Not towards my goal but I did listen to most of the Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells (the author of the murderbot diaries) and highly recommend it. Eyeball reading, maybe not listening reading. The last book in the main story switched narrators after leaving off on a cliffhanger. Usually a narrator change doesn't bother me but it absolutely killed the vibes this time. So Harbors of the Sun will probably be on my update for next month. Read in my own head with the character voices from the original narrator, somewhat angstily. I don't think I'd be mad if the he wasn't so good. I'll probably even look through what else Christopher Kipiniak has narrated for my next listens, I liked him that much.

Confusing I still want to tell people about audiobooks when I don't count them for my own goal? Yeah probably. I'd have hit my goal 3 times by now though. I still want to challenge myself to take time and sit down with my books.

But yeah everything but the first two books of that series is "free" with membership on audible right now.

Not sure if I want to set a goal but I'd like to come back and give my updates about what I've read.

1st book of the year was The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

I actually have never seen the movie before reading it but have heard good things about it and the book so I wanted to give it a shot. I've been a bit nervous about committing my time outside of my comfort zone of Ursula K Le Guin and Terry Pratchett cause like... reading books takes a LONG time and a lot of focus from me so sunk cost is scary. The endorsement by Ursula on the cover really eased me into this one though.

An incredibly earnest and exceptionally fantastical fantasy where magic was described as one would describe a dream upon waking. Schmendrick's ramblings are all entertaining and there's such a liveliness to all the characters.

[spoiler]

I think most interestingly is how pensive I felt about prince Lir and his romance with the unicorn at first, which then was answered by the narrative which agreed that it was like a death for not only the unicorn but to Lir as well, who yearned for purpose and passion, which was provided not by a person but the idea that the Unicorn represented.

[/spoiler]

Great read, though the hints of modernity always threw me off like a prince reading a magazine, or schemdrick being offered a taco. They came off as silly fun though.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms by Fumiyo Kouno for March

READING CHALLENGE UPDATE: MARCH

Changes:

• Added @ninjamuffin99 with a goal of 24
• Added @SourCherryJack with a goal of 20
• @TecNoir's goal increased from 10 to 83
• Awarded bonus phantom books to @Malachy

@Aalasteir @AbstractOutliers @AngelLOL123 @Asandir @Atlas @AypS @detergent1 @door88 @Dr-Freebase @Featherwaite @Ganon-Dorf @Gimmick @Haggard @Jackho @JerseyWildcard @Malachy @MetalSlayer69 @ninjamuffin99 @ObscuraArcanum @OneThousandMeeps @Pingu @Prinzy2 @PudgieDaFrog @SlutasaurusRex @SourCherryJack @StrangInk @SteveMaddenFootball @TecNoir @TopazAzul @TurtleWaffle @Yomuchan @ZJ

8. The Knight of the Swords - Michael Moorcock

I love me some Moorcock (lol) but man this book was BO-RING.

5 books for me. I already read Uzumaki and The Art of Pink Floyd The Wall, so that's three left. I'm halfway through another already.

I finished When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, and my god what a book. At one point the reichsbank couldn't print money fast enough, so they developed new techniques to print more money faster, all the while saying that printing money had no effect on why it was inflating and blaming it on the exchange of the dollar and pound sterling going up.

That's only one particular fact, the book is full of human misery as people stopped using money and started selling silver and grand piano's to farmers for food, as farmers stopped taking money because the amount they charged would be worthless in a week once more money was printed, and this only got worse as shops started changing prices daily, to on the hour.

A lot of people are also unaware that the communists were active in Germany at the time, but unions had effectively lost negotiating power as conditions got to a point where they didn't even know what to lobby for as whatever wages they asked for would be outdated before the paperwork was signed, which played a role in why the communists couldn't get people behind them quickly or at scale; no one wanted to join a movement that was paralyzed to ineffectiveness, and when inflation came to an end bankruptcies skyrocketed, so there wasn't much of a bourgeois to point to as enemies when lots of them were standing in lines waiting for the dole like everyone else.

