thelorelei's FIRST thread

I've been on LibraryThing since 2011 but primarily have used it as a way just to catalogue books and to remind myself of all the books I actually own while they've been boxed up between multiple moves as I finished my professional training.
I live with my spouse, kids, and cats in a comfy little house in a dense, surprisingly walkable neighborhood in the middle of the US. I love to garden but have no garden (yet). I'm a big fiber arts geek. I have big plans to get back into keeping freshwater aquariums. I have years and years of classical vocal and string music education which now comes down to singing to my kids in the car and when I'm doing dishes.

There's no way I'll get to 75 books this year. I have three small children. I'm in the first year of practice at my job. I'm trying to keep up with three languages on Duolingo.
And I don't even know how to use HTML coding to make functional links and whatnot, so bear with me.

But man, I started reading again for pleasure when I was laid up with COVID last year, which is also when I discovered how to check out eBooks from the library on my kindle so I could read even when all my books were packed away and I couldn't leave the house. And boy did I miss reading, and devouring books, and challenging myself with books that were maybe slightly beyond me (Looking at you, Cryptonomicon on which I have temporarily given up -- maybe next year).

January-March 2023: (ok maybe I remember some very basic html code after all, since I managed to UNDERLINE this, wooo!)
1. The Stolen Heir by Holly Black
2. Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore
3. Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore
4. Lyra's Oxford by Phillip Pullman
5. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust, Volume 1) by Phillip Pullman
6. The Secret Commonwealth by Phillip Pullman
7. The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin
8. Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff
9. Setting Up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week by Stuart Thraves

April 2023
10. Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot
11. Provenance by Ann Leckie

May 2023
12. The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
13. Paladin’s Grace by T Kingfisher
14. This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
15. The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

June 2023
16. Paladin's Strength by T Kingfisher
17. Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey

July 2023
18. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
19. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (in progress)
20. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
21. The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
22. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

August 2023
23. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
24. Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin (audiobook)
25. Randomize by Andy Weir (audiobook)
26. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (audiobook)

September 2023
27. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

October 2023
28. Ark by Veronica Roth (audiobook)
29. The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay (audiobook)
30. Just Out of Jupiter's Reach by Nnedi Okorafor (audiobook)
31. You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles (audiobook)
32. Summer Frost by Blake Crouch (audiobook)
33. Slow Time Between the Stars by John Scalzi (audiobook)
34. Falling Bodies by Rebecca Roanhorse (audiobook)
35. How It Unfolds by James S.A. Corey (audiobook)
36. Void by Veronica Roth (audiobook)
37. The Long Game by Ann Leckie (audiobook)
38. Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey (audiobook)

November 2023
39. Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey (audiobook)
40. Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey (audiobook)
41. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

December
42. Sunshine by Robin McKinley (audiobook)
43. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
44. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (audiobook)
45. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey (audiobook)
46. Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey (audiobook)
47. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Welcome to the group! My cousin just finished the Cashore series and enjoyed them and I'd be curious what three languages you study on Duo? I also am a language lover who has more than one language on there and recently got Rosetta as well to use in tandem with each other.

>3 WhiteRaven.17: Thank you! I'm currently reviewing German, which I took all through high school and into college (and was nearly fluent but never quite believed it, ha), and learning French and Danish, both for the first time. Sometimes I really want to add Irish or Scots Gaelic but I think I need to get way further with the three I've got before I can jumble them up with a fourth language.
The Cashore series was a great discovery of mine like ten years ago and to be honest my favorite of the entire series was the second, Fire, which is a bit of a one off within the series. I did enjoy her suddenly coming back to that world recently with Winterkeep and Seasparrow, however.

>4 thelorelei: Ah, ich spreche ein venich deutsche (honestly, I think that is all I remember of German as I ended up switching to studying Swedish instead). Swedish was much easier and I enjoyed it more. French and Danish sound interesting, I studied Spanish in high school so that's my long term language I've kept up with and I recently started studying Japanese - which has been a definite learning curve. Hope the learning goes well for you!
Fire was my cousin's favorite as well, perhaps I'll see if I can borrow the series from her to read for myself at some point.

Welcome! I can definitely understand putting Cryptonomicon on hold... 😀

Welcome, and happy reading!

