Bit of a Nightmare Now

I am not happy with my country. Go Marchers!

The Book Date does a weekly roundup of what people are reading, want to read, or have read each week called It's Monday! What Are You Reading and I'm going to sign up. There's also a version that is kidlit focussed, and as I read a few of those (surprisingly few, actually), I check in with either Teach Mentor Text or UnLeashing Readers for their version.

My pile of books for this week:



* Dragon Bones, Patricia Briggs. These books are where the "Hurog" in her blogsite comes from, and they are also fun fantasy books with an interesting protagonist

Dungeoneers, John David Anderson. Another of last year's Cybils books! This is a fun meta book about playing D&D, although a bit long for its conceit. The sophomore is willing to try it out, so that's a good sign.

* Dragon Blood, Patricia Briggs. The second Hurog book is even better than the first, as the stakes are raised and the protagonist is more self aware.

(* Books I started this week.)


I started but didn't finish:


Hunting Grounds, Patricia Briggs.

Bookmarks moved in several books:



The Sea Without a Shore, David Drake. And there's a battle, and we get some fancy flying from Daniel, but Adele and the new ensign must fend for themselves in the big city.

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Dina Nayeri. This is my Reading My Library audio. Things came to a screeching halt when the protagonist was caught maybe kissing a boy, which is a big deal in Iran. I was nervous so I only listened to a wee bit at a time. Now she's been hurriedly married to an old rich guy so I guess her life is picking up? Or collapsing in ruins, one or the other.

A Shocking Delight, Jo Beverley. I like the characters -- the businessman's daughter tossed into the aristocracy of her mother's family, the reluctant aristocrat who can't seem to get out of the smuggling business, but I'm finding their attempts to meet in the middle rather dull.

The next few books I'm not really reading, just dipping into between the books I'm trying to finish so that I can pretend that I'm going to read the books on my bookcases.




A Traitor To Memory, Elizabeth George.
Emerald Atlas, John Stephens. Kate's sister has a better instinctive understanding of bad guys. Too young to be socialized out of it, I guess.
Kenilworth, Walter Scott.
Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen, Wendelin Van Draanen.
The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox.
Reading and Learning To Read, Jo Vacca.


2017 Challenge Progress:

1. Cybils 2015: 77 out of 82. Need to finish these up.
2. Cybils 2016! 0/ a lot. I haven't even counted. I've read none of them.
3. Reading My Library: Slowly listening to A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (the library will want it back next week and I'm barely halfway done) and am partway through a Jo Beverley book.
4. Where Am I Reading?: 2/51. Starting over!

Happy Dream Day!

I'd like to keep up this reading diary for myself so I can go back and see what I was reading against what, and when, and if I had any thought. I know I record everything on librarything.com, and also on goodreads, but it's harder to see what was happening simultaneously, which is a huge part of my reading experience.

I'm concentrating lately on Patricia Briggs and Cybils books, because I'm meeting her in a few weeks so I want to have read everything recently, and the Cybils books because the new list came out and I haven't finished the old. I'm also trying to alternate between a library book and a personal copy, which works out perfectly for those two concentrations but may get more complicated later.

I'm also on another reading team, where we complete small reading challenges for countries around the world. We are currently in the U.K., so I'm reading a book whose title has all the letters in STONEHENGE.

The Book Date does a weekly roundup of what people are reading, want to read, or have read each week called It's Monday! What Are You Reading and I'm going to sign up. There's also a version that is kidlit focussed, and as I read a few of those (surprisingly few, actually), I check in with either Teach Mentor Text or UnLeashing Readers for their version.

My pile of books for this week:


* Cry Wolf, Patricia Briggs. Part of my complete Briggs re-read for Foolscap. Also, not coincidentally, the next book for my Tuesday book club. I last listened to this book as an audio with my kids, and they like it too.

* The Fog Diver, Joel Ross. A Cybils pick from last year. I liked the word play (it's post-apocalyptic and the kids discuss the legends of the past in a mangled way) and the ensemble cast, as well as the found-family vibe. And the action was good, with dirigibles and sky-pirates and tethered-dives with treasure at the bottom.

