EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi all,

Hope US folks had a good labor day weekend! I had a good weekend, but it's been a very migraine-y week. Meds seem to be working right now so getting a post in.

This week I finished:

The Hidden Palace - I hadn't really expected a sequel to the Golem and the Jinni, but it was good and I'm glad it happened. Used for book nerds book set before the advent of the internet.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - books & brew book for September. This was very meh for me. Sad in a too real but not really cathartic way. Just a bunch of toxic people, passing their toxicity down to the next generation and everyone around them. One of those "why does everyone seem to love this?" books. Used for book nerds book with a character that frustrates you, since basically all of them did.

You Should See Me in a Crown - this was a lot of fun, a good pick me up after the last one. used for popsugar book with the same title as a song, book nerds book about hope, read harder book set in the midwest, aty book with at least 6 words in the title.

Currently reading:

The Broken Kingdoms - audio book, will be for popsugar book with an author with the same zodiac sign

Final Girls - reading for popsugar tbr with ugliest cover. I don't have many totally horrible books that i own (which is what i'm considering my tbr), so went with one i don't particularly like that i felt like reading. It'll also be novella for book nerds.

QOTW:

In school did you like required reading? hate it? indifferent?

I did all the required reading, with the exception of Heart of Darkness. That one was so bad, even though it was short, I skimmed it just enough to do the project involving it/answer reading questions. (I re-read it a couple years ago for a reading challenge, it's still terrible, I missed nothing). But I rarely ENJOYED the books, and I was generally annoyed that they were taking up reading time better spent reading books I WANTED to read. I'm glad I'd already built a love of reading before the heavy required reading started up in middle school, or I might have grown to really dislike it. I really feel like a lot of schools just keep pulling from the same tired lists decades later, rather than really creating a reading syllabus that makes kids interested and excited to read and learn. Even now, most the time when i return to classics I find them just ok at best, and terrible at worst. Not saying there's zero value in them, but so many are by dead white men. I think some freshness could be introduced.

Since the last check-in, I have a few finishes.

Practical Magic was my Popsugar magical realism book. It was OK. I never really connected with the characters; I think it's because the writing style felt a little distant. It also felt like every romance, except maybe the one daughter who liked her best friend, was insta-love/lust, which irked me.

Some short stories I've been listening to through Realm: Fire in the Haze, The Fisher of Bones

And one manga: Noragami: Stray God, Vol. 18

I'm currently reading Archivist Wasp, which I've had on my TBR list forever, and was recommended in the Popsugar group for the book about forgetting prompt. It's interesting so far, but not what I was expecting. It's a sort of post-apocalyptic paranormal fantasy.

QOTW: There was some required reading I had in school that I really liked, but for the most part I was indifferent to bored with it. I almost always wound up reading ahead on assigned reading to get it out of the way so I could read better/more interesting books, but then I'd have to skim to review before having a test on it.

Some of the ones I remember liking at the time were Pride and Prejudice, Cyrano, and The Color Purple.

The ones I especially disliked... Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Although our class didn't read it, one of my grade school books was kind of like a Reader's Digest collection of other stories and books which had A Wizard of Earthsea by LeGuin in it, which was my first exposure to that story, so I guess in a roundabout way I can be grateful to required reading for that?

Short week, only one finish so far.

Thick: And Other Essays - This was okay. A couple of the essays were good, but some of the more academic stuff felt a little over my head.

QOTW: Whoops I was the kid who liked Wuthering Heights, heh.
I was usually pretty excited about the assigned readings, because hey, new books, but I also felt like spending so much time talking about them kind of ruined the experience. I would normally bring the book home and read the whole thing in one go (instead of "chapters 1 and 2" or whatever the assignment was). This was not so helpful when we then had to discuss what we thought might happen next and such. I remember I read A Separate Peace that way and I was shocked - SHOCKED! - when (view spoiler)[Finny died (hide spoiler)] until another part of my brain caught up and I realized I had kind of maybe known it was going to happen? And then I decided that maybe all that stuff about foreshadowing and symbolism wasn't just bunk, and I didn't blow through all the required books quite as fast.

I taught my first day of school today and I am totally wiped out - but as much as I was having a really hard time getting into the right head space to start the year, once my new students were in front of me I got my energy back. I teach 8th grade but this year I have a small 6th grade advisory group and they are just too cute!

Two finishes last week:
The Hod King, which was the best of the series yet - last book comes out in November, I believe, and I can't wait. If you like steampunk, get thee straight to a library or bookstore for Senlin Ascends!

We Are Satellites was the other finish, for the other GR group that I mod, and it was excellent. I've never read anything by Sarah Pinsker before, but I will definitely seek out more now. If anyone is interested, the author is hosting a Q&A thread about the book here!