>6 drneutron: Thank you! Yes, as much as I adore Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age and Anathem being my favorites of his), I just struggled to march through that behemoth of a book and mostly did not understand what was happening.

>5 WhiteRaven.17: Oh, Japanese is one I've had my eye on, too! It was offered in my high school (we had an embarrassment of riches with Russian, Japanese, Latin, French, Spanish, and German) but I didn't have time in my schedule for more than one.
And do give the Cashore series ago - I'd be interested to hear what you think.

>7 FAMeulstee: Thank you!

Welcome! You do sound busy.

Given your likes have you read Lois McMaster Bujold and/or Patricia McKillip?

I'm long retired, my only daughter is 30, my activities minimal so I have plenty of time to read. Mostly F&SF, but I find lots on these threads to interest me.

I'm also into fiber arts, initially sewing, but for the past decade or so mostly historic crafts like card weaving, and recently sprang.

Hi! Dropped my star to follow along. I'll jump on the Stephenson bandwagon. Personally, I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and the earlier stuff, It was The Baroque Cycle that broke me. I've not read much of the newer stuff. Most recently I read the D.O.D.O books, they were pretty decent.

Looking forward to how your reading year progresses. Don't stress on the numbers, though with this group, they are bound to increase. When I first joined, I thought there was no way I would every hit 75, now I usually do. But then, only have 1 kid in their 20's. :)

>11 quondame: Yes, I've read The Curse of Chalion and several of the Miles Vorkosigan books and really liked them. The only thing that kept me from reading more was the sheer volume of them and getting confused about reading order for the Miles books.
I feel like I've read some Patricia McKillip here or there when I was younger. She comes up a lot and somehow I've never done a deep dive into her oevre.

>13 thelorelei: Well, up until Mirror Dance/Cetaganda the Vorkosigan books were meant to be read in any order. Certainly Cetaganda takes place years before Mirror Dance. After that the plots become more dependent upon what's in the previous volume - especially after Memory which has to be my favorite SF book as The Curse of Chalion is my favorite, non-Tolkien, Fantasy.

I love the series feature here - and the Vorkosigan saga has both as published and chronological versions.

>13 thelorelei: I love the Vorkosigan book and am doing a reread of them this year. If it helps, curioussquared was nice enough to share a link with me earlier this year with a recommended order. https://bookriot.com/vorkosigan-saga-reading-order/

>15 dreamweaver529: Oh that's helpful! I'll take a look

I just finished Hunt, Gather, Parent. When I'm not reading sci fi or fantasy I'll occasionally read non-fiction of the sociological bent, and my sister gave this one to me for Christmas. And let me just say that I LOVED this book and it gave me such a sense of... hopefulness? In my opinion and in my experience as a working parent of three small kids, American parenting, isolated, under duress, without any of the cultural tools that basically allowed our species to evolve in the FIRST PLACE...is a horror show. I feel like I'm doing everything wrong, all the time.
But last night I tried something from this book - I asked my four year old twins to unpack the cat food order from chewy, fully prepared to accept if they said no. But they both agreed, and then I STOPPED myself from telling them that they were doing it wrong while they made sky high stacks of cans before eventually getting them into the pantry. They got the job done and instead of running around the house after dinner like a loud, fighting group of wild animals, and instead of making a giant mess of the basement play area, we had a relatively calm clean up period before bed. No fights with each other or their older brother. No play that got so rough that someone came upstairs crying.
I've also started trying to incorporate some other tools, like telling them the natural consequence of their action instead of hollering a "Don't do that." At the very least, I feel myself getting less worked up with each interaction.

>17 thelorelei: Yay for finding something that worked. Children are such a challenge and twins are more than double that, I'm sure.

Welcome to the group, Laura.

We have a few things in common. Both joined LT in 2011. You have twins and I am a twin (although I am very much Devito to his Schwarzenegger).

No stress in the group at all to hit the nominal target of 75 books, some of the bunch read 6x75 books!

Welcome to THE GROUP, Laura! You've already established your place. I'll confess that *Crypto* and *BaroqC* are my least favorite Stphensons. My last was Seveneves, which I loved half of and liked the other half well enough.

