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What I read: January 2018



“A Conjuring of Light” by V.E.Schwab. Book 3, I read book 2 in maybe... November? Of course I had to make the boy buy me this for Christmas, considering how book 2 ended. I spent a lot of this book hoping that Kell would hook up with Holland or maybe just die. Anything would be better than being stuck with Lila. Then of course I felt guilty, because do I hate her because she’s female? Would I tolerate her better if she was a man? Um… maybe. I didn’t totally hate her by the end, but it seemed like she was the meanest taker and suffered the least consequences, so. I mean, I feel like the author tried to give her some consequences, but there was no way to make Lila really care about them. Though days later I was still bereft at having finished the story. I will miss them all so much.

Though I’ve just noticed that she’s doing a sequel trilogy and I’m not sure how I feel about that…

Library Hold Challenge!
I put a lot of books on inactive library hold so I don’t forget about them. The list is currently up around 55 books, and that’s getting unmanageable. Last year I managed to read everything that had been there since 2016, and I don’t know if I can do the 2017 ones but I will try. There’s one I might just purchase, but I should read it anyway. Or set myself up for 2019 “Books I bought and never read challenge” which wouldn’t go so well I suspect because I bought at least a few of those books because they were too fat to read in 3 weeks. Or “Books I brought home from my mother’s house Challenge” which wouldn’t go so well because a lot of them are “serious literature” and I can only take so much “serious”.

So, LHC #1: “Everfair” by Nisi Shawl. Not really sure what I expected here, but I was quite looking forward to this book. It’s 380 pages (roughly) and has a ton of characters, who I had a hard time connecting to, I think because the story takes place over like 40 years. To tell the story she was telling, I suppose it had to have that scope, but maybe it should have been longer? I don’t know… I didn’t realize until about 100 pages from the end that I was missing the point. This story wasn’t so much about the characters, the characters were in service of the place. And in the case of this story that’s not a bad thing.

“Fortunately the Milk” by Neil Gaiman. I gave this to Ed for Christmas even though it’s meant for I guess 8-year-olds. Ed didn’t care and read it anyway and then forced it on me. It was cute, but not important I think.

“Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi. I’ve got this short story I work on sometimes, and it needed some background about Iran. I’d known about Persepolis for a long time, but it wasn’t really on my radar to read. I’m so glad I did. The voice was marvelous.

Not really reading, but where else do you put it? I listened to the entirety of Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin, a podcast about WWI. Six episodes, all over 3 hours. It’s like reading a whole book.

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