EPBOT Readers discussion

Hello Everyone,

I'm getting a post out there more or less on time this week. Life for me at the moment is in a groove and manageable. I hope this week is going well for all of you too.

I even have some finishes this week. I finally finished listening to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. I enjoyed this and I liked how it wrapped up the story even though it set up follow on stories. I enjoyed the character and her brashness while also being vulnerable.

I also finished a quick freebie from the Amazon Prime "improbable meets cute" collection, audiobook, With Any Luck. This was a short story, it was about 1 hour audiobook. It was a fine thing to complete while on a walk.

I also completed another "improbable meets cute" on my Kindle, Royal Valentine. Again, it was a no-thought-required chill short story that I could finish before bed in one night.

I started another one of the free romance books I got on my kindle at the beginning of the year, Be Brave with Me. I'm going to be ready for real books and non-fiction soon I think! I'm about 70% through this so while I'm not adding great literature to my list, I am getting through stories.

I have a few more of the Amazon short stories from both improbable meets cute and Obsession collections that I'll listen to before figuring out a real audiobook next.

QOTW:
What novel caused you the worst book hangover?

I had to look up what the internet thinks is a book hangover. Depending on how you interpret it, a bad hangover was caused by finishing a book I did not like that caused some amount of distress or depression. For me that would be The Four Winds. I read it all, for neighborhood book club, but did not like it and swore off Kristin Hannah after finishing it.

A different interpretation could be a book I enjoyed that I was sad to see it end because I enjoyed being in the land and didn't want it to be over. Thankfully there are many more of these. The Expanse books were like this. Similarly, lately The Thursday Murder Club books are like this. I want to stay in their world.

Long ago (late 1980s) I had that feeling about The Mirror of Her Dreams. I would limit my reading so that the book lasted longer. I don't think that book has aged well. Maybe sometime I'll reread it.

Happy Thursday!

Finished:
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna - 4 stars - for Popsugar's book where someone sleeps for 24 hours. I really enjoyed this. It was cute and gave me a similar vibe to T.J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea.

Lyorn by Steven Brust - 4 stars - not for a challenge. Another solid entry in the series, but definitely not the place to start. This one was fun, though, because it involved the main character hiding out in a theater that was rehearsing for a musical, and the author wrote lots of parodies of well-known Broadway songs.

Comics/manga:
Horimiya, Vol. 14
Horimiya, Vol. 15
Horimiya, Vol. 16
Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 2
Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 3
Komi Can’t Communicate, Vol. 29
Akane-banashi, Vol. 5

I am currently at 33/50 prompts for PopSugar (29/45 and 4/5).

Currently reading:
Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier - not for a challenge (yet) - so far, I'm really enjoying it, and it's a fast read.

Upcoming/Planned:
The library was generous with new releases...

Funny Story by Emily Henry - not for a challenge (yet)
Saint-Seducing Gold by Brittany N. Williams - not for a challenge (yet)
Blood Justice by Terry J. Benton-Walker - not for a challenge (yet)

QOTW:
Using the good interpretation (a book that really resonated with me that I didn't want to leave behind), the "worst" (best) was probably Little Thieves. I finished it for the first time and immediately wanted to reread it.

TGIF!!

Last week I finished Empire in Black and Gold and loved it. I just love falling in love with a new series that is fully complete so I will be able to just read straight through! I'll take breaks to read other books in between, but I'm really excited about this.

My other finish was an audiobook, Strong Female Character by Fern Brady. I'd initially downloaded it because she was hilarious on Taskmaster and I figured her memoir would be funny, and she does have a very funny turn of phrase, but it actually was quite intense as it was her story of growing up undiagnosed autistic in small-town Scotland. Highly recommended. I usually don't do audiobooks, but I make exceptions for the memoirs that are read by the author. I just loved listening to her Scottish accent.

QOTW:
I always interpreted book hangover as a good book I didn't want to finish. Generally, when that happens I need to make my next read something completely different, so it doesn't suffer by comparison. Most of Guy Gavriel Kay's books give me that feeling, also the three I've read by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

TGIF indeed!

A Marvellous Light - So I wanted to read the one with the parrot on a boat, but I was good and started at the beginning. This was very well-written with a reasonable magic sytem, but I am not big on secret cabals or whatever so I didn't love that aspect. I can now read the parrot-boat and then we'll see about the third.

Crow Lake - This was in a little free library and said "crow" so it came home with me. There were only two very brief mentions of crows; it is actually about the effects of a traumatic event on a family in a small town. It was done well except that I don't like the thing where the narrator says, "If we had known what was going on at the neighbors' at that time, maybe things would have been different," and then you don't find out what was going on at the neighbors' for multiple chapters. It has now been released back into a different LFL.

Spring and All - I actually like some of the William Carlos Williams stuff that people make fun of, so I thought maybe I'd enjoy his book. Unfortunately it is not a book of poetry; there are poems interspersed in it, but it is mostly a kind of personal manifesto about imagination and the meaning of art or something. They were kind of stream-of-consciousness essays that I would maybe call prose poetry, except that there was a section in which he discusses the difference between poetry and prose, and I didn't understand it (nor any of the other sections, frankly), so I don't know how he'd describe it. Some of the poems were all right but I think overall I like him less than I did before.

QOTW: It's funny we all have different interpretations of this! I would have said it's when you finish a book and have trouble reintegrating into real life, feeling sort of woozy and wiped out. That used to happen to me a fair amount as a kid, since I would read stuff straight through and get really immersed. I don't do that so much now and it hasn't really happened lately. The last time I remember wasn't even a novel: it was Torch Song Trilogy in college over a break. I was reading outside and then had to lie on the grass for a while, and one of the cleaning ladies was concerned for me.