2: Dune by Frank Herbert

Very entertaining. I wasn't sure how much I'd like the sci-fi genre, but now I'm excited to read the 5 other books that are now on-route.

I did watch the 1984 Dune, but haven't seen the 2021 Dune, though the casting looks pretty good.

I won't be done with it today, but within the next two weeks I'll have Orderly and Humane finished, slow start but once this dense book is finished I should speed up.

The Haunted inn by michelle Dorey

How to build Self - discipline by Martin Meadows,

The Fungus by Harry Adam Knight (it's pretty excellent sci-fi horror ,if i say so myself would definately recommend it if you like horror movies of that era like "The Stuff"

Now as for a book I couldn't get into It would have to be "Catcher in the Rye"

12) Log Cabin Block Basics by Jean Ann Wright

A nice, simple to the point book about log cabin quilts and how to construct squares. There are 3-variations but my focus is on the full and half-block. I especially like how everything is broken down including the amount of fabric needed for planned projects.

13) Artful Log Cabin Quilts by Katie Pasquini Masopust

While it's a nice read, I'm nowhere near the patience level needed to accomplish any of proposed creative tasks. That said, they're still pretty good.

14) The Empire Star Block by All American Crafts, Inc

A neat little Dollar Tree find. It's a small, 30-page book with a sampling of quilt themes and block modifications. Trying to get ideas right now for the type of quilt/quilts I want to make for gifts.

1. Eve - Cat Bohannon
2. What's Gotten Into You - Dan Levitt
3. The Murder Wheel - Tom Mead
4. The Whole Truth - Jim Peebles
5. Death and the Conjuror - Tom Mead

I read The Witcher series last year and enjoyed them immensely, as well as Bram Stoker's Dracula, which was good as well. Then I watched Rise of Empires Ottoman Season 2 on Netflix which is about Mehmed II and his war with Vlad the Impaler, and one of the historians made a funny dismissive comment about who Vlad actually was and how he's overshadowed by the myth because some Irish guy made up a character about him.

I have this on my list this year for October, looking forward to it.

My January count:

January

1: Honor and Renown by Glynn Stewart

2: Kitty Cat Kill Sat by Argus

3: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

4: Witch King by Martha Wells

Finished my first book of the year

I read half of another similar book but there's only so much of this self-help shit I can absorb. It got pretty samey as it dragged on and many of the points were just general mental health stuff and not really specific to the topic.

Oh well, I did find some value in it. Time to never think about narcissistic abuse this way again. The online communities that talk about this stuff are full of people just shouting the buzz words at each other but no real discussion or tips for improvement. Everyone's situation is unique and their understanding of narcissists differs. I don't think there's going to be much help anyone can offer so it's just time for some slightly more pointed trial and error in dealing with the ex. It was good to know I was already doing many of these things, and I got some great tips on shutting down conversations, at least. I'll be applying these strategies when I go to a pediatrician appointment for kiddo next week.

LITFAM UPDATE: NEW GAME PLUS EDITION

What's up gamer girls? Hope you've been grabbing 2024 by the roots of the mane because it's already tryna up and gallop away, and it's difficult enough reading on horseback to begin with. What?

Anyway that gray matter must be increasing after all given this year's lineup of actually very sensible goal counts (wtf) and respectable progress toward them, while also starting right out the gate with more readers than we ended the previous year with. Things are already looking good in tome town and the year still stretches ahead like a field of untread snow. Keep turnin' those pages. Also all mistakes are actually esoteric literary codes.

Top Fam:

1. @argile (16)

2. @TopazAzul (14)

3. @Asandir (10)

@argile @Asandir @Atlas @AxolotlGav @CappyCatII @Darklion0 @detergent1 @door88 @DrSevenSiezeMD @Frontlined-Backend @Ganon-Dorf @Gimmick @GonzaloAtWork @Haggard @JerseyWildcard @JJBoltonNG @Joltopus @Malachy @OlTrout @OneThousandMeeps @Pingu @Prinzy2 @Sheik13LoZ @SlutasaurusRex @TecNoir @TehPoptartKid @The-Great-One @TopazAzul @UnderWhirl @Urichov @Yomuchan @ZJ

Thanks for the update! Seeing +2 next to my name right from the start is so nice. Should be quite a lot easier to keep up with my reading goals this year. I really felt burnt out by all those dime novels (even though they are quite well written for a dime novel!). Reading only 1 or 2 per month is a lot better for my mental health.