Plus the books I talked about last Friday:


(* Books I started this week.)


I started but didn't finish:


Bookmarks moved in several books:



The Sea Without a Shore, David Drake. And there's a battle, and we get some fancy flying from Daniel, but Adele and the new ensign must fend for themselves in the big city.

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Dina Nayeri. This is my Reading My Library audio. Things came to a screeching halt when the protagonist was caught maybe kissing a boy, which is a big deal in Iran. I was nervous so I only listened to a wee bit at a time. Now she's been hurriedly married to an old rich guy so I guess her life is picking up? Or collapsing in ruins, one or the other.

The next few books I'm not really reading, just dipping into between the books I'm trying to finish so that I can pretend that I'm going to read the books on my bookcases.




A Traitor To Memory, Elizabeth George.
Emerald Atlas, John Stephens. Kate betrays the world at the orders of the villain, and then is shocked when the villain behaves villainously. She's not the brightest star in the sky, that one.
Kenilworth, Walter Scott. The wife has shown up at her husband's castle, but he's too busy with the queen to notice her.
Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen, Wendelin Van Draanen. Sammy's bad day culminates with her policeman friend doubting her, which is just too much to take.
The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox. What are the fundamental rules of our universe?

Reading and Learning To Read, Jo Vacca. Wrapping up strategies for encouraging reading comprehension. I should write some down because they would work for book club next year.


2017 Challenge Progress:

1. Cybils 2015: 76 out of 82. Need to finish these up.
2. Cybils 2016! 0/ a lot. I haven't even counted. I've read none of them.
3. Reading My Library: Slowly listening to A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (the library will want it back next week and I'm barely halfway done) and am partway through a Jo Beverley book.
4. Where Am I Reading?: 2/51. Starting over!

Completed Challenges from 2016

Wow, January is half over, and I haven't checked in with any of the reading challenges I was on. That's mainly because I didn't finish most of them, but in many of the cases that wasn't really the plan, so it doesn't bother me that much. For my own sense of closure, here's how they ended:


Well, I didn't quite finish. I was in good shape going into December, and then I didn't read any of them in the last month. So I'm working on finishing them up before I dive into the new ones.  It's mostly the middle grade books that are left, so I should get through them fairly quickly. I think I officially am 7 books short: two of them are graphic novels, four middle grade SF, and one middle grade fiction.





Reading My Library. This is an eternal quest. I'm in the adult fiction section, and also about half way through adult audio. I am not moving that quickly, but then I'm not too worried about it.




          Where Am I Reading 2016? Again, my complete collapse in December left me about 10 books short. I had what I needed, and I didn't feel like reading it. Oh well, I've marked the missing states and I'll try to start with them in 2017.





I was actually doing two diversity challenges, and I finished the kidlit one easily and never forced myself to read a book of poetry so I didn't complete the adult one. I had the most fun where every month I focussed on one aspect and tried to keep track to see how my reading reflected that. I should do that again this year, although I guess not in January :-)

Surprise Me: I kept forgetting to do this one, so I only read about 2/3 of the books picked randomly from my TBR list. I did like the general idea, so maybe I'll try again.










Oops, I completely forgot I was doing this one. Looks like I accidentally got everything but the Pulitzer winner, and I almost did that one (I read a book by a guy who has won the award, but I didn't realize it wasn't with that book until I got it home).

Completed this one last summer.














Shelf Love: Well, I managed to read about 50 books from my shelves, which is good, but I also managed to buy about 22 books that I haven't read yet, so that's not as promising, although I have some good excuses (sometimes my kids steal books and don't give them back for ages!).

Instead of tracking this, which was a bit of a pain, I will keep up the having of shelving books acquired this year on a special, separate shelf, so I can remind myself that I did want to read these things!

I think I finished off with 248 books read from my library. I am definitely a library-addict.

What Have I Been Reading?

I'm almost into the third week of the New Year, and I haven't updated this blog-diary with my recent reading. So it's time to fix that. Hopefully next week I'll get back into the Monday "What Are You Reading" swing, but I am feeling the urge to document this now. So far this year has been light on reading -- I went back to Houston and spent a lot of time with family, which was fun, and then came home and was scatter-brained, which also makes reading difficult. But now I'm feeling more relaxed and ready to escape into alternate realities!