You're in DuoLingo territory here too. Sybilline/Lucy is doing Irish, Laurelkeet/Laura still reviews French, and I, Peggy, completed the Italian course. I've now forgotten all of it and want to start back again, but time and concentration have fled. I'd really like to try Japanese too - or some other non-Indo-Euorpean language just to see if I can cope.

Some of us are loving Victoria Goddard's fantasy. I haven't talked to anybody who didn't adore Hands of the Emperor.

>17 thelorelei: My mom never told me to do anything; instead she always asked if I would. That really struck a chord with me when I was old enough to realize it as a successful tactic and I've always used it with my kiddo, who's now 14. He's always been happy to be a helper, just like I was, and I think my mom's technique has a lot to do with it. Yay for resisting telling them to do it another way - I know from experience how hard that is!!

>21 scaifea: Yeah, I have really struggled with accepting a "no thanks" when I have asked my son to help with chores. Maybe because I'm really, really, really, really TIRED, haha.

So, I finished Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot and I'm sad to say, it felt pretty thin. I love a good space opera so I gave it a chance. It seemed like the author had a lot of scenes with snappy dialogue in mind, and not much in the way of solid plot construction. Ah, well. On to Ann Leckie's Provenance. Her Ancillary Justice series broke my MIND last year.

>23 thelorelei: I loved the Ancillary Justice series and its mindbreaking aspects.

OK, so I made it through two Ann Leckie books which I enjoyed thoroughly, and T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace. It's the first Kingfisher I've read and I'd characterize it as....extremely horny but in a good natured way? The two leads are middle age or near to it and very well intentioned people who have an awkward meet cute. Each successive meet cute is increasingly awkward and/or embarrassing for one or the other and it builds up with them sort of inadvertently bonding over some pretty painful past traumas. I can get behind a good romance if it's sort of within the fantasy or sci fi genre and this fits that bill, so I enjoyed it. The only thing that bugged me even a tiny bit is some very contemporary language (such as a high priest saying "Damn straight!" and the like). But once I got used to it and just went with it, it stopped bothering me. I requested the sequel from the library as an ebook and there's about a 6 week wait. Luckily This is How you Lose the Time War finally came in, which I have been trying to get a hold of for like a year. It keeps becoming available when I'm in the middle of another book so then I have to reschedule delivery.

>25 thelorelei: I've enjoyed all the The Saint of Steel books in a liked but not loved way, and they are all romances.

>26 quondame: Yeah, I certainly found Paladin's Grace fun to read but it's probably not a "buy" for me. I dunno, I do like my books to feature some sort of romantic subplot but it's not a requirement. But when the romance IS the plot I start to look for more going on. I felt like this one had juuuuust enough to not make me plot-antsy.

I'm doing it! I'm reading Octavia Butler!! I've been trying to choose an Octavia Butler work to start with for literal years and always found the catalogue too daunting. But with a plane trip home and an uncooperative internet connection, I took the leap into Parable of the Sower which I had preloaded on my Kindle thanks to prime reading. So far so good!

Alright, I also just took an impromptu trip to the library (the best kind of trip) with my son and while he was playing I got to visit the sci fi fantasy shelves and finally picked up the first two books of Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate. I've been a fan of Novik since His Majesty's Dragon was first published so it was really fantastic to get into a new work of hers. I'm liking Parable of the Sower but there's no return deadline on that one.

Apparently what I needed to finally start listening to audiobooks was 40 minute (one way, 80 minute total) commute.

Heh. Mrsdrneutron does that - she listens to more than I read every year. 😀

>30 thelorelei: Yeah, it was getting difficult to find enough podcasts that I liked well enough to keep my interest so I started getting audiobooks from our state online library plus I signed up for a trial of audible. 80 minutes in the car every day has really added up.

Ever pick up a book that has been on tons of "best of" lists, with myriad glowing reviews and are just...underwhelmed? That was Priory of the Orange Tree for me. I so wanted to like it and all the fantasy elements were theoretically there. I just found the characters so thin and superficial. I finished it out of sheer sticktoitiveness.

>33 thelorelei: I enjoyed it until just over 1/2 way through - then it was like a mad puppet show of get these characters here to do that then there to do this then.....