EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello!

I hope everyone is having a good week. Things are hot again (and still dry) here in New England. Summer is drawing to a close soon.

I did not have any finishes this week. I'm close to finishing The Last Original Wife. There's a lot of things irritating about this book but I'm now close to the end and invested so I will finish but it is not very good. I'll write more when I actually finish.

I'm enjoying my next audiobook A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor. These are Hank Green's books and they have been fun. It is current-day sci-fi. This one is over 50% longer than the first one (at least in audiobook, 15 hours compared to 9 hours). I recommend these two books for light enjoyable sci-fi. I am about 1/3 of the way done.

That's it for me this week. No finishes. @Rebecca, I did check out Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks and have it from the library. That is next up for me.

QOTW:
(Making this one up myself this week) What are some books you read when you were younger that were wildly age inappropriate? Not necessarily inappropriate content, just unexpected to be reading it at that age.

I have a couple. The one that really stands out to me is Papillion. That is the memoir of a French man (wrongly supposedly) convicted of murder. He escapes from a penal colony in French Guinea. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read this. I do remember it being a slog for me. I read it because my brother read it and was talking about it at the time (he's 6 years older than me). It was probably not a good choice for me at that age.

Another, but probably less outside the norm would be the entire John Jakes Bicentennial series. It started with The Bastard and there were 8 novels ending with The Americansfollowing the same Kent family members from prior to the Revolutionary War up to the 20th century. I started reading all of those in my early teens too. It was the start of a period of my reading a lot of historical fiction.

Funnily I used to read the John Jakes books listening to Abba's Greatest Hits album and some of the song lyrics would start to meld with the story in my brain.

I read a lot of short stuff this week because I waited too long to put in my library requests.

Roast Beef Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney - This was a public domain recommendation from the Epbot Discord. It's about a divorced woman who works in traveling sales. The publication date is 1913, but it's pretty clearly a collection of short stories, so it's possible they were written earlier. It's funny and tender, and unlike Strong Female Character historical fiction, no one can claim that the protagonist is anachronistic! The author also wrote Show Boat and a bunch of other things that were made into movies, so I'll be watching for those to come into the public domain over the years.

Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome - This companion novella to Lock In was part of a Tor giveaway. At this point in time, the primary interest for me was the author's 2014 conception of a viral pandemic. I was pretty impressed with what he got right, although he kind of glosses over some aspects, and there are some convenient circumstances for plot reasons. But, like, for one of the characters I went, "Oh OK, that's Ed Yong."

Convenience Store Woman - I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this, and now I have read it and I'm still not sure. It's a Japanese book, so you have the issue of translation being necessarily imperfect and also of cultural context/expectations. I guess it's supposed to be a kind of darkly funny commentary on conformity.

QOTW: I thought about this for a minute, and the only thing I came up with is This Life by Sidney Poitier. I read it in either elementary or middle school for a Black History or biography assignment, and it starts off with his childhood in the Bahamas and his, uh, exploits in the chicken shed (with the chickens as well as with a girl). I could've done without that at that age.

@rebecca - I loved Lock In and Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome. Those (and Head On) are some of my favorite Scalzi books. I read them in 2018 or maybe very early 2019. I haven't reread them since pandemic but they were top of mind when it hit.

It's been so hot around here, I'm mostly only had the energy for reading comics and lighter fare since the last check-in.

Finished:
The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil A Rún, Volume 5
The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Volume 6
The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Volume 7
Heartstopper: Volume Four
Noragami: Stray God, Vol. 24
The King's Beast, Vol. 7
Komi Can't Communicate, Vol. 20
Honey So Sweet, Vol. 1

Currently reading:
I'm about halfway through The Girl in the Tower. Really enjoying it so far.

QOTW: I was reading adult mysteries and romance novels around 10 years old, thanks to the library and my grandma's Harlequin subscription. I think I first read Dracula when I was around 13-14, going through my teen vampire phase. I discovered Anne Rice around that time, and I picked up one of her erotica books at the library, thinking it was more Anne Rice vampire stuff. (It was originally released under a pen name, but this edition proclaimed 'Anne Rice' on the cover.)

Visiting family in Colorado this week, so I've had a lot of reading time!

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body was excellent - raw, honest, and vulnerable. (CW: rape, disordered eating)

Then I ripped through the first two books of the Hollows series by Kim Harrison (Dead Witch Walking and The Good, the Bad, and the Undead). The first has been sitting on my kindle for years and although I only rated it 3 stars, it intrigued me enough to download the next one from the library, which was stronger. I definitely plan to continue the series, but my loan for The Ten Thousand Doors of January just came in so I'll read that first.

QOTW: Hm. I can't really think of anything off the top of my head. I was always a fairly advanced reader so I'm sure there was something?