QOTW: I had a love-hate relationship with required reading. I've always been a big reader, but when I was in middle school I disliked most of the books we had to read. I've never enjoyed literary analysis, and it often killed my enjoyment of a book to have to pick it apart. I do clearly remember the first time I actually liked a book I was required to read in 9th grade (oddly enough since you just mentioned it, it was A Separate Peace) and having a sudden realization that just because a book was required didn't automatically make it boring. My sophomore year in high school, I had to fiddle around with my schedule in order to fit in both choir and band (yep, I was one of those), so I ended up taking literature electives instead of the canon Western lit class that everyone else took. As a result, I missed out on a lot of the so-called "classics" that it seems everyone else has read. I have gone back as an adult and read some, and probably enjoyed them way more than I would have if someone had made me analyze them! Then my junior and senior years I took some lit electives (Russian lit and Modern German lit) from a teacher I adored, and I still have a lingering fondness for the Russians :)

Haha I hated A Separate Peace so much in school. Goes to show tastes are always different! I didn’t hate Tye Scarlet Letter as much as everyone else seemed to. But I didn’t like a lot of it. Catcher in the Rye, wasnt a fan. I didn’t like 1984 or of mice and men or animal farm either. I think a lot was the picking it apart, as mentioned. I picked the Fellowship of the Ring for a paper in middle school and by the time i was done I had no desire to read the other two. And I still haven’t to this day.

had a good labor day, i was off from my weekend job, so yaay! :D

I'm currently reading The Thousandth Floor, which is the first in a (typical) trilogy.

I've requested the next (book 5) in the Magic 2.0 series I've been reading, Out of Spite, Out of Mind XD

QotW: most i liked (And Then There Were None, My Name is Asher Lev, Lord of the Flies, Romeo & Juliet, Pygmalion), some i didn't understand at all (How Green Was My Valley), and yes, there were some i just didn't like (Grapes of Wrath, A Separate Peace).

in a weird kinda way, i guess in the end i did like it - when my kids were in school with grades (one's graduated college, the other is a junior in college), i was always curious to see what they were reading in English. some books i read while my (younger) daughter(s) were supposed to be reading them - Lord of the Flies (re-read), Reading Lolita in Tehran (I'm sure there were more, but I've forgotten them by now) XD

I finally finishedUlysses! What a relief. In the end, I didn't hate it, but I'm not sure it was fully worth the struggle. That said, it's tempting to re-read now that I have a better grasp of it. But I certainly won't be doing that anytime soon. I do feel like they probably didn't have to go to all the effort of banning it - you have to work so hard for the obscenity that it hardly seems worth it.

As a reward, I went straight on to Hope for the Best, and spent some time with my favourite time travelling historians. I could really do with reading the previous books since it's been a while and now at book 10 I'm a bit hazy on some of the details, but it's still an enjoyable read. And I've got two more to catch up on in the series, plus a new spin off series to look into (anybody reading the Time Police ones?)

Today I picked up Mr. Popper's Penguins for the Book Nerds children's classic prompt. I'd never read it before and, since I'm currently living in the land of penguins, it seemed like a fitting pick. It was a fun little read, if somewhat baffling.

QOTW: I don't actually remember much of my assigned reading, which I suppose doesn't bode well for how much I enjoyed it. There were definitely a few notable books though - Ender's Game was probably my first foray into sci fi, and it blew my little mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on the other hand was tedious, but has led to lifelong in-jokes with friends who also suffered through it. We did a lot of short stories, many of which have stayed with me in some way or another, often because they were mildly traumatic and very depressing in their themes. I never understood why there were so many thoroughly depressing works assigned in middle and high school. Does it aid in class control by damping down any high spirits?

Yeah I hadn't really thought about it, but in 7th grade we read Fahrenheit 451, Of Mice and Men, and Flowers for Algernon (with the sex pages ripped out). Not really an uplifting set of novels there. Bit of an issue with "serious literature" in general, I guess.

No finishes this week.

I am continuing Tiamat's Wrath. I am nearing 40% or so through it. Given it is the 8th book I am surprised at how consistent and good they all have been. Anyway, still enjoying listening to it.

I am slowly reading The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions. It is slow because I've picked up another book for IRL neighborhood book club. Reading this does make me want to volunteer for some kind of citizen science geology/paleontology excavation somewhere.

The book I started reading is Don't Ask Me Where I'm From. This will be for the local author prompt as it is written by someone in my town. This is a teen book. The author is having a local meeting at the end of the month when we'd normally meet so we're planning to attend (either in person or over zoom) that as our club meeting.

QOTW: I remember various assigned reading. My experience with AP English was sufficiently memorable that I advised my kids not to take it. Only thinking about it do I remember it though. I do not recall liking it all that much. I usually don't read too deeply into my books so all the symbolism stuff we had to do was just unpleasant.