melreads | Entries tagged with reading

I've been doing one of these lists for several years in my paper reading journal (it was originally, I don't know, "23 books to read in 2023" or something). I limit it to books I already have, and while I've never come close - or really even tried to come close - to finishing the list, it usually does prod me to read some of these that I would have forgotten about otherwise, so I figure that makes it worth doing. However, it's already the end of March and I haven't touched the main list of 26 - although there was an "add-on" one that I read (I'll get to that at the bottom) - so I need to get on the stick about this!

Mel's version of "26 books to read in 2026":
(note: I'm updating as I read any)
1. Burning Roses
2. Middlegame
3. Back to the Garden
4. The Bookbinder (read)
5. Lincoln's Admiral
6. Agatha Christie short stories
7. An Arcane Inheritance
8. more Oz stories
9. Circe
10. The Rook
11. The Water Witch
12. The Wizard's Butler
13. The Poppy War
14. The Heart of Everything
15. The Widow Queen
16. Melusine
17. The Midnight Bookshop
18. Kingdom of Tomorrow
19. Fortress in the Eye of Time
20. The Once and Future Witches
21. Elphie: a Wicked childhood (I think Rob gave me this one)
22. June, Reimagined (read!)
23. Poirot books (I guess I have several unread ones?)
24. Reckoning Hour
25. Lady Cop Makes Trouble
26. The Bright Sword

(I wrote "try again" by 25 and 26 because I know I started those two and never really got anywhere.)

The two "extra" ones were a Star Trek: TNG book called Klingon Empire - which I did start and didn't like - and then the one I actually did read, which was Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. (I liked it. I have somehow managed not to read anything by Elizabeth Bear before, although I knew who she was.)

(Am I reading - or at least buying - a heck of a lot of fantasy these days? You bet.)

just some more reading-related links:

re Pillars of the Earth
My October Daye obsession
holiday-themed reading + 2023 favorites

Books that defined the 70s
2022 reading
Miss Marple
more about Miss Marple

2021 reading
holiday reading
more holiday reading
what my husband and I both read
Expanse books, and a poem
my goodness, I'd forgotten I did this: virtually everything I read in 2021
more reading

I started to copy over some old entries about reading topics from my other journal, and I decided to start with just linking to them, that'll be easier and I won't lose whatever links and comments and stuff are there! (This will probably end up in several installments, assuming I finish it at all!)

What I read in 2024
buying books
holiday-themed reading

Lord of the Rings
Wastin' Away - my favorite LOTR-themed cartoon!
12/15/24 (reading the History of LOTR books) (also some about Wicked)

Wicked: book vs movie

Beware - definite spoilers here!

Saturday, July 18, 2020
Finished Abaddon's Gate. I guess moving on to... what's the name of the next one, I can't think. The one on the planet beyond the gate, anyway. (Cibola Burn, I just looked.) I need to look up Cibola, I don't what it means beyond what Trashcan Man says in The Stand. A mythical city? My grasp of mythology beyond the very basics of Greek and Roman gods is tenuous.

Let's see, before we move on, do I have more thoughts about Abaddon? Don't really understand that reference either, beyond Abaddon being a Big Bad. These guys, meaning the authors (I can't think of them as one person) write such good characters. Sam dying feels like a punch in the gut. (I also think of the revelation way later that she and Pa were lovers. Doesn't surprise me that Sam would like girls, but there's hardly even any inference that she knows Pa to speak of. Sam's been on Tycho and I mostly never got the impression that Pa was, although maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, never occurred to me at all.)

Sunday a.m.
I forget every time how depressing Cibola Burn is - actually all these books are pretty depressing, come to that. Dropping rocks on Earth, for god's sake - and we haven't even gotten to that part yet! By that standard, Cibola Burn's terrorists and alien robots and killer snails are minor-league.

Monday
Well into Cibola Burn now - well 10%, according to Kindle. (Still getting rolling, but not the very beginning.) I was thinking that nowadays my brain registers this duality: I think of the characters and I also think of the way the authors are setting things up, to play out later in the book. I think as time goes on I see it from the authors' POV more and more. Maybe that's why I have trouble getting quite as immersed in books in general the way I used to. Or, I don't know, maybe I've been that way for years and I'm just now noticing. (Some of that definitely came from being an English major, though. I think before that, I was oblivious.)

Always a definite possibility of spoilers!

Monday, July 13 (still on Expanse #3)
It occurs to me that I really like the character of Anna, even though she's a preacher and I'm an agnostic. I never have any problem with people from middle-of-the-road religions. It's the zealots I have a problem with. (I was thinking of this more generally but it's also why I hate Ashford so much. Zealotry doesn't have to be about religion.)

Tuesday
I wrote down the quote from Melba about how everybody's bags of meat, there's no souls, and all that matters is your story and your name. (The authors have versions of the "bags of meat" bit scattered around the books - that one and that we're monkeys playing with microwaves. I wonder which story and which name Ms Koh/Mao means, since she has multiples. Or maybe she means Holden.)

Wednesday
I like a lot of what this book says about how people react to tragedy. I think they must have talked to psychologists or something. I think that's why these books work so well - these people are in (almost) unimaginable circumstances but they're just people, & they act the way normal people react. It's very grounded.

Thursday
It's funny how some violent things don't upset me at all, but others really do. I hate the counter-coup bit where they're going around shooting people execution-style. Somehow I find that particularly upsetting. I really, really hate book Ashford. (TV-Ashford is David Strathairn in particularly insane mode, yes, but still, he's somebody that I have difficulty hating.) (Casting is everything.)

I ranted before about the whole Did Not Finish concept, because (to sum up) I felt like there was a difference between the books you stopped reading because you hated them, and the ones where you just never came back to, for no particular reason. But this list was made before I ever came up with that idea (which I called Type 1 and Type 2), so I can't even say for sure which type these are! But I definitely did not finish them, that's all I can say. And these are presumably 2021 and earlier, because they came from my 2020-21 journal. (And yeah, I know quite a few of these are books people love. No judgment of your taste is implied!)

Twilight
Three Hearts and Three Lions
Crazy Rich Asians
11/22/63
Gone Baby Gone
The Copper Gauntlet
Revelation Space
A Killer's Mind (the series is Zoe Bentley, I think?)
A Curious Beginning
A Discovery of Witches
Agent to the Stars
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (I think I got a long way into this one, too.)
Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
God-Shaped Hole
Murder on the SS Rosa
The House with a Clock in its Walls (despite the fact that it was made into a movie I liked, I think?)
Gideon the Ninth
The Man With One of Those Faces

nonfiction:
Flu (by Gina Kolata) (which I started and stopped multiple times)
Washington's Spies
1776

Oh, and there is a note at the bottom of the page, saying that I didn't count books where I read just a few pages and then never came back to it, I had to at least get through a chapter or two to count as a proper DNF!

Mel Reads

Entries tagged with reading

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26 books to read in '26

Reading posts in the old journal, 2021-23

Linkage 2024

Flashback: 2020, mid-July (spoilers for Expanse books 3-4)

Flashback to 2020, mid-July (spoilers for The Expanse)

Flashback: The DNF list

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