Outread Aubrey! Challenge discussion

Finally finished "The Coquette." I liked how it was formatted in letters between the characters, but the story itself... not so much.

Aubrey, should I find a single copy of the Coquette to add to the shelf? I read it in a copy bound with a second story, which I have not read. Would it be better to use a single copy of it instead, so it isn't confusing?

Aarrrgggghhhh! Haven't finished a book in two weeks! Life, slow down....

I picked up Steal Like an Artist on a recommendation from a friend, and it was a good recommendation indeed. It's less a how-to than a fresh angle on different aspects of creativity and how to stimulate it—I'd certainly recommend it to all of you other writers (or artists or creative people in general).

I don't think I'm 'currently-reading' anything right now...I'm just pretending I am. (Except for one unpublished book I'm beta-reading.) I think I'll pick something entertaining by Gilbert and Sullivan for my spare moments to help foster the illusion...

I have the first book of James's series marked "to-read." What do you mean by "edgy?"

I've decided to set aside The Fault in Our Stars for now, and I've begun the audiobook of "Panic" by Lauren Oliver. So far it's interesting, but I'm eager to get to the exciting parts.

Finally finished a book today! A short one, at work...one recently put out by Project Gutenburg. I'll have to find the title again so I can count it... It was a story about a little Italian girl named Pappino.

I haven't read anything in about a month, probably more. I'm thinking of bowing out of this challenge, ya'll; there's no way I can keep up with the pace, not with the state my mental health is in. :/ I dunno if I'll bow out yet, but I probably will. So that's why you haven't and probably won't see me commenting much.

Reading can be a good and healthy distraction, though. :)

I can't even bring myself to do what I have to do, hardly, let alone stuff I don't have to do...

Okay, so I picked up "Missing You" by Harlan Coben yesterday at work...got into it so much that I bought it...and read to chapter 25 before going to bed. It didn't make my 7 am shift very comfortable to have missed that much sleep, but it's definitely a page turner! Has some d-words and one g-d, but so far nothing worse. No bed scenes, and the violence tends to take place to one side rather than being the focus of the narrative.

Can someone make a law that books that aren't the first book MUST SAY "This book is a sequel and this is the name of book one" because SERIOUSLY IT'S DRIVING ME MAD to keep picking stuff up from the library and finding I have NO CLUE what's going on. ARGH. Nowhere on this book! Nowhere does it say!

I'm reading a bizarre combination of books that ranges from Victorian poetry to a book about somebody who likes to drive motorbikes very fast. Also the Aeneid and stuff. My 'currently reading' is almost as broad as my music taste, which is questionable at best...

I'm mostly reading the Dresden Files, which is doing wonders for my writers block. But I feel your pain, Miriam. :)

Finishing up "On Writing Well" and then I plan to read Joel's book so I can review it on Sunday!

I've given up on Panic. The female protagonist just irritates me, and while I want to know more about the male protagonist, I don't want to slog through the girl to get to his parts.

I read a bit of House of Hades last night. I sadly lost interest in a character when I learned something about him. :P Kind of made me disappointed with the author, too...

Olivia wrote: "I read a bit of House of Hades last night. I sadly lost interest in a character when I learned something about him. :P Kind of made me disappointed with the author, too..."

I've heard a lot about those books, but haven't seen them in my local library -- I'm not sure if they'd been in the kids' section or the YA section, but I haven't run into them -- so I haven't yet got around to giving them ago. I've got a friend who loves them, though.

Miriam: They are very good. I'm not entirely sure where they would be, though... But they are exciting. :D My little sister enjoys them too.

I've started "Henry IV" by Shakespeare and "Hope Leslie" by Catherine Maria Sedgwick, both for school. I haven't gotten far in either, but I'm enjoying them. And I'm almost done with House of Hades, then I can get my hands on the rest of the Divergent trilogy. ^_^

This has not been the greatest reading year for me so far (at least as numbers go—I have read some fantastic books). I'm counting on summer reading to make up for that.

Anyway, I did read Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers while in the dentist's waiting-room; that was good fun. And I'm tagging Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as outread-aubrey, because I re-read it from cover to cover for the first time in years, one day when I just didn't feel mentally up to tackling a new book. Every word of it was familiar, but I understood and enjoyed it even more than when I was younger.

I'm technically reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles again. And actually annotating it this time. Yay exams. (They suck massively.)

Other than that, it's a bit of a slow patch.

