slowly evaluating my library for weeding before September's move. My stats page tells me I currently have around 45 cubic feet of books (or roughly thirty boxes), not counting the TBR shelf, which is probably another dozen or so. Unfortunately I'm also finding a lot of TBRs that never made it to the TBR shelf! They'll have to wait until the end of this year, I've been so looking forward to bringing that number down.
I don't expect to get anywhere near June's total read this month - I have a trip this weekend and a party the next weekend and a job interview the weekend after that, and all the preparations involved in all of those. But I do hope to be doing *slightly* better than I am right now.
Well, after a great month in June, I've gotten a slow start to July. Only three ROOTs read - and two of those abandoned in the first fifty pages! But they've gone away, which is the most important thing.
I've been reading a great many more library books, mostly because a whole pile of holds and new releases descended on me at once. I absolutely adored How Not to be Wrong, a book about math, and Afterparty, the new(ish) Daryl Gregory. Which should surprise no one; I always love Daryl Gregory. I eagerly await his new book in - August, already? Sheesh. Some people write entirely too quickly. (I kid, I kid. What's there to complain about when you get two new books by your favorite author in one year?)
On a meta scale, I've been slowly evaluating my library for weeding before September's move. My stats page tells me I currently have around 45 cubic feet of books (or roughly thirty boxes), not counting the TBR shelf, which is probably another dozen or so. Unfortunately I'm also finding a lot of TBRs that never made it to the TBR shelf! They'll have to wait until the end of this year, I've been so looking forward to bringing that number down.
I don't expect to get anywhere near June's total read this month - I have a trip this weekend and a party the next weekend and a job interview the weekend after that, and all the preparations involved in all of those. But I do hope to be doing *slightly* better than I am right now.
69MissWatson
Well, real life interferes with reading sometimes. Just enjoy it when you've got the time for it.
70Merryann
>58 jen.e.moore: I LOVE the phrase , Book Compression Alogrithm. Love it! Love it! Love it!
71jen.e.moore
July update:
As predicted, a light month: it's been busy, with two trips, a job interview, and getting ready to move. (I packed my first box of books today!) But I did still get another six ROOTs read, so I really shouldn't complain.
My favorite book this month was an interlibrary loan: Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. It's not quite just the book version of The Wicker Man, but it's very similar, and it turns out I love that kind of stuff. It seems the book is out of print now, but lots of libraries still own it; I recommend it if you also like pseudo-horror about obnoxious people being tormented by jolly pagans.
And in preparation for the move, I'm about to do something unprecedented. I'm planning on going through my to-be-read shelf and getting rid of anything that no longer appeals. I haven't done this in a long time because usually, I end up enjoying those books once I force myself to read them, but I really do just have far too many books at this point, and perhaps it'll be less painful to part with some that I haven't already spent much time with. Maybe. I'll let you know how it goes.
As predicted, a light month: it's been busy, with two trips, a job interview, and getting ready to move. (I packed my first box of books today!) But I did still get another six ROOTs read, so I really shouldn't complain.
My favorite book this month was an interlibrary loan: Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. It's not quite just the book version of The Wicker Man, but it's very similar, and it turns out I love that kind of stuff. It seems the book is out of print now, but lots of libraries still own it; I recommend it if you also like pseudo-horror about obnoxious people being tormented by jolly pagans.
And in preparation for the move, I'm about to do something unprecedented. I'm planning on going through my to-be-read shelf and getting rid of anything that no longer appeals. I haven't done this in a long time because usually, I end up enjoying those books once I force myself to read them, but I really do just have far too many books at this point, and perhaps it'll be less painful to part with some that I haven't already spent much time with. Maybe. I'll let you know how it goes.
72rabbitprincess
Good luck with the move and with getting rid of some books!
73Merryann
I had a liberating experience the other day when I picked up a book and got ready to list it into my library. All of a sudden I thought, "If I don't keep this and read it (and I know I'd be making myself read it) I will have time to read something else that I may not get time to read otherwise. Something I really do want to read.