Oh shit!

so far I finished:

• The name of the wind

...

Aaaaand I started "reading"

• Treasure island

Finished:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Demigod Files

Started: Demigods and Monsters

5. Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski

Finished the second short story collection last night. Just as fantastic as The Last Wish. I'm hoping to jump into Blood of Elves today. I also found out last night that my copy of Dracula is roughly 130 pages fewer than the standard page count. I was curious why every page seemed packed with information. It's nice to have a smaller page count, but Lord, it makes it feel like a slog to get through.

I also have some H.P. Lovecraft short stories on Project Gutenberg I'm hoping to get into this week. I'll probably provide some thoughts on them here, but I don't think I would count them officially since they are quite short.

Turns out the last like 12 pages or so were just a commentary on the book, so I really only had to read like 8 pages to finish. Shit, if I'd known that then I'd've just tried to get it done in January itself. Anyways...

The Girl Who Leapt Across Time: A fairly easy read. The main character is Yoshiyama Kazuko, a girl who one day gains the ability to jump across time and space when she faints after smelling a lavender-like chemical in her school's science lab. She doesn't find out about this until after much later, though, and only thanks to an unusual set of circumstances that ended up occurring. Regardless, unlike most protagonists, she doesn't like her newfound abilities since she doesn't want to be regarded as a freak of nature to be examined! To do that, though, she needs to jump back to the day of the incident in the science lab, and try to confront the person who put that chemical in the lab. Who could it be, and what could they want from Kazuko?

The entire story is rather short, at about 116 or so pages (give or take) in the edition I read. Most of the events in the story are limited to the course of a few days, and aside from a few chapters, there's nothing much particularly going on in terms of action. However, the descriptions and the way that tension is built up is commendable, and at points I wanted to continue reading despite being exhausted. However, (SPOILERS) near the end the story takes a rather strange turn in both vocabulary and pace -- from being filled with relatively common daily-life vocabulary for most of the story, near the last few chapters it feels like a completely different book altogether -- and although it has a realistic ending, it feels a little cut short. There definitely was potential to continue the story from the culprit's side of the story, but it was unfortunately omitted. (/SPOILERS)

I would recommend this book, especially if you're looking to learn vocabulary for things that you don't quite normally encounter enough in daily life, but would still occur from time to time. I should point out though that the way the characters speak are possibly a bit dated, and may sound somewhat stiff by modern standards. Also, the side characters present in the story seem to serve a very limited role -- and once it's over, they aren't really mentioned much anymore. Although it's not necessary to shoehorn them in wherever possible, they felt somewhat 1-dimensional. It's worth knowing that if you enjoy stories with deep character development -- you won't find that for the most part here for the side characters at least.

Lastly, I suppose this is common to all stories but it bears mentioning just in case: keeping track of the characters' names is hard! Eventually you get it, but at first I a) didn't know Kazuko was a girl and b) frequently confused Kazuko with Kazuo, especially when they were being referred to by their first name.

5: Chimera's Star by Glynn Stewart

It's taken like 14 books but Stewart is finally exploring some mysteries he tossed in the original Sharship Mage book... the aliens that created mages and magic through a brutal eugenics experiment on Mars. I'm excited for the next book that's set to be released this summer.

2. Wink - Phoebe Eclair-Powell

After reading a segment from this script for my uni auditions, I thought it would be a good read to know in context.

But my god... Was it so hard to look away.

To put it best, it follows two silo train wrecks of humanity, the porn-addicted Year 11 Mark and the unsatisfied-with-everything-yet-has-enough French teacher John.

Set in South London, the playscript explores the limits of how the internet has changed young lives: manipulation, catfishing, and skewering the perception of a "perfect life".

It was with Mark's obsession with pornography, with his skewered objectifying view of women, that he tries to steal John's partner, Claire, into his own. As such, he creates an identity, a financially successful banker named "Tim", that he thinks would make Claire fall head into heels with him...

It's a heavy script to read as it showcases the damaged-side of youth today, particularly British youth.

I would recommend it enough, though it's only available online. It's a short read that takes about 2 hours (well for me at least).

6: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

I really liked Nettle & Bone so I queued up the audiobook of another T.Kingfisher book to listen to with the wife in the car. We enjoyed it. There was some absurd humor in a 14-year-old baker being the last hope of a city about to be attacked by an invading army. Mona has to use her only magical skill she has, power over baked goods, to somehow save everyone she cares about.

