EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the late post, another hectic week. One of my cats had some....issues. That involved much cleaning of messes and him being confined to the bathroom until we could get him to the vet/it stopped to contain the mess. Luckily the vet didn't see the signs of anything serious, was probably a mild bacteria build up in his guts. He's on some stuff to control the symptoms and seems much better now, able to be around the house again. Still was very stressful.

Book Club: So it seems the general consensus is that people DO want to keep doing book club, but that just having a pre-reading and a finished reading posts will be easier all around going forward. I'll probably get a suggestion thread going in the next week or so.

This week I finished:

The Descent of Monsters - this is my popsugar book picked randomly from my tbr (I set kindle to unread, closed eyes and mashed forward and back a few times, then poked screen). i liked it, continuation of a series. Really cool world, i'll get the fourth book soon hopefully.

Crossover, Vol. 1: Kids Love Chains - read some comics, finished this up. It was kind of interesting, not amazing.

Meant to Be Immortal- found this on a book sale, had a migraine all week too so wanted fluff.

Currently reading:

The Traitor Baru Cormorant - this started out really strong and I figured I'd be finished by now. But I got bogged down in the middle with the rebellions. too much logistics/politics, i have trouble following stuff like that. It's an interesting idea having an accountant as the protagonist instead of a warrior or adventurer or some such....but it also means most her plans and actions involve stuff like moving resources around. I'll still finish it, i just needed a break. Will be popsugar something broke on the cover.

Tall, Dark & Hungry- re-read because i'm not ready to dive back into Baru.

QOTW:

How do you all organize your goodreads? Do you have a lot of shelves, or do you like minimal ones? Do you not worry about it at all?

I have a ton of shelves, I tend to use them kind of like tags. I have basic genre ones like science fiction, fantasy, paranormal romance, etc. Then I have a shelf for series, plus ones for each year of each challenge I do. Plus one for my book clubs. I don't really need them a ton, but it's nice for stuff like long series to be able to go into the series shelf and just see where I left off.

I hope you have a much more relaxing week upcoming after the last few you've had.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World: My husband did another of his "I think you should read a book abouuuut" and came up with "fish". This was shorter than I expected, sort of in the John McPhee vein, interesting but light. It's from 1997, so I had to look up whether the North American Atlantic cod fishery had recovered (seems like no).

The Secret of Chimneys: This is the Agatha Christie novel that came into the public domain this year. It took a while for it to show up on Project Gutenberg, probably because people are not as into her adventure thrillers. I actually enjoyed the rather lighthearted, almost flippant tone, and the story was entertaining (if both obvious and implausible at times). However, there was more than the usual dose of racism/xenophobia/antisemitism, which rather spoiled it.

Interior Chinatown: This was highly recommended everywhere, and it was thought-provoking, but the format didn't really work for me. It says "a novel" on the cover, but I'm not entirely convinced - not because it's ostensibly written as a TV script, because it really isn't that, but because it's less a narrative and more a...series of allegories? Also it served as an excuse for a lot of telling rather than showing.

QOTW: I have shelves for earlier life stages (elementary school, middle school, high school, college) to keep that stuff out of the way, and everything else goes in "read". This is probably not the optimal system, but I'll worry about that once I'm solid on "actually entering all the books, preferably with read dates".

Aw, Sheri, I hope your cat's doing better.

This week, I had a few finishes:

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing which was my Popsugar book by an online personality. I think I mentioned before that the character voice was a little off to me, but I still enjoyed the story and I'll probably give book #2 a chance later.

I also finished The Raven Boys. I used this as my DNF book for Popsugar, since I tried listening to it in audio format a few years ago and bounced off of it, mostly because I didn't care for the narrator. I found this much easier to get through in eBook format, and actually enjoyed it a lot, even though I guessed some of the big twists before they happened. I'm definitely going to pick up the rest of the series at some point in the future.

Some comics & manga: Blue Flag, Vol. 5, Given, Vol. 3, Given, Vol. 4, and Komi Can't Communicate, Vol. 12.

I am just starting Black Sun, but I'm not far enough to have any opinion yet as of this post.

QOTW: I tend to use my shelves as tags also. I do shelves for my reading challenges, genre/general content tags, some setting tags (mostly contemporary/historical, and an "other worlds" tag for fantasy/sci-fi) and a couple of fun tags (stuff like "excellent fictional ladies" for female characters I an particularly fond of). I have shelves for each year since I started tracking my reading, and a general 2006 and earlier shelf for stuff I know I read before I started tracking.

I also have a few extra exclusive shelves in addition to the standard read/currently reading/want to read. I added a maybe shelf, a DNF shelf, a stalled shelf, a lost interest shelf, and a never shelf (mostly for authors behaving badly, so I can remember why I didn't want to read their books).

Sheri, series shelves are a really great idea! I should probably start doing that, especially for some of the long-running manga series I read.

Aww, poor kitty! I hope he is feeling better (and that you are giving him lots of smooches and snuggles).

Just one finish for me this week but it was a doorstopper that probably could have been split into a trilogy - The Priory of the Orange Tree. I loved it. I've never read any of her books before but now I want to go back and read more! I used it for the book with a map prompt. There were two maps, actually, and I flipped back to look at them constantly, because the geography of the world of the story was super important to the plot.

