This past weekend I went to the shore with sis, aunt, and two cousins.
I was the only one who’d not brought a book.
One of my cousins finished her book and lent it to me with directions to give it to Aunt when I’m finished.
Code Girls by Liza Mundy. I’m absolutely loving it so far! I can’t help but chuckle and groan at the same time over the mentions of the rivalry between the US Army and Navy.
You mentioned this almost a month ago, @Catherine, but I just managed to get the first Nevermoor book from my library, and I’m enchanted by it! I was expecting a fairly standard middle grade fantasy but it’s so delightful and charming and wonderfully eccentric! Or maybe I should say “wundrous-ly” eccentric!
ISN’T IT DELIGHTFUL!?
I loved it so much. The next one is just as fun. I think the third is scheduled to be released in October?? And they’ve announced that there will be 6 books total in the series. I’m so excited to follow Morrigan through all her years in WunSoc!!!
Has anyone read House of Leaves?? Probably the weirdest book I have ever read but it was so interesting! Took me a couple tries to read the whole thing but it made me want to look up other people’s theories. Those are my favorite kinds of books and movies, where you NEED to look it up after just to know what everyone else thinks happened.
House of Leaves is my all-time favorite book! When it first came out, I got the last copy available in the Dallas area by flirting my way into someone else’s reserved copy. I only feel a little bad.
That book kept me up at night. The realization of what “Always” meant made me have to put the book down because I was alone upstate.
Holy F***!!! 
I read the About on GoodReads and began thinking “oooo, something Briar-like!”
Now I am going to sleep with the lights on.
I tried to like House of Leaves. Really hard. But at a certain point I couldn’t get past my feeling that it was just pretentious. And once that creeps into your mind, it’s tough to get around it.
I haven’t given up on it yet, and might return to it. I’m open to persuasion and theories, but for me, I got the same feeling out of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Father, Son, and Holy Rabbit.” or Brian Evenson’s “Windeye,” but in a more condensed, powerful way. What am I missing?
I didn’t find it pretentious - but maybe that’s because my dad forced me to read James Michener books when I was young and THOSE suckers were pretentious haha
I was fascinated by all the levels of story-telling, and I loved that the whole thing was so wildly different than anything I’d come across before. I like how unsettling the house is, and I like that the random footnotes and pieces of things that the original author threw in were red herrings and hodge-podge.
Brought Circe with me on a camping trip Saturday and Sunday, had the day off yesterday and read more, actually fell asleep reading it last night.
At work today and ticked off that I’m not reading it right now.
ALSO!
My best friend got me a year long subscription to Book of the Month for my birthday, and I can’t wait to get my hands on my pick from this month’s list:
It’s out for delivery as I write this!
Now that I’ve finished Howl’s, I’m starting on Circe today! Book twins!
That’s the book I got from BOTM this month! I’m halfway through Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia), and then I’m tackling Space Between Worlds! Oh, I’m so excited you get BOTM now - I’ve had it for almost 2 years now, and I’ve gotten so many lovely things.
Weird thing happened today… I’m currently reading two books, The Haunting of Hill House and The Starless Sea. Only because they were both on my list and became available. But The Starless Sea references Hill House! mentioning the use of the name Eleanor in both books. Never had that happen where a book references another book that I am currently reading
My husband convinced me to join him reading (listening, for him) The Poppy War and wow is it intense! The characters are a lovely band of misfits, and there are some very comic moments but this is very much a story about what war does to people and nations. So…intense. But really good.
I went camping this week and took Ella Minnow Pea with me (Thanks @Fox)
It was whymsical and sad and so much more happened than I thought would. Yes, citizens are restricted from using more and more letters, but alongside it all, people are falling in and out of love, families are seperated, and communication is censored. I expected it to be clever and funny, which it was, but it was more than that too. (And hearing my sibling use words like “buzz” while I read it made me have a secret laugh.)
I’m so glad you enjoyed it!
I finally finished Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (and which was included in one of our Summer Reading Lists!) and oof, I don’t even know if I had words for it yet. The reading experience was very similar to LOTR (lots of walking, lots of lore, fellowship of misfits), but it was also so much grittier and more violent that it felt a lot harder to get through.
That said, it’s a masterpiece, and so different from anything I’ve ever read before. Neil Gaiman’s blurb on the back is pretty spot-on, and he describes it as “A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way.”
I’ve been on a reading spree the past few days, so I just wrapped up Circe, The Castle in the Air, and The Martian (which my wife has been pestering me to read for a while) and I really enjoyed all of them (though definitely the first and third ones a bit more). I was looking for something to listen to while working today, so I ended up choosing to listen to @Catherine’s recent finish Black Leopard, Red Wolf. I’m not too far into the audio book yet, but I understand what you mean, Catherine - there’s so much going on, I may have to physically read it because I don’t want to miss anything that’s happening. I’ve got it for two weeks, so I’ve got plenty of time, though!
Oh wow, yeah I don’t know if an audiobook would’ve worked for me. Also, it must be so long!! The book is 620 pages!
Then again, the style of writing definitely calls back to an oral storytelling/griot tradition, and I’m sure the production quality is fantastic, so I bet it’s a full experience. Looking forward to hearing what you think!