6. Dracula by Bram Stoker

Just finished up Dracula a few minutes ago. I enjoyed it for the most part, I can only imagine how a reader in 1897 would have felt reading this without all these preconceived notions of Dracula and vampires in general. The ending did seem a bit quick and probably could have been fleshed out more but I still enjoyed it. A classic for a reason is the best way to describe Dracula.

4. How To Win Friends and Influence People – A self-help business book from 1936 that is still a best seller. Turns out, the two major pieces of advice are being courteous to people and being less negative. Not groundbreaking stuff anymore, but it clearly works when applied correctly. Most of the advice is still applicable to the modern day; the “smiling while on the phone” does work in my job, to an extent. The book makes it clear it is about “winning” friends for opportunities, not “making” them, though it still advises to make genuine relations. The rest of the book was clearly dated, written in the 1930s, with references to events and people from between world wars. It can’t be avoided but it still takes me out of it when the author writes about President Harding and John D Rockefeller Jr like they’re recent figures.

5. Look Out for the Little Guy – Apparently, the biography written by Ant-Man and seen in Ant-Man 3 turned out to be real. The book has Scott explaining what happened to him across his appearances in the MCU, and he only covers events that appear on-screen. Very little book-original scenes are featured. There is some decent advice about being more confident and being aware of one’s own vulnerabilities despite having no superpowers.

6. Old Man’s War - Sci-fi military book about senior citizens getting a new lease on life and joining a space army. The book follows a man through training, going on missions, and raising up the ranks. There is a lot of text on how the future tech and body enhancements worked, while the story itself is a bit grim on the horrors of war and critical of the military industry complex. The sections that described how various alien species were treating captured humans like cattle was disturbing to read through.

Does anyone else face difficulties reading vertical text quickly? The current reader app I'm uses formats epubs to display text vertically, and I think my reading speed dropped like a stone because of that -- from about 6 pages per hour to 2, which is terrible given how it shouldn't be a hard read. To be fair, those times are against two books so I can't say whether I'll go back to 6 per hour if I change it to read horizontally, but I sure do hope it's greater than 2 or else I'm in huge trouble, since the current book I'm reading is about 241 pages and I'm probably 5 or so pages in at most.

First time, put me down for 12!

Finished 4th book Demigods and Monsters.

@Frontlined-Backend have you had the chance to read The Pragmatic Programmer? I'd like your input if you have.

Finished 5th book. Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice - Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Olivia Gatwood. Illustrations by Theodore Taylor III. A collection of poems.

Volume 1 of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I've already seen the series but I'd heard there were aspects of the writing that didn't translate to screen. I was expecting some particularities of language and those were there (choose is chuse, for example, and surprise is surprize) but the one I didn't expect was that the book comes with citations referring to works that don't exist. The characters are quite simple but there's a delightfully theatrical air to the way they carry on. Excited for volume 2, though I'm gonna take a break for some other book for now, mainly because an 800-ish-page hardback is quite the unwieldy thing to be hauling around.

Finished 6th book. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Geschichten aus der Geschichte (literally Stories from history)

It's a book written by authors who run a podcast of the same name. Last week they released episode 438, so I guess you can say it's enjoyed a little bit of success.

The format: each week one of the hosts tells a little story, and the other one doesn't know what the story will be. The book tells 20 stories about various topics. Each story about 5-6 pages long. So it doesn't go much in depth, but it's an easy read and they always add a "further reading" at the end, if you are interested in learning more about the topic.

Very interesting book.

I finished Orderly and Humane, what a greatly detailed account of the German expulsion from the recovered territories after WW2. The title is an antonym, as the entire process was anything but orderly or humane, and it takes it's name from I believe article 13 of the Potsdam agreement if I'm remembering correctly.

Not sure what I'm reading next, but I plan on reading the Wheel of Time sometime this year.

I've decided to give in and start counting audiobooks. It feels a little bit like cheating, but the majority of my time at work, I can listen to things on my phone while I'm working, so I figure I can get a lot of reading done that I've wanted to do for awhile. Next I'll be telling you about...

Stoker, B. (2020). Dracula [Audiobook]. Narrated by Mark Gatiss. Penguin Audio. (Original work published 1897)

You can check your local library.

Some libraries offer digital books and audiobooks through the Libby and Hoopola apps. You would just need a library card.