Overall, this book is a good overview of the monetary policies mixed with a lot of conditions on the ground as it includes diary entries from Austrains and Germans, as well as British government personnel.

While I wait for book 8 in the Wheel of Time, and one of RFK's books to arrive, I'm picking up a book about how two codes were cracked in WW2, material which I'm already somewhat familiar with.

Done reading these books:

30. Der schlauste Mann der Welt, Andreas Eschbach, 224 pages

31. Das also ist mein Leben (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), Stephen Chbosky, 288 pages

32. Todesstrom (The Ruin), Dervla McTiernan, 464 pages

33. Believe Me, JP Delaney, 416 pages

34. When you're ready this is how you heal, Brianna Wiest, 240 pages

Der schlauste Mann der Welt:

Jens Leunich doesn't have many material goods - just as much as fits into two briefcases. Now, his life is bound to end in ten days and he plans to write down how he managed to spend the last years living in expensive hotels by gaining a massive amount of money through illegal means.

Solid, funny book.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

Charlie is 15 years old and in highschool and the book contains letters he is writing to an unnamed friend, similiar to a diary format. He talks about his worries and problems, particularly with fitting in and love.

Great book. Highly recommended. Of course, also read The Catcher in the Rye.

The Ruin:

Back in 1993, policeman Cormac Reilly first day on the job faces him with a harrowing situation: two evidently neglected children, Maude and Jack, are in a house, her mother is liying dead in her bed upstairs, due to an overdose of heroine.

Now, 20 years later, one of the kids, Jack, allegedly committed suicide. But Maude, who spent the majority of the last 20 years in Australia and was seperated from Jack and just recently returmed to England, finds inconsistencies but the Police is unwilling to investigate further.

When Cormac Reilly is asked to look into the death of Jack and Maudes mother, he too can't ignore that the investigation into Jacks case is faulty - can he find the truth, even though he can't expect help from his colleagues?

Very good book.

Believe Me:

Claire has to find ways of financing her acting studies - without a Greencard her options are limited and she ends up getting hired by concerned wifes to flirt with hired men to expose them as unfaithful (or not).

One of those jobs ends badly when the wife of Patrick Fogler is found dead one day later. The police is convinced that Fogler is the murderer and even a serial killer.

To prove this, they hire Claire to attract him, so that he lets his guard down and admits to his gruesome killings.

Good, very tense book. Stressful read.

When you're ready this is how you heal:

Book with several essays, detailing how you need to allow to feel pain to start a healing process and growth.

Great book.

hey Jackho, first of all, thank you for hosting this challenge again!!!!

yesterday I finished my first book this year: Kicking Away the Ladder, by Ha-Joon Chang.

the idea of the book is interesting, and it has some cool facts laid out, but I didn't like it overall. it has too much "to learn more about this, check the works of this author" and "this will be explained shortly or in chapter X". the book feels more like a hypertext, but without the hyperlinks. I feel like there is some kind of propaganda going on the book, but I'm too dumb to underneath it. the way it is organized, it is hard to memorize and keep track of what is being laid out. I learned lots of new words, but there were also grammar errors occasionally.

next book I will read is about borderline personality disorder

Finished reading No. 6 #5.

The book continues with Nezumi and Shion's infiltration into the Correctional Facility. We find out more about what's going on from Safu's perspective, along with some potential foreshadowing regarding Shion's character. There's a couple fight scenes, and the depiction of the Correctional Facility is itself rather grotesque. There's a lot of detail throughout the book and in contrast with the previous books, there isn't as much of a focus on internal monologuing, at least as far as Nezumi and Shion are concerned (not to say that it isn't there -- especially in the case of Safu).

Was a relatively quick read. 7/10. Moving on to #6 in the series next.

11: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Scalzi's latest goofy novel. It was fun and a quick, enjoyable read. My tiny quibble is I think it had too many POV characters - I feel like it would have worked with either just a couple of POV characters each having a few chapters or different POV every chapter, but instead there were some recurring POV's and others were only given 1 chapter which made it feel like it was building up a longer story but you never really got that. But still good!