And I put the book in the 'go' stack!
I'm sure this kind of healthy thinking happened to me because of this ROOT group. Good luck with your weeding through, and think of how enthusiastically you'll be able to greet the contents of book boxes you unpack after the move, knowing all inside are definitely wanted. :)
And I put the book in the 'go' stack!
I'm sure this kind of healthy thinking happened to me because of this ROOT group. Good luck with your weeding through, and think of how enthusiastically you'll be able to greet the contents of book boxes you unpack after the move, knowing all inside are definitely wanted. :)
75jen.e.moore
So I dug through my TBR shelves tonight and between books I decided I was no longer interested in reading and books that, for some reason, were still in LT as ROOTs even though I actually got rid of them *last* time I moved, my list has dropped from 304 to 284! That's a whole box worth of books that I don't have to pack, never mind read. I am delighted. :D
79jen.e.moore
End of August recap:
August is officially the slowest reading month for me by a wide margin: I only finished twelve books. Outrageous, I know. They were good books, though. I got into Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories, which are delightfully fun; I read a horror novel by Tananarive Due, which was phenomenal; and I finally read Foucault's Pendulum after carrying the book around for four years. That's one I'll be glad not to pack.
At the last minute I decided to read the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey - I'd read the first one when it first came out, picked up an ARC of #2, and then...never read it. So I brought 1 and 2 along on my labor day weekend vacation and read both of them, although I didn't actually finish #2 until September 1st. I'll finish off those quickly, I think - I have an ARC of #4 on my shelf, too, so that's another ROOT - and then I've got a huge stack of library books to get through. The fall publishing season is murder on my to-read list. ;)
Plus I'm moving this month! I still don't know where to, but I have to be out of my current apartment by the end of the day on the 30th, so everyone keep their fingers crossed for me that I find a great place with lots of space for all my books. I will of course keep working through as many ROOTs as possible so I can cut down on the number of them that need to make the trip...
August is officially the slowest reading month for me by a wide margin: I only finished twelve books. Outrageous, I know. They were good books, though. I got into Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamourist Histories, which are delightfully fun; I read a horror novel by Tananarive Due, which was phenomenal; and I finally read Foucault's Pendulum after carrying the book around for four years. That's one I'll be glad not to pack.
At the last minute I decided to read the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey - I'd read the first one when it first came out, picked up an ARC of #2, and then...never read it. So I brought 1 and 2 along on my labor day weekend vacation and read both of them, although I didn't actually finish #2 until September 1st. I'll finish off those quickly, I think - I have an ARC of #4 on my shelf, too, so that's another ROOT - and then I've got a huge stack of library books to get through. The fall publishing season is murder on my to-read list. ;)
Plus I'm moving this month! I still don't know where to, but I have to be out of my current apartment by the end of the day on the 30th, so everyone keep their fingers crossed for me that I find a great place with lots of space for all my books. I will of course keep working through as many ROOTs as possible so I can cut down on the number of them that need to make the trip...
80MissWatson
That is a scary prospect. Keeping fingers crossed!
82connie53
Have you found a new place? Is it easy to find one where you live. It would be almost impossible here. So good luck in your search.
83jen.e.moore
>82 connie53: Still plugging away. I have a couple of good leads (and one application in) so I'm feeling pretty good about it right now, at least.
84jen.e.moore
Addendum: I have found an apartment, and I sign my lease on Thursday to start moving in a week from today! I can't wait.
86MissWatson
Good to hear you found a place. Enjoy the new digs!
87jen.e.moore
It's time for the mid-September update:
I've been able to work on catching up on my reading this month at last, although I'm still not at the ridiculous rate I was going earlier in the year. (I'm going to cheat just a tiny bit - I checked out 7 graphic novels this morning.) I'm trying to read the ROOTs that are books borrowed from friends so I can give them back when they come help me move!
