Tag: currentlyreading

Book Overload — A mid-month check-in

~ EMM

To give you a sense of how my reading is going this month, here are some numbers:

  • Books carried over from previous months = 3
  • Books started this month = 3
  • Books finished this month = 2
  • Current number of books in progress = 4

Do I have more in-progress books now than I did at the start of this month? Yes.

Have I finished reading everything on my Orilium TBR? No.

Status of my Orilium Spring Equinox TBR

In fact, I haven’t even started the Psionics & Divination read (A Fate Inked in Blood) yet! I meant to start that one in the first week of this month so that I could be sure to have plenty of time to finish, but plans changed. I can’t remember my reasoning now, but I’m sure it made sense at the time.

Seriously, everything feels backward and wrong on so many levels this month. Why would reading be any different?

Is some celestial object in retrograde or something? BRB. *Goes to Google.*

Yes. It appears that is in fact the case. Well, there you go. That makes me feel a little better, I guess.

A Game of Hearts and Heists (my Art of Illusions reading assignment) is one of the books I started reading already. But I had to put it aside so I could read (and hopefully finish) The Tainted Cup before my Camp Book Club discussion this coming Friday. The good news is that I am really enjoying The Tainted Cup and find myself excited to get back to it every time I have to put it down to do something else.

After I finish The Tainted Cup, I plan to start A Fate Inked in Blood (finally!) and get back to A Game of Hearts and Heists. There are still two weeks left in the month, so I think I have time to finish all three of those books.

As for the two books I’ve already finished this month, they were both contemporary romance reads. The first was It Happened One Summer, and the second was The Homecoming War. Both were really fun books that I tore through and didn’t want to put down. I sighed happy sighs when I finished them. Highly recommend both if you like contemporary romance.

How is your reading going this month? Are you off to an equally awkward start? Or have you already finished your TBR?

Currently Reading

~ EMM

As promised, it’s time for a mid-January reading update!

I’ve made some progress on the books I mentioned in my last post, and I’ve even managed to finish a few! Here’s the inbox / outbox update…

Outbox

Since my last post, I finished reading:

  • The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal — I enjoyed this, but didn’t love it. It’s been positioned as “The Thin Man in space.” I’d never seen that old movie, or read the book the movie was based on, so I waited to watch the movie until after I read this reimagining of the story. Now that I’ve read this book and seen the movie, I think I’m a little disappointed that the detective couple in The Spare Man isn’t quite as charming and charismatic as the detective couple in the movie. Without the movie, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing, but if you’re familiar with the movie, I guess that’s just something to be aware of going in. You’re not really getting Nick and Nora. Then again, maybe The Spare Man is meant to be riffing off the original source material (the book by Dashiell Hammett)? I’m really curious to hear more about this when the Writing Excuses podcast does their deep dive on this book in February.
  • Finding Me by Viola Davis — This audiobook was riveting! If you like Viola Davis’s work (and seriously, who doesn’t?), I highly recommend checking this out. I also recommend it to anyone pursuing any sort of artistic endeavor. It’s so good. And, if you like audiobooks, definitely listen to this one because she reads it herself.

Inbox

After finishing The Spare Man, I needed another fiction book to read. So I went through my FairyLoot hardcovers, and decided to start with A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson.

My new LED booklight is fully charged and ready to go…

I picked this because it’s short, and I’d heard a lot of glowing reviews for this book. Plus, it is technically the first book in a new series, so I can use it for the January prompt in the Choose Your Own Adventure: Year in Aeldia Magical Readathon 2023 Challenge. And yes, I started a Magical Readathon spread in my Passion Planner. More on that when I do my February set-up post. 🙂

Until then, happy reading! Talk with you more soon.

How many is too many?

~ EMM

What are you reading? Should be a simple question, right?

You know that moment when you realize that you’ve bitten off way more than you can chew? I think I’m having whatever the reading equivalent of that is right now.

I started reading six books at the start of the year. Not all at the same time. It just sort of happened over the course of about a week. I think I was up to about four in progress before I managed to finish one of them (the only novel). But then I immediately started another one (also a novel) and then a couple more.

So at the moment, I’m reading six books.

What are they?

  • The Fantasy Fiction Formula — Okay, this writing craft book is kind of a cheat because I actually started reading it in 2022, but I put it down during the last couple months of the year with only a few chapters left to read. I picked it up again in January, determined to finish it. But, I read non-fiction slowly, and I read craft books especially slowly, because I either get annoyed by them and set them aside, or all my highlighting and note taking slows me down. This one started with the latter problem. It gave me a ton to chew on, which is why I set it aside. But the final third is more of a review, so it’s taking a little longer to get through.
  • The Anatomy of Genres — As long as we’re on the topic of craft books, I purchased this beast in December, really excited to read it, but put off starting it until the New Year. I dove in on day one, and it is definitely blowing my mind, but I think it’s possibly going to take all of 2023 for me to get through it because it is DENSE. There’s a lot to think about here, and I’m taking a lot of notes.
  • Italian Folk Magic — I picked this up because I write fantasy, and I was curious about what sort of magical traditions might come from my own ancestors. I think a lot of this tradition in my family got lost a couple of generations back when everyone was trying to assimilate to acceptable white middle class culture in the US. My grandparents all died when I was really young (one long before I was even born), and I grew up far from our extended family, so I feel really disconnected from this sort of thing. I think I may need to buy a copy for my mom so we can discuss.
  • The Spare Man — This is the novel I started after finishing the only book I’ve finished reading so far this month. I bumped it to the top of my TBR because Writing Excuses (podcast) is going to do a deep dive case study on this novel with the author in February, and I wanted to be able to follow along.
  • Finding Me — Memoir is one of those genres that I always forget that I enjoy. When I was going over my stats, I remembered to go check what’s new in memoir (since it doesn’t usually organically pop up in places where I look for books to read). I started with the Goodreads Choice nominees and saw that a friend of mine HIGHLY recommended this memoir, so I picked it up. The audiobook is fantastic.
  • Spare — Of course this came up in my search for what’s new in memoir. At least half of my author friend group is reading it right now (we are all team Harry and Meghan). So, I decided to request it from my library on audiobook. I was shocked that I got it almost immediately after release. Now I’m alternating between this and Finding Me while doing stuff around the house.

Those of you who are paying close attention might realize that none of these are Fairy Loot special edition hardcovers. I thought I was going to read Babel this month. I read the first 10ish pages at the very start of the month, and I was excited about continuing. Then I lost track of it and didn’t pick it up again. Now I don’t think there’s any way I’ll finish it before the end of the month. So… I think I may pick up one that I suspect (based on others’ reviews) will be a fast read. Then I can get a quick win. Let’s hope by this time next week, I’ve finished some of these and at least started a Fairy Loot book.

I’ll check back in at the end of the weekend and let you know how it’s going. In the meantime, I’m curious, how many books are you currently reading?