EPBOT Readers discussion

Hi all,

Hope everyone is having a good week! It's been a weird weather mix, keeps going from sunny and almost spring like to cold and now it's snowy today but it'll be warm and sunny again tomorrow with mid 40's next week. I have a concert tomorrow night, downtown. Hopefully all the snow is gone then!

This week I finished:

Fugitive Telemetry - Finished murderbot, then ran out of murderbot. (system collapse still has too long of a hold for a re-read and I really did just read it last month)

Heir of Uncertain Magic - felt the need for some cozy fantasy since i ran out of murderbot. This wasn't quite as good as The Keeper of Enchanted Rooms, but i still liked it. I think the last one just came out this week.

Currently reading:

Starter Villain - very much enjoying so far, but not very far in yet.

The Leftover Woman - still plugging away at this. Bit of tough going. I liked the other two books I read by this author. It's not exactly that i don't like this book. I like the overall story, but I wish it was all told from Jasmine's perspective. Every single time it switches over to Rebecca, i get annoyed and end up putting it down for a couple days and i get reluctant to start listening again because i know i have to pick up in her annoying spot that made me put it down in the first place. Maybe if i'd have gotten the print it'd have been easier to skim through it. It's not really the voice actor's fault, I don't think. It's just the way the character is written, is to be THAT kind of character.

QOTW: Borrowing from popsugar this week: If you were going to publish a book (or have published) would you use your real name or a pen name?

I would probably use my real name, but use my maiden name. There's some chance that my husband would also choose to publish some day and I wouldn't want us ending up confused with each other since ours would probably end up in the same sci fi/fantasy section of a bookshop.

Happy Thursday!

Woke up this morning to a light dusting of snow and now it's pouring down rain. Make up your mind, weather!

Finished:
ASAP by Axie Oh - 4 stars - for Popsugar's book about K-pop. I needed some cute fluff and this delivered.

Blackout by Dhonielle Clayton et al. - 3 stars - for Popsugar's book that takes place over the course of 24 hours. More cute fluff. I guess for Valentine's Day I was just in the mood for easy, fluffy reading. This is a YA anthology written by 6 Black YA authors telling interconnected Black love stories that all happen during one blackout in New York City. Some were a little too instalove but overall I enjoyed it.

Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman - 3 stars - for Popsugar's collection of at least 24 poems. Some of the poems were hard to follow on audio, but I found some of them very powerful, especially towards the end. I might read it again when I can get my hands on a digital print copy.

Comics & manga:
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 8
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 9

Currently reading:
Whiteout by Dhonielle Clayton et al. - for Popsugar's book set in the snow. Take the same authors and concept as Blackout that I described above, but move it to Atlanta, Georgia, and set it instead during a snowstorm that shuts down the city.

Upcoming/Planned:
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher- for Popsugar's book from a genre you typically avoid

This Day Changes Everything by Edward  Underhill for Popsugar's fiction book by a trans or nonbinary author

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei - for Popsugar's book written by an incarcerated or formerly incarcerated person

QOTW:
I think I would probably use a pseudonym, just because my full name is one of the most common first names and one of the most common last names in the US. Just a quick search on GR yields at least five authors with some variation on my name with different middle names or initials just on page 1 of search results.

First week of the new Boox! It seems good so far.

The Case of the Late Pig - This is one of the "Queens of Crime" I haven't really read. Per Wikipedia, her detective character is "thought to be a parody of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey" and her earlier books "focused less on methods of murder or the formal strictures of the whodunit and more on mixing possibilities together." I saw a recommendation somewhere of this one, which is later in the series and does in fact whodunit decently, but I found the detective somewhat irritating and I don't think this is my new favorite author.

How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers - This was going around social media recently and my sister also texted me about it. The author draws a bird and a plant to look as similar as possible, and then provides a short, humorous poem about how to distinguish them (color, sound, behavior, spelling). I got it from Gutenberg and found it amusing (as my sister said, "It's short, but it's free!)

Murder and Magic - I saw this in a discussion of whether sff mysteries can work well. It's short stories in an alternate history with magic, in which the author goes on a lot about how the change in history led to the current geopolitical situation and also about how the magic works, but I found it odd to be ostensibly in the 1960s but with gaslamp-style tech (barring a few modernities obtained by magic, like phones and refrigerators) and a feudal social order (with a jarring reference to a raid by "red barbarians" in the New World). At least one of the mysteries was fair play via a magician assuring the detective that no magic had been used in the room, which... is not a very satisfying argument for the genre.

QOTW:
If I were to publish a book, the most plausible scenario would be nonfiction, and I don't think pseudonymity is big in that genre. I did discover once while anagramming that I can take my full name, pull out "a novel by", and make a reasonably passable name out of the rest of the letters. In the extremely unlikely event of my publishing a novel, that would be very tempting.

I am trying to make more of an effort to check in here this year. Last year was a little bit rough with reading.

finished reading :
The Best is Yet to Come by Debbie Macomber
Always Dakota by Debbie Macomber

she's kind of a comfort author for me. I loved the first book, I didn't realize the second was the third or fourth book in a series so I was a little bit confused by the side plots. It ended up just ok.

Currently reading

Can't Spell Treason without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

Inheritance by Christopher Paolini (audiobook) - husband and I are listening to this together.

The Girl from the Other Side volume 5 came in from my library hold.

QOTW: I would probably use my own name if I published something. I am comfortable with my name, I kept my maiden name when I got married and I don't see using a pseudonym.

Hello everyone!

This week I finished one of the free kindle romance novels I downloaded at the beginning of the year. These have been really hit or miss. I had one major miss also this week. The book I actually finished was Falling for Dr. Nelson. For these books giving them 3 stars is actually really good.

I then started and DNF'ed Pilgrim's Pie. It was not good. It was a time travel book that I couldn't even tell the character traveled in time. All of sudden he maybe did. The story was about the Wampanoag's in New England and then talks about them wearing turquoise, a rock from the southwest! Then in two successive sentences there were grammatical errors, on top of other intermittent errors. It just drove me nuts and I couldn't go on.

I'm now reading Coming Home. It is mediocre so far but no-stress reading before bed.

I'm still listening to Rock Paper Scissors for neighborhood book club. It is kind of in the thriller genre, not something I typically read. I'm about halfway and the characters are interestingly getting creepier.

QOTW:
I've been a co-author on a few technical books during my career. Non-fiction I'd definitely use my name. I would probably use my name for fiction as well. I don't see me ever writing fiction.

Hi all-
Two finishes for me this week. The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science is by one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Sam Kean. I got my copy signed by him in the fall when he was the keynote speaker at a conference I was attending. He's an excellent storyteller!

The other was Killers of a Certain Age, and I'm off to share my thoughts on the book club thread :)

QOTW: I guess I would use my real name? I'm not a writer and have never even considered publishing something some day. I've presented at a conference or two, and am a featured teacher leader in Intentional Moves: How Skillful Team Leaders Impact Learning (I was trained in teacher leadership by the author and had the privilege of working one on one with her as a leadership coach for a year), and my name is on all that stuff.