Right now I'm reading Lauren Bacall's autobiography, By Myself and Then Some. I didn't think it was possible for me to be more charmed by her, but it happens with every single page. Also in the currently-reading stack: Gulp by Mary Roach, which I cannot read while eating, and The Watcher by the Threshold, an ebook I started more than a month ago and haven't been able to keep going on. I've lost the knack of ebooks, I think.
As for moving - the previously-mentioned apartment fell through, but I found another one right away, so I'm not moving today but hopefully sometime this week, next week at the absolute latest. I am so ready to be done with this move.
I've been able to work on catching up on my reading this month at last, although I'm still not at the ridiculous rate I was going earlier in the year. (I'm going to cheat just a tiny bit - I checked out 7 graphic novels this morning.) I'm trying to read the ROOTs that are books borrowed from friends so I can give them back when they come help me move!
Right now I'm reading Lauren Bacall's autobiography, By Myself and Then Some. I didn't think it was possible for me to be more charmed by her, but it happens with every single page. Also in the currently-reading stack: Gulp by Mary Roach, which I cannot read while eating, and The Watcher by the Threshold, an ebook I started more than a month ago and haven't been able to keep going on. I've lost the knack of ebooks, I think.
As for moving - the previously-mentioned apartment fell through, but I found another one right away, so I'm not moving today but hopefully sometime this week, next week at the absolute latest. I am so ready to be done with this move.
89jen.e.moore
It did! Now, of course, I'm drowning in boxes, but that's only to be expected at this point. So far nothing's been broken and only one thing has been lost, but I refuse to call it completely lost until I get unpacked, because who knows.
Tonight, I start unpacking the ROOT books. :D
Tonight, I start unpacking the ROOT books. :D
90MissWatson
Happy reading in your new home!
91jen.e.moore
End-of-September update:
I tried my hardest, but I fell even further behind on my 300-books-in-a-year goal in September. (Could the week of moving have had anything to do with that? Noooo, surely not!) Well, that just means I'll have to read even more in October. As October is usually a solid reading month for me - all the ghost stories in the world, plus lovely fall weather that begs for nothing more than a cup of tea and a book - I'm not too concerned. After all, it's Day Two and I've already finished two books, with another looming close on the horizon.
I'm extra-excited to read my ROOTs now that I'm all moved and I've had the chance to go through everything bit by bit to be sure that everything I'm reading are things I'm really excited about. I just finished Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, a fantastic new memoir slash call to arms on the subject of death in America, so I might return to Postmortem, a rather academic ROOT that's been on my shelf for nearly a year. My book club is also doing some books I have as ROOTs, so that will be fun to get rid of.
I put together the first part of my Ikea modular couch yesterday, and I must say I'm pleased. It makes an excellent reading nook.
I tried my hardest, but I fell even further behind on my 300-books-in-a-year goal in September. (Could the week of moving have had anything to do with that? Noooo, surely not!) Well, that just means I'll have to read even more in October. As October is usually a solid reading month for me - all the ghost stories in the world, plus lovely fall weather that begs for nothing more than a cup of tea and a book - I'm not too concerned. After all, it's Day Two and I've already finished two books, with another looming close on the horizon.
I'm extra-excited to read my ROOTs now that I'm all moved and I've had the chance to go through everything bit by bit to be sure that everything I'm reading are things I'm really excited about. I just finished Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, a fantastic new memoir slash call to arms on the subject of death in America, so I might return to Postmortem, a rather academic ROOT that's been on my shelf for nearly a year. My book club is also doing some books I have as ROOTs, so that will be fun to get rid of.
I put together the first part of my Ikea modular couch yesterday, and I must say I'm pleased. It makes an excellent reading nook.
92Familyhistorian
Sounds like you have your priorities in the right place, setting up your reading nook right away!