Finally finished House of Hades, and now I've moved on to Riordan's Kane Chronicles: The Red Pyramid. I learned lots of stuff about Greek/Roman mythology, and I get to learn about Egyptian. ^_^ I'm kind of enjoying this more than I have the Percy Jackson books. I would have started the remaining Divergent books, but my library is making me wait an eternity for them. Although I've just now been todo I have something waiting for me at the library. ^_^

I bought four books the other day: "The Graveyard Book" (Neil Gaiman), "The Wishing Spell" (Chris Colfer), "Dragonborn" (Toby Forward), and "Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction: How to Create Out-Of-This-World Novels and Short Stories" (Orson Scott Card, Jay Lake, and Philip Athans). I went in the bookstore for one book only, and I came out with that book and three others. I'm beginning to lose my self-control in a bookstore, people. The day has finally come...

Miriam wrote: "Olivia wrote: "I read a bit of House of Hades last night. I sadly lost interest in a character when I learned something about him. :P Kind of made me disappointed with the author, too..."

I've hea..."

They're shelved in Young Readers. Basically, preteen.

Had two nasty weeks; ended up sick because of it, and being sick had me sent home from work on sick time a couple days this week...thus, reading. I've got about six books read that I need to mark here. I just like to comment about them when I mark them done, so I should take time to do that....

Hannah: That makes sense. :) The first series is middle grade. The second series seemed to me just a little bit older sometimes. I hope you get to feeling better. :( Being sick is no fun at all. :P

At long last, I have begun Insurgent. Getting to Allegiant will be interesting because I've heard there's some huge things that happen. With my ability to find spoilers, I'm surprised I haven't been spoiled yet.

I just finished Delirium. I have generally decided that I don't like YA stuff in general because they're just so....juvenile. That said. Delirium was amazing. It's a very well crafted Dystopian story but it's also an allegory of love and emotion and humanity. You think that if you think too hard about it it will be kind of hokey, but it's actually not. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series which...my library does not have. * sigh *

Hannah - my library only has children and teens, with no shelves for stuff in between. Hence the uncertainty as to where to look. :)

I finished going through Tess with a highlighter and sarcastic margin notes (omh I hate Angel Clare with a burning passion, and don't get me started on Alec), so I'd like to say I'm now reading something for fun, but... I'm not. I need to reread Gatsby and Rapture, and then collate quotes from all three into Word docs according to themes, and I kind of want to die because I just want to read something for fun and I don't have time or energy.

That said, I finished writing the book I was working on, so the 45 mins or so I used to spend writing each evening could possibly be given to reading, although really I should use them to work.

Exams suck.

Young Readers is for ages 7-12. Older children. It's probably shelved in general children's books.

Hello, I'm baaaaack! Did y'all miss me?

Theodora, darling, do you want to trade horror stories about mental health? I've got a good one. Point is, I haven't read much in the past month either, but that apparently doesn't deter me from HOSTING this darn reading challenge. I may not always be a challenging person to keep up with (although I keep telling myself I will fix that one day), but there's so much more to this challenge than that. Even if you can't win the big grand prize, we're often doing sprints that are based on random drawings. Plus there's all the good talk and book recommendations from the lovely people here. Even if you know you won't outread me (or think I'm a lame challenge and have had me outread since week 1), it's still worth sticking around. :)

On that note, I apologize to everyone for going AWOL. Garage sale, moving, three jobs, and my summer vacation outta explain why I've been a little MIA. But I've spent the last week slowly getting back on top of things, so I'm here to make sure y'all are behaving and reading.

I did get a manga volume read yesterday. And read a webcomic the other day because someone threw a link at me and I managed to get sucked in. Oops.

Olivia: If you can find a single edition to add that would be best, but ultimately it won't affect your book count, so don't stress over it.

Aubrey wrote: "Olivia: If you can find a single edition to add that would be best, but ultimately it won't affect your book count, so don't stress over it."

Okay. :) Thanks! ^_^

Which manga/webcomics? :D

I've been reading Soul Eater. Which is shockingly ecchi at times - like a random page of nudity that has nothing to do with the plot at hand during a tense moment. I'm just like what even. The anime was much better in this regard. (But they promise that the manga carries the anime's plot farther and better so I'm gonna slog through it and hope it gets better. It's only one incident every few chapters as far as i've seen...)