I enjoyed The Traitor Baru Cormorant although you're right that it got a little confusing with all of the politics. I will continue with the series someday, but haven't gotten to it yet.

QOTW: I have a lot of genre tags, but haven't gotten super specific with series or characters or anything like that. I do have a shelf for each year's reading.

My finish this week was The Once and Future Witches. I have left thoughts in the book club thread.

I am still reading Project Hail Mary. Since I only tend to read paper books right before bed I go fairly slow and it appears to be driving my husband crazy! I think he really wants to talk about the book but is afraid of spoiling it and he keeps picking it up to reread chapters, etc. He cannot wait for me to finish.

I also started the next (6.5) Expanse novella Strange Dogs. The audio book is only 2.5 hours long and I think I only have 45 minutes left. That should be a quick finish this week.

I'm not sure what I want to listen to next. I have one or two Scalzi books and could always pick up Expanse #7. Or something else.

QOTW: I am totally lazy. I never explored shelves here on GR. I never really noticed the "Add new shelf" button and only used the 3 default lists of read, currently reading and want to read. So I sadly do not have any other shelves here. Now I'm wondering what I'm missing and reading everyone else's replies with interest.

i finished City of Zirdai, and now am reading my penultimate Sidney Sheldon, The Sky Is Falling

QOTW: my shelves are rather simplistic - my shelves are the years I read the books. my reading challenge to myself every year is "to read more than the previous year." so by shelving them with the year I read them, it's easy to keep track of my numbers.

I finished The Secrets We Kept shortly after the last check-in. I might have mentioned this last time, but I think it would make a better movie than a book - lots of action but not a lot of character development or intricate plotting. It was mostly fun, though, so I'm looking forward to IRL book club #3's discussion of it.

Next up was Grown, which had been sitting on my Kindle forever. I read the whole thing in one sitting - it's not by any stretch a light read, but it if you can handle the subject matter it is an absolute masterpiece. The beginning might make you think that it's only for teenagers, but I think that's intentional - the tone changes as Enchanted does.

After that, I read The Power, which had been recommended to me by multiple people but I knew nothing about going in. It drew me in right away - the central mystery of what we're counting down to, plus the ways that all of the characters are interconnected made me finish in a day and a half. It leaves you thinking afterwards, too, particularly having read it right after Grown.

The biggest event of the week was that I FINALLY after six months finished listening to Skyward! Considering that I haven't been going anywhere for the last year and a half and that I usually listen to audiobooks in the car, that actually wasn't too bad for as long as it was. The production values were fine, but I think I would have enjoyed it more as a written book with the amount of time spent on plane specs and flight training. And the big reveal at the end was not quite as shocking as I hoped - but I know this is not the kind of book that's intended to be strung out over half a year, so I can't really fault the author for that. :)

I'm currently reading The Shadow of the Wind, which really drew me in at first but is dragging a bit as it goes. The convolutedness of the plot feels kind of forced, for some reason - maybe it's the translation, or maybe people in Spain have different expectations. It started off with a cool gothic Starless Sea vibe, but the number of characters, contrived secrets, etc. makes it feel more like a soap opera 2/3 of the way through. I haven't given up hope, though - there's still time for things to turn around!

QOTW: Like Susan, I've only ever used the three default shelves. It would probably be more useful if I broke things out more, but at this point it would take more untangling than I'm willing to put into it. :)

Two finishes for me this week. I readRule of Wolves which I enjoyed. My only complaint is that the author really doesn't have much exposition to remind you what happened in the last book (or previous books in the Grishaverse), and it's been long enough since I read the previous one that it took me awhile to remember who everyone was. I actually have another complaint about the author's choices of what she did to one of her characters but it's spoilery so I won't say anymore.
I also read Hoofin' It as a palate cleanser when I bailed on my IRL book club because it was too grim. I got a boxed ebook set of eight "magical romantic comedies" for about $5 one time, so this was the second one. They are silly and entertaining and sometimes you just need something like that. So far, the first two are set in the same world but don't have overlapping characters.
I am an avid list maker and organizer so I use the shelves a lot. I actually only include the books I've read since I started logging in 2017 or so. If I started my "want to read" I feel like it would be an endless list I could never finish (and I have enough of those for craft projects :) ). They are basically by genres, but I also decided to list the time period (although I can't really remember what motivated that). In the past year, I have even gone through and checked for consistency by author and came up with personal definitions of fantasy vs. supernatural vs. science fiction. I will tag books with multiple genres, and I also tag which ones were from book clubs. My book logging here led me to find letterboxed, which is pretty much goodreads for movies.

Trystan wrote: "i finished City of Zirdai, and now am reading my penultimate Sidney Sheldon, The Sky Is Falling

QOTW: my shelves are rather simplistic - my shelves are the years I read the books. my reading chall..."
If you go to "My books" and click "reading stats", it will give you a count of books by year. When you click details, it shows you the book covers you've read by rating and the shortest and longest. This is one of my favorite goodreads features to have a little pictorial graphic summary of each year's books by rating.

@kathy - thank you! That is fascinating and I never noticed that before either. Now I know and will click that link much more often! I just don't spend that much time on GR exploring the features and looking beyond whatever I'm doing.

@sheri this was a great QOTW because I learned so much.

Kathy, yeah, that's a neat little feature, but I didn't know that existed until only like a few years ago. so I still have my shelves. it makes it fun for my featured shelf to be "this year's books" :)