CSS Notes for Professionals

This is a massive cheat sheet for CSS. Since I'm dabbling in web design recently, I figured this would be a useful resource to have around. The notes themselves are a bit unintuitive at times, but having to experiment and do a bit of trial and error was a learning experience all by itself. And my F5 key got a lot of use for that, hawhawhaw!

The Art and Science of Writing a Scientific Paper by Devendra Mishra and Dheeraj Shah

I fancy myself as a somewhat unorthodox, self-educated scientist (I CAN DREAM DAMNNIT!), but I figured it wouldn't hurt to read up on the proper way to write a scientific paper. It'd be an improvement over how I take my notes - rambling this way and that with bookmarks everywhere for sure. This book has some good advice for quality control, organization and even provides insight on integrating photographs, charts and images taken by modern equipment.

Hi-jacking the thread very briefly to ask some of you keen-readers a question about e-readers;

Are they worth it? I've never used one!

That depends. Do you read often enough to make use of it? Are you struggling to find space for your dead tree books? Have you tried reading on your phone or tablet and it's straining your eyes?

I like my Kindle because it's a dedicated device with minimal distractions and keeps my ADHD addled brain focused on my reading. I also like that it has a more paper like texture to the screen and I hardly ever need to plug it in.

If you read a lot of books it is also very convenient to have all your purchases available instantly and there are ways to download library books for free too.

Is it worth it? If a $100-ish device that really only does one thing is expensive to you probably not but if you won't miss that much money then maybe it's worth a try. See if you can borrow a friend's for a few days to see how you like it.

I read a lot, I go to the library so I don't own most of the books I've read. My library also certainly doesn't allow e-book downloads, it's not that high-tech. I also don't have a smart phone or a tablet, so I can't really say if that "suits me" or not.

I could borrow a friends, but it's one of the older models with a keyboard. That's all I could have access to as a trial.

If your location in your profile is correct I believe you can borrow books through Libby/overdrive with a Kobo e-reader. Reddit posts seem to indicate Kindle is not well supported.

I never heard of that service before, seems neat! Either way I looked up my local library's postcode and it's not in the database.

I read most books with an e-reader (Tolino Shine 3) and vastly prefer reading books on that, as the backlight adjusts to the time of the day, I can change the font to a more easily readable one and most importantly, when I am almost done with one book, I have the next one available without being forced to carry multiple books with me.

Any E-book-reader with a backlight in the midrange price range should be worth it as long as you like reading. As my Tolino Shine 3 is slowly getting there in age, I am planning to likely pick up a Cobo Klara BW next.

Thanks for the reply, I've been trying to look into e-readers and it doesn't seem like there's anything that really does what i want anymore? I might be mistaken.

I'd like a physical keyboard, but the last Kindle with one of those was over 15 years ago.

I'd like an SD card slot, but again, seems to be a dying breed.

And if I get one with those 2 options, I have to sacrifice a backlight!

Someone please inform me if I'm completely ignoring something obvious. Thanks

Just finished reading "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder.

It was published 1981, and about the development of a computer at that time. I got this book way back in 2021, and I expected the book to be much different but it was still a good and pleasant read! Feels like a documentary, fun to read about the engineering passion that went into a computer, especially before the big personal computer boom that we know today.

I find it much easier to read and stay focused if I have music to listen to, originally I was listening to some VA-11 HALL-A prologue ost, but that wasn't cuttin it.

I landed on "The Expanding Universe" by Laurie Spiegel. Super early electronic synth music, it sorta sets the mood perfectly. Released in 1980, this album was likely being made at the same time as the Eagle computer's development from the book!

