EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone!

Hope everyone is hanging in there.

Weather's being weird, but on nice days it's been good to get out and run and enjoy it!

Book club: I have posted questions for Space Opera, so whenever you are able to get started, you can chime in. There's also an overall discussion thread for final overall thoughts, or for people who would rather discuss the book as a whole instead of in chunks.

This week I have finished:

Here and Now and Then - this was my irl books & brew pick, we're meeting on zoom on tuesday. I liked it, although it got to be a bit of a slog in the middle. It was interesting using time travel as a vehicle to examine familThe Count of Monte Cristoy and bonds and how lives intersect.

Gender Queer - read harder graphic memoir. I liked this, was a look into the author's journey with discovering eir sexuality and gender identity when nothing seemed clear cut.

currently reading:

The Count of Monte Cristo - finally got past page 600, i think that' puts me at halfway ish. It's hard to tell, for all that my goodreads edition and Kindle edition are supposed to be the same, the progress bars are not matching. Goodreads says I'm only at 46%, my kindle says i'm at 53% or somesuch. I figure that means i'm about halfway, between the two.

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation - this will be my popsugar anthology. It's interesting, although i feel like i'm lacking a lot of Chinese history to get some of the stories. That's more on me than on the book. Ken Liu, the translator who gathered the stories, said he wanted to show a wide range of contemporary Chinese science fiction, especially authors who haven't been published into English much. He admitted that it doesn't mean they're the most accessible stories to non-Chinese audiences. but I think that's kind of cool, not a lot of point of reading Chinese authors if they are written specifically to appeal to a western audience.

QOTW:

borrowing from popsugar again because it's fun:

What's your favorite dinosaur? (or any prehistoric beast really)

I never really went through a big dinosaur phase myself. But I'd say plesiosaur. When I was a kid we did a unit on myths, and one of those was the Loch Ness monster. We read that one theory was that the monster was actually a plesiosaur that had not gone extinct. I doubt there's much scientific merit to that, but I always liked the idea that a dinosaur species had survived in secret for millenniums. When I draw Nessie, I tend to draw her as a plesiosaur looking creature.

This was a work week again, so I only read one book. Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy details a deliberate plan by Democrats to stoke white supremacist sentiment so that they could wage a campaign of armed voter intimidation, ballot-stuffing, murder, and the forced resignation of black and white Republican and Populist officials who were then run out of town. I had never heard of this until maybe five years ago, despite having lived my whole life in North Carolina. This book is extremely comprehensive; to give the necessary background, it covers some three decades of Reconstruction and its aftermath. I found it rather a slog to read, but absolutely worth it. I can't really find words.

Hoopla didn't really help my experience with this one. In addition to its weird behavior with the last pages of chapters, it hung up while trying to load a new section and then logged me out. I'm sure it's seeing atypical demand right now, but I'm excited that a bunch of my Libby holds came in and I can spend next week with my Kindle.

QOTW: Oh man, I definitely had the dinosaur phase, age three to five or so. My favorite then was compsognathus, because at the time it was the smallest dinosaur known (to children's books, if not to science). Having learned as an adult that birds are actually dinosaurs, I am unable to pick a favorite, although I am particularly fond of corvids.

Heavy workload again this week, so not much reading. I've started The Tetradome Run, which I had picked up for free thanks to BookBub. Although my first impression is a spin on The Running Man, it's well-written and engaging. I have quite a bit more to go, so I'm curious to see where it leads.

QOTW: Not huge on dinosaurs, but as I am also a huge fan of corvids, I enjoy the smart predator that learns quickly, so basically the Jurassic franchise raptors, even though I know they have very little bearing with reality :)

This week, I read Space Opera. I had a much easier time with it this attempt, and I was able to finish it today. I rated it 3 stars, but it was really more of a 3.5 star read for me. I enjoyed it, but at times I thought it got a bit muddled, and I never really got fully invested in this characters, but the actual writing was excellent and very quotable. For now I'm using this for the prompt from a past Popsugar challenge: a book set in space, just to fit it in somewhere.

I'm just about to start the new Murderbot, Network Effect, which I am really looking forward to. This will be my Popsugar book with a robot, cyborg, or AI character.

QOTW: I didn't really have a big dinosaur phase growing up, but I always thought triceratops and stegosaurus looked cool. I guess I like the spiky look! :D

I somehow completely missed last week's check in post, so this update covers two weeks, lest anyone think that I am the world's fastest reader and did all of this in a single week. :)

When I last checked in two weeks ago, I was in the beginning of Across the Universe, and wasn't feeling it despite all of the people who had recommended it to me over the years. Well, right after I posted was when it started to draw me in, and I might have actually sniffled (my version of ugly crying) and gasped out loud (my version of fainting in surprise) a few times before I got to the end. So if you haven't read it, don't judge by the first quarter or so - it seems like it takes forever to get through the setup, but it really does get going quickly once that's out of the way.

Next up was The Quilter's Apprentice, which had been on my shelf forever and was the perfect thing after all of the emotion of my previous book. It's basically a cozy mystery, but there's no murder - the mystery is just figuring out what happened between a couple of the characters in the past and why they're still angry at each other now. It's the first in a lengthy series, and it does a good job of setting everything in motion and establishing all of the characters and relationships.

After that, I read The Majesties, because a friend in one of my book clubs had posted that she had questions about it and wanted to talk to someone about the ending. She hasn't responded yet to my post that I've read it, but I can guess what she wants to discuss - I won't give it away for anyone who hasn't read it, but the ending is a fairly big twist. That aside, it is a really interesting look at this very specific community of rich Chinese families in Indonesia, which is interesting.