93jen.e.moore
Of course! Books are the first priority, then the couch, then the tea. (Tea happens this evening.) I get to spend tomorrow curled up reading! Which is really the ideal break from moving.
95connie53
I'm glad to hear the move went well and all the important things are unpacked and put together!
96MissWatson
A reading nook, tea and early autumn weather, that's an indeal combination for ROOTing, isn't it?
97jen.e.moore
Mid-October update:
Fifteen days into October and I've already read more than I read in September! And by the end of the night I should be caught up to where I should have been last month for my 300-books-in-a-year challenge. Of course, that means I have to read another 25 books in the next fifteen days - and I know I'm gonna get behind again in November because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo. Oh, well. I'm taking a long weekend in December, just for reading. (And drinking. Okay, I'm taking Repeal Day off in December. Still, I'll probably get some reading done.)
I decided to go nostalgic for my spooky stories this year; I wanted to read all the John Bellairs I could get my hands on. Unfortunately my library doesn't actually own any Bellairs, so I started in on the Series of Unfortuante Events, which I started at one point while it was still ongoing but never finished. It's utterly delightful, and I'm addicted - and going through about a book a day since I started. They're getting longer by now, but I'm sure I'll still finish by the end of the month. And I grabbed some Bellairs from my new library (now that I've moved, I have both my home library where I live and my home library where I work), so I've got that, too. And a pile of actual adult novels of spooky stories, but frankly right now I'm addicted to the kids' horror novels. After this I think I'll pick the children's librarians' brains for more.
In the middle of all this I decided to re-read the last couple of Vlad Taltos books, since I realized once I got my hands on Hawk that I didn't remember much about them. They were wonderful - even better than I remembered - and I've been running through those at one a day, too. I can't ration Vlad, that would just be wrong. Today I read Hawk, and yes, it's just as amazing as I was hoping, and then some.
Oh, and I took a picture of my lovely new reading nook this morning in between Vlad getting himself into trouble and Loiosh trying to talk him out of it, but it's on my tablet, which I don't have right now. I shall try to remember to post it later. (It was a great morning for reading, rainy and chilly, wonderful for curling up with an excellent book and a cup of coffee. With pumpkin spice creamer. I love October.)
Fifteen days into October and I've already read more than I read in September! And by the end of the night I should be caught up to where I should have been last month for my 300-books-in-a-year challenge. Of course, that means I have to read another 25 books in the next fifteen days - and I know I'm gonna get behind again in November because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo. Oh, well. I'm taking a long weekend in December, just for reading. (And drinking. Okay, I'm taking Repeal Day off in December. Still, I'll probably get some reading done.)
I decided to go nostalgic for my spooky stories this year; I wanted to read all the John Bellairs I could get my hands on. Unfortunately my library doesn't actually own any Bellairs, so I started in on the Series of Unfortuante Events, which I started at one point while it was still ongoing but never finished. It's utterly delightful, and I'm addicted - and going through about a book a day since I started. They're getting longer by now, but I'm sure I'll still finish by the end of the month. And I grabbed some Bellairs from my new library (now that I've moved, I have both my home library where I live and my home library where I work), so I've got that, too. And a pile of actual adult novels of spooky stories, but frankly right now I'm addicted to the kids' horror novels. After this I think I'll pick the children's librarians' brains for more.
In the middle of all this I decided to re-read the last couple of Vlad Taltos books, since I realized once I got my hands on Hawk that I didn't remember much about them. They were wonderful - even better than I remembered - and I've been running through those at one a day, too. I can't ration Vlad, that would just be wrong. Today I read Hawk, and yes, it's just as amazing as I was hoping, and then some.
Oh, and I took a picture of my lovely new reading nook this morning in between Vlad getting himself into trouble and Loiosh trying to talk him out of it, but it's on my tablet, which I don't have right now. I shall try to remember to post it later. (It was a great morning for reading, rainy and chilly, wonderful for curling up with an excellent book and a cup of coffee. With pumpkin spice creamer. I love October.)