12: The Eternal Empire by Torsten Weitze

This book was a little odd to me. Maybe it was the translation but the story felt very orientalist to me - the Eternal Empire is obviously an "asian" culture (people primarily eat rice, which isn't found anywhere else in the world, they have paper walls, they have a very rigid class system and an empress running the country among many other things) and at one point the author or translator chose to point out people's skin tone is 'yellow' which was an ick moment for me. The story was also just not as strong as in the other books. Hopefully this was just a one-off because the other books have been pretty good and only a few chapters into the next book has it back to being a good read.

I suspect you don't really need these things. I have a ye olde kindle with a keyboard and the typing experience was always heinous from how tiny the keys are. The software keyboards on the newer ones are superior - and anyhow what are you expecting to type on there? Searching for a book title is all I ever use it for. If you're expecting to take notes on the thing while reading they're not optimised for that and you're better off just keeping a separate notepad beside it.

Since you can highlight very intuitively I tend to focus on that so as not to interrupt the reading, and after the fact flick through it to take notes on what I highlighted. Both typing on the device and switching from reading to typing is cumbersome.

Secondly, an SD card for what? If you have a non-kindle e-reader or a jailbroken kindle you can plug the device itself into any computer and it acts like one big storage drive to drag books onto. If it's a storage space concern, you can fit thousands of books into a few gigabytes.

Probably the most underrated feature of a vanilla kindle is the cloud component that isn't as locked-down as you would expect. If you have a book from a dubious source you can email it straight to your kindle where it's auto-converted and "just works" from there, being tied to your account. I can't tell the difference between books I purchased from amazon and ones I side-loaded this way. Storage is never a concern and you can delete and re-download books at your convenience. I used an android e-reader years ago and it was good but I ultimately lost all my highlights etc, on kindle even if the device gets destroyed all my books and highlights are in the cloud for as long as Bezos-Net sticks around.

This also means the kindle app on my phone is always synced, so I can get some reading progess in even away from the kindle and I can very quickly browse my highlights or find any bit from any book I've read on a whim via search. It leaves me feeling a tad naked when I'm reading a physical book instead. To answer your original question I think they're a good investment, especially now when most models are good and you can get one a couple gens old for cheap without sacrificing much. New model kindles tend to have barely any difference from the model they're replacing anymore.

I don't need the physical keyboard, but I do prefer it. The Kindle 3 is also one of the only Kindle models with a headphone jack, which is useful for me.

And I want an SD card for audio books, mp3 files and for filling up the Kindle with graphic novels and manga for my partner who primarily wants one to digi-tize there collection of books, which is a lot.

If I was just using text files, I'd agree with you. But I'm not.

In that case a regular phone or tablet will be way better. E-ink readers are really good for the focused reading of text and not much else. For comics they're black and white, relatively slow and the screens aren't very big, so any older gen tablet with a big screen would be better even with the screen glare (which could probably be solved with a matte screen protector). I read digital comics on an old iPad Pro if not on desktop, even manga is better just from the bigger screen.

For audio if I couldn't go with a phone I'd go with any cheapo MP3 player that differentiates books from music, but the iOS app Bound and android's 'Smart AudioBook Player' have a slew of customization options each and are really hard to beat. On Bound you can send your files to it wirelessly. Almost forgot Audible, which some YouTuber has probably shilled to you already, it's good too but a tad pricey.

I don't have a tablet or a phone and I don't want one. I'm specifically looking for e-ink readers.

She only reads black and white manga and from the PDF's we tested on the Kindle 3 I'm borrowing, they run fine. Page turning is fast, looks fine.

The MP3's work great too the speakers are surprisingly good, the only issue is storage.

Thanks anyway.

Done reading these books:

35. The Killer Profile (Profile K), Helen Fields, 416 pages

36. Das Mädchen an der Brücke (The Girl by the Bridge), Arnaldur Indriðason, 384 pages

37. Unsre verschwundenen Herzen (Our Missing Hearts), Celeste Ng, 400 pages

Profile K:

Midnight Jones (banger name) works for a company that specialises in psycholgical personality tests. One of the anymous profiles she analyses has extreme values - a so called Profile K, only rumoured to really exist and identifying the tested person as potential serial killer. Shortly after the test, several murders start happening in London and as neither the police nor the company she works for are willing to listen, Midnight has to identify and find the killer before he finds her.