First, a formatting experiment: I copied/pasted directly from goodreads -- let's see how it turns out:

cover	title	author
	When Demons Walk (Sianim, #3)	Briggs, Patricia	edit view »
	Moon Rising (Wings of Fire, #6)	Sutherland, Tui T.	edit view »
	My Family Adventure	Jules, Jacqueline *	edit view »
	Hatchet (Hatchet, #1)	Paulsen, Gary	edit view »
	Steal the Dragon (Sianim, #2)	Briggs, Patricia	edit view »
	Guts & Glory: The Vikings	Thompson, Ben *	edit view »
	Liaden Universe Constellation: Volume III	Lee, Sharon *	edit view »
	Alpha	Asaro, Catherine *	edit view »
	1824: The Arkansas War(Trail of Glory, #2)	Flint, Eric

Hmm. The default somehow made the title column about 5 millimeters wide, and it was a pain to check the html to find the spot in the middle of gobblegook to increase it. If anyone reads this, let me know if it looks like I changed the right thing. It's possible my computer is just tired of me and so makes the preview looks nice so I go away.

As you can see, I've read a lot of SF so far this year. I started with 1824, an alternate history about America before the Civil War, where Arkansas is a separate country founded by Native Americans, blacks, and white people who either want land or find policies towards those groups distasteful. (John Brown being an extreme example of the latter.) Sam Houston is a major player, having not suffered an injury a decade ago that changed his career trajectory toward Texas (this is the second book in a series, which I didn't quite realize, so we miss the divergence from our own history). I found it an interesting take on some familiar figures as well as a more palatable version of reality, but it suffers from a lot of repetition and characters telling each other stuff that both they and we already know.

Then I finished up Alpha, a science fiction book about an android struggling toward consciousness and an aging military man trying to adjust to personal and technological upheavals. It has a distinctive feel of Asaro, with earnest robots working their way through their programming and rather emotionally clueless warriors having almost as much difficulty with their feelings.

Then I finally finished up the Liaden short stories, which were fun. I have some problems with some of the tropes and assumptions of Liaden, but with short stories I can easily suspend my issues and just enjoy the vividly imagined cultures and characters.

I'm still working through last year's Cybil's finalists, so I read the Viking history book Guts and Glory: Vikings, which I did not enjoy as much as I expect fifth graders to, because I am stodgy and want to hear about people who aren't men sometimes. I refreshed my palate with an easy chapter book from the same list, and enjoyed the tiny dramas that Sofia enacted in My Family Adventure.  I like kids with enough gumption to build a pinata on their own, and I enjoyed the Spanglish although I suspect mainly because it made me feel smug about knowing most of the Spanish words. And then I went on to read a fantasy Moon Rising. It's ridiculous how long it has taken me to read this category, because it should be one of my favorites. Maybe I'm afraid of disappointment. While it's true that Moon Rising wasn't my favorite, I bet I'd like it more if I had read others in the series; it was fun to have dragon protagonists but I kept getting distracted wondering about anatomy questions that are probably covered in more detail in earlier books. I actually own one of those earlier books, and I'm pushing it up the TBR priority because of the strength of #6.

I reread Hatchet for probably the fourth time to prepare for my elementary book club. Once again I had completely forgotten about Brian's angst over his mother's infidelity and his parent's divorce, although his life in the wild was vivid and gripping. The porcupine that gives him both a leg full of needles and the clue to starting fires, the moose whose insane attack reminds him of the chaos of nature, and the plane that strands him but also has the tools to call for help -- those I remember. Lots of kids, although most hadn't finished the book, so I guess classes have moved on since my children's day -- both of them read it in class, hence my high reread count.

And finally I'm powering through as much Patricia Briggs works as I can finish before February, when she comes to Seattle for Foolscap 2017. These two are early works in the Sianim series, although they don't share characters (one guy from one book is mentioned in the other). They are solid fantasy world stories, which smart and capable women alongside men willing to appreciate that in their companions, and cool magic systems that unfold in different directions. I'll hand them on to the boys to prepare them for the convention as well.