After that, I was ready for something more in-depth, so I picked up City of Golden Shadow, which I'd been meaning to read for a while. The characters are great, but I didn't realize the extent to which the series is all one big story, so this 780-page book is pretty much all setup. I enjoyed it, but I still need a break before going back for the next installment.

I'm now reading the next selection for IRL book club #3, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II. It's great - the author has a lighter, conversational tone, so it's not just a slog through endless names and dates - you get to hear some great stories about people dealing with crazy events in a variety of ways. I'm only about 1/3 through it, but I'm taking my time and savoring it because I'm enjoying it so much.

QOTW: I don't know that I had the full on dinosaur phase when I was a kid, but I did get a really cool pterodactyl finger puppet from a vending machine that was so awesome that I pretty much carried it with me everywhere for several years, so that was probably my favorite (ironic, since I hate birds with the fiery passion of a thousand suns). I may also hold the world record for most viewings of the planetarium show "Death of the Dinosaurs," since I traveled quite a bit with my dad when I was a kid, and he always wanted to get his money's worth from his science museum membership by using it in every city. In those days, the planetarium was usually included with admission, and the most popular show was Death of the Dinosaurs. I'm sure I saw it in at least 8-10 different cities, and at the science museum in my city a dozen times. Subsequent discoveries seem to have demonstrated that almost every aspect of the show was inaccurate, but I don't know if there's an updated version out there now. I hadn't thought about either the finger puppet or the planetarium show for quite a while, so thank you for prompting this trip down memory lane. :)

Hi everyone! This week was a re-reading kind of week - I just this morning finished my periodic re-reading of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. The ending still makes me teary even though I've read it multiple times!

Reading with the kiddos - my son got bored a few chapters in to A Wizard of Earthsea, so we shifted gears and now I'm reading The Princess Bride and having a blast. He loved the movie so it seemed like a good choice! I also picked up a used copy of D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths and am reading it to both kids at snacktimes - I've been on the hunt for something that they both will enjoy and this seems to hit the sweet spot of being accessible for my 5-year-old (today is her birthday!) and still interesting for my 9-year-old.

I'm about to start Six Wakes, and lined up after that is The Ghost Brigades, both for my other Goodreads group.

QOTW: I went through a huge dinosaur phase as a kid - when I had the chicken pox (I predate the vaccine!) I insisted that it was actually the pterodactyl pox, and if you asked me when I was 5 or 6 I would have told you that I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. Now I've reacquainted myself with dinosaurs as a parent of dino-obsessed kiddos - we're big Dinosaur Train fans! My favorite is parasaurolophus, what my son called "the bone dinosaur" when he was little because of the bone on the back of its head.

This week: finally rumors that the library may re-open soon... hooray!!!!!

Read Network Effect. So much fun!!! Jennifer- if you've liked the other MurderBot books, you'll love this one. The others in the series have been novellas, so it's fun to see what the author can do with the ink-space to start developing her characters and settings a bit.

And now for something completely different, I finally started The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. It gets seriously into the details and weeds of Mr. Rogers' life, far more so than I was really expecting, but so far its been super interesting. It's also been every bit as gentle and reassuring to read as he actually was, which has been nice with so much stress in the world.

QOTW-
You're making my 4-year-old nephew positively swoon with this question! I've always been a bird lover, so it's been archaeopterix since I was a kid: a flying dinosaur with feathers that is genetically very close to being a bird.

Hello all, just been lurking the past few weeks, so sharing some highlights from the last month.
I finally got to read the The Last Emperox, three weeks later than intended. (It came out two days before my bday, and husbot preordered me a signed copy, so that was going to me my quarantine bday activity. But somehow they didn't get enough copies signed, which they fixed (and gave me a free ebook as consolotion), so I didn't get it until this week. There were a lot of great things about it and it ended well, except for one thing I wish he would have done differently.
Thankful to Tor and their authors for all the free books they are giving to people on their mailing list. I have really enjoyed the first two murderbot novellas based on recommendations from here.
I also enjoyed the latest Gail Carriger novel, Defy or Defend. This is Dimity's post-finishing school adventure.
I have holds on several "next in series" books through my library. At first I was disappointed that only 1 in 7 was available, but it's actually working out well that one more is showing up every week or so.
I think my favorite dinosaur is now back again-Brontosaurus. It wasn't really my favorite, but I remember being disappointed when reading dinosaur books to my kids that they had decided it was another type of Apatosaurus. But when I was looking it up just now to check, I found out they decided they were different species after all! Welcome back, Thunder lizard!

Hullo hullo

I finished up Dread Nation only a day or two after I last updated, it read delightfully fast. Apparently the next one is already out, which was a fun discovery for the friend who gifted it to me too.

I read Measure for Measure, the next in my complete Shakespeare. Not my favourite, but some delightful messing around with disguises.

Now I'm on Oliver Twist. I've seen the film so many times so I know the general plot, but I've no idea how much it was changed. I like Dickens I suppose, but you can definitely tell where he's trying to bump his word count. I appreciate his reformist attitudes though. But if I see one of those 'where you be if you got transported to your most recently read book's setting?' memes I would nope out so hard. I studied the Poor Laws for A Level history, there is pretty much nothing good about them.

QOTW: I don't have a favourite dinosaur type, but I am fond of the fact Sue (from the Field Museum) uses they/them pronouns. My fave would probably be the London cast of Dippy if it had been there when I visited the Natural History Museum, but alas it was on tour and I saw the Blue Whale instead.