Pretty good book that drags a bit.

The Girl by the Bridge:

Second book revolving around the retired policeman Konrád. This time, the grandparents of a missing woman contact and ask him to find their granddaughter. Sadly, he is too late, as he finds her dead, lying in a bed, seemingly from a drug overdose. While investigating, he also learns about the death of a young girl from decades ago, drowning, with her puppet nearby. The case was deemed a death of natural courses but Konrád finds inconsistencies and connections to the death of the young woman. Can he unravel all of this?

Good book. Massive improvement over the first book.

Our Missing Hearts:

Twelve years old Bird lives with his father in Harvard. Their life is heavily influenced by a set of laws called PACT, aiming to "protect American culture", especially from "Chinas influence" as China is blamed for the massive financial crisis that the USA went through. As he is half-asian and his mother is asian and became the lead figure of protest against this law, his mother decided to leave Bird and his dad three years ago, so that Bird wouldn't get taken away and brought into another family.

Now, Bird recieves a letter with a picture of a bunch of cats - he remebers that his mom read a fairytale about cats to him when she was still home and this small hint leads him down a path of trying to find his mother.

Good book, with realistic made up future events. *looks at current tarifs*. Oh well.

I’ve been helping others with literacy. Reading to kids, lots of very short books.

Dr. Seuss , is still popular. Others:

• the bad seed
• the cool bean
• if you give a moose a muffin
• There’s a fly guy in my soup
• snowplace like home
• showdown at the fair

since they’re so short, the week could probably be combined to 1 entry. Assuming it counts, that is.

5. Neil Price - Children of Ash and Elm: a non-fiction look into the Norse peoples (aka Vikings) from various parts of Scandinavia from before the raid on Lindisfarne to after the cultural Christianization of the region.

6. Martha Wells - All Systems Red (re-read)

7. Martha Wells - Artificial Condition (re-read)

12. Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth – An examination of the various female figures in Greek mythology, as seen through a woman’s point of view and providing additional context from Ancient Greece and Rome. The author also writes how the goddesses are portrayed in modern works, so this may be the only time the musical flop Xanadu is given any kind of academic study. It is an informative read; it is funny to learn that Hestia, Goddess of the Home, was the one Greek god who wasn’t a spiteful jackass.

13. Starship Troopers – A sci-fi military book that got a very loose 90s movie adaptation. Emphasis on “military” because this book is very heavy on combat tactics, bureaucracy, and squad discipline, with speeches by a teacher/the author on how the military should or should not function. There are more pages dedicated to military doctrine than actual scenes of Mobile Infantry fighting the Bugs.

14. Michelle Remembers – a partly debunked account written by a psychiatrist about a woman who claimed to have been a victim of a Satanic cult when she was a child. The book helped sparked the Satanic Panic that occurred in the 1980s and targeted Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, and daycares. Anyway, there are some serious ethical breaches in the doctor/patient relationship, with the doctor getting too involved with Michelle’s personal life and physically holding her during sessions. The fact the two divorced their respective spouses and married each other after the book was published is a big red flag. The book, read via the Internet Archive, is not worth reading; it is mostly transcripts Michelle recounting violent scenes with dead babies, animals, and Satanists. The real-life aftermath of the book’s release is far more interesting and tragic, with many innocent people accused and lives ruined.

Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams

Finally, after several months and a trip to the Thriftbooks website to buy a replacement copy after losing my old one, I can say I've finished this little novel! I have a soft spot for xenofiction stories about stray cats ever since my days as a preteen Warrior Cats fan, so this book was right my alley. Had a lot of action, fantasy, world-building, and other fun things that make this a riveting read.

The Living and the Dead by Jason

A short but sweet comic by some Norwegian comic artist that has zombies and furries and shit. Very little dialogue in this one, but the silent movie styled visuals and black comedy make the story very engaging.