" Even if you know you won't outread me (or think I'm a lame challenge and have had me outread since week"

Last week? Ha. Ha, ha...

Ahem. * shuts up *

I finished "Cold Days" which means no more Dresden books for me until the next one comes out which is sometime this summer and that's about all anyone knows about it. I'll survive. Somehow.

So I started "Heart" by Simon Morden, which unexpectedly turned into a King Arthur story, which led me on a wild trail of Wikipedia research, which ended up with me obtaining a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain." So that's promising.

I'm rereading With by Skye Jethani. Highly, highly recommended. :)

I finished Insurgent. It was exciting and incredibly fast-paced, although I hadn't been sure what the characters would be doing through the 500-some pages. But the ending kind of exploded my mind, and now I have a theory running around inside it. Has anyone here read this?

Also, has anyone read Maximum Ride? If so, is it any good?

I've read it, Olivia. Although don't expect intelligent comments because it was a while ago. :) I won't be able to read Allegiant any time soon, on account of my libraries being useless and my bank account being sad...

Miriam wrote: "I've read it, Olivia. Although don't expect intelligent comments because it was a while ago. :) I won't be able to read Allegiant any time soon, on account of my libraries being useless and my bank..."

*Nods* Do you remember any particularly negative content? :)

I know the feeling, with the library. The waiting list at mine is ridiculous. =_=

Actually I think that the new Dresden book comes out tomorrow.... who knows when the library will have it tho.

Maximum Ride - I've read about one chapter and died of its juvenileness. It was like reading something that I wrote when I was 14. That kind of juvenile.

There were...things I didn't like about it. Primarily, I think, because I have no interest in / actively dislike the relationship between Four and Tris. I thought I'd reviewed it expanding on that, but when I checked just now I didn't seem to have done, so it must have been a blog post I wrote (which I'll see if I can find). For me, their interactions made me fairly uncomfortable the whole way through, and marred my enjoyment of the book, which would have worked fine without any romantic subplot. But very few people seem to be of the same opinion.

Ah, Olivia, it was this post (http://www.miriamjoywrites.com/2014/0...) where I talked about my general lack of interest in romance plots, ha ha. But I did briefly touch on why I didn't like the one in Insurgent particularly.

Jenni: Haha, I'll keep that in mind. :)

Miriam: Interesting, I'll have to take a look at that. :) I had noticed in Insurgent there was a lot of touching and kissing, when they weren't angry with each other.

I think I may have misspoke, or didn't clarify. I had asked about Maximum Ride's negative content. ;) My bad. o.o

I did notice that, Jenni. And I have the first hold on the library copy; mwahahaha!

Meanwhile I started on "Fury of Calderon" or whatever...the first book in Jim Butcher's fantasy series. It's really, really meh. I wasn't expecting Dresden, obviously, but I was expecting, well, something. So far the characters are two-dimensional, the relationships underdeveloped, the plot overused, and the pacing sort of random. I'm about 25% of the way through too! Geoffry Monmouth is far more interesting. Did you know that "History of the Kings of Britain" is the source material for King Lear? Fascinating stuff! I can't believe it took me this long to read it!

ehh, I listened to about a quarter or half of the audiobook version of Fury of Calderon. It was okay for long car rides................. but I wasn't that impressed. It had none of the stuff I liked about the Dresden Files in it. I don't even remember its plot, it was so slow. =P (And I think they had Morgul-wraiths in it, at which point I was severely underimpressed.)

@Olivia - I wouldn't know about negative content, being that I dropped it so fast... XD i'm gonna guess fairly low because it's juvenile fiction, not teen fiction.

@Jenni: Ah. XD Well, I enjoy middle grade, so hopefully these will be fun too. ^_^

I accidentally borrowed six library books when I don't even have time to read the two I already have.... :/

I love how you use the term "accidentally." Like the books just flew into your arms and you walked out without realizing it. *grins*

Grace - They totally did. I only went in there to kill half an hour.

I consider myself warned. Watch out for escaping books when killing time in libraries! ^_^

At least libraries don't cost money. That usually happens to me in bookstores!

Good point, Hannah! It happens to me, too. ;)

In a bookshop I never leave with any books, since I don't have any money / even when I do have money, I don't carry it with me. The temptation is therefore out of my reach, even if I'm often on the edge of stealing something, ha ha. I just sit *in* the shop and read them there.

But libraries, libraries are a different matter. *looks guiltily at pile*