98jen.e.moore
End of October update:
Oh my god, I am so sick. I missed all of Halloween :( and now I have to start working on NaNoWriMo while sick. Further updates later; I'm spending my brainpower on other things today.
Oh my god, I am so sick. I missed all of Halloween :( and now I have to start working on NaNoWriMo while sick. Further updates later; I'm spending my brainpower on other things today.
99rabbitprincess
Oh no! Feel better soon!
100jen.e.moore
I never actually did a mid-November update, did I? Well, I'm hyped up on caffeine today, might as well. ;)
It took me a couple of weeks to get over my Halloween cold, plus I've been doing NaNoWriMo this month, so it's been busy. Today I'm trying both to finish writing my novel and to get everything ready for Thanksgiving! But I have been reading.
I've read more than I expected to this month, actually. I piled up a huge stack of horror novels for Halloween, both ROOTs and library books, and I didn't get through all of them, so I just kind of carried on. I've also been reading some scifi to give me motivation for my novel, which is set on a generation ship. I hope someday to write space civilizations as great as Ann Leckie's.
Although I'm a little behind on my 300 books in a year challenge, I think I'll be able to finish - and I'm on target to read 100 ROOTs by the end of the year! That's twice my updated goal and more than three times my original goal. I might have to be more ambitious next year.
It took me a couple of weeks to get over my Halloween cold, plus I've been doing NaNoWriMo this month, so it's been busy. Today I'm trying both to finish writing my novel and to get everything ready for Thanksgiving! But I have been reading.
I've read more than I expected to this month, actually. I piled up a huge stack of horror novels for Halloween, both ROOTs and library books, and I didn't get through all of them, so I just kind of carried on. I've also been reading some scifi to give me motivation for my novel, which is set on a generation ship. I hope someday to write space civilizations as great as Ann Leckie's.
Although I'm a little behind on my 300 books in a year challenge, I think I'll be able to finish - and I'm on target to read 100 ROOTs by the end of the year! That's twice my updated goal and more than three times my original goal. I might have to be more ambitious next year.
101connie53
Jen, stop saying such scary things!
300 books a year! 100 ROOTs! You must be doing nothing else but read!
And writing a novel! Good luck on that! That's really awesome!
300 books a year! 100 ROOTs! You must be doing nothing else but read!
And writing a novel! Good luck on that! That's really awesome!
102jen.e.moore
I'm amazed at how much I've been able to read this year! But a lot of them have been short books - and I read fast, I can do a 300-page book in one day if I don't have too much else to do. :) I'm looking forward to a couple of days like that this week, especially now that it's snowing.
103connie53
Snow! Please, no snow for me. But the Christmas vacation is starting this Friday. I hope to read a lot, but from the previous years I've learned that the days between the festive ones are filled with cleaning and groceries.
104jen.e.moore
And a quick mid-December update:
I've got 22 books left on my 300-in-a-year goal, and if I really apply myself, I might be able to do it. But there's Christmas getting in the way there, and New Year's, and I forgot to account for the annual Tolkien season. (I blame Peter Jackson: ever since his movies started coming out in mid-December, December through January has been Tolkien season for me, and I hardly get any other reading done.) I'm trying, though.
I've got 22 books left on my 300-in-a-year goal, and if I really apply myself, I might be able to do it. But there's Christmas getting in the way there, and New Year's, and I forgot to account for the annual Tolkien season. (I blame Peter Jackson: ever since his movies started coming out in mid-December, December through January has been Tolkien season for me, and I hardly get any other reading done.) I'm trying, though.
106jen.e.moore
Thank you, Connie, and same to you!
107jen.e.moore
Well, depending on how you count, I read somewhere between 276 and 306 books this year! I'm gonna call that a huge success. And about a third of those - 101! - were ROOTs! Which is an excellent sign, because I've set my goal for 100 ROOTs again for next year. Mmm, so many books.
