Sophinisba Solis

Hello, Dreamwidth, it's been three weeks since my last books post and I have finished four more books, bringing me up to 20 for the year. Whoo! One of those books was for work but I will tell you about the other three: Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha, The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon, and How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.

( books! )

I have again gone seven weeks since my last book post but am managing to post on a Wednesday! I have finished just three books since then, one I won't talk about and also Educated by Tara Westover which was good and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee which was GREAT.

Books I have read parts of but may not finish include Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford, The Mothers by Brit Bennett, and an audiobook of Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

And now, a cut tag: ( Read more... )

It's a Wednesday and I've been less busy at work this past week! I have been reading books!

( Read more... )

I also checked out but haven't yet started reading Crooked Hallelujah by the Cherokee writer Kelli Jo Ford, which I found out about through the delightful NPR Book Concierge, which came out yesterday.

Hello! I'm very tired but I've remembered that I've been meaning to post about reading on a Wednesday. Omg I used to do that like every week? Or most weeks?? And haven't done so since February 2014???

What I've read
In the first five months of 2019 I read 15 books for work plus these twelve for fun, my favorites starred:
Rumaan Alam, That Kind of Mother
Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered
Tana French, The Secret Place
Kiese Laymon, Long Division
Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly’s Guide to Your Next Crisis (this one was mostly a waste of time but on the bright side not very much time)
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter*
Tana French, The Witch Elm** (omg)
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties*
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere*
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

Then Endgame happened an in the last five months I've read one short novel for work and, like, a lot of fanfiction about Tony Stark. /o\

What I'm reading
A couple days ago I checked out the novel Severance by Ling Ma from the library. I had not heard of it before but it came up on the list of relatively popular but available titles on Overdrive. I'm a little less than halfway through and I'm digging it. It's about a young woman who's one of a handful of people to survive a plague. I enjoy a good near-future apocalypse/dystopia and I also like the chapters that talk about her life before the plague, stuff about being a twenty-something in New York, about being a Chinese-American who travels to China on business, just stuff that's different from my experience but resonant and well written. I am anxious about where the post-plague plot will go.

What I'll read next
I actually forgot that I'd checked out Severance and I also checked out The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell on Overdrive. Maybe I will read that next. It looks to be about a bunch of generations of a family in Zambia and I wonder if it will be anything like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which I read a few years ago and loved.

ETA Also a lot of people on Twitter have been talking about Gideon the Ninth and I requested it from the library so I might get it that way eventually, or maybe give in and buy it.

via_ostiense asked me about my favorite flavor of ice cream. If I had to choose one I'd probably say coffee, but I also appreciate strawberry, cookies and cream, and some other flavors. I used to go to Dairy Queen and get mud pie Blizzards, or peanut butter cup ones, those are awesome. But there aren't a lot of Dairy Queens near where I live now and I guess I haven't missed it much. Frozen yogurt is bigger around here and I've always thought fro-yo tasted kind of weird.

I'm not really into ice cream in general these days. I used to buy cartons and then it would stay in the freezer for months and months and get gross. B buys it and I'll have a little dish from time to time. I also used to really like gelato from certain fancy gelato places, but on the other hand never really got excited about the fancy local ice cream places that B and other friends of mine love. One of the flavors my friends get excited about is salted caramel and I can't stand that stuff, ugh.

And since it's a Wednesday let's do a quick reading meme. I finished Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, continued to like but not love it. I read a pretty good chunk of Purple Hibiscus this week and just a little bit of Claire of the Sea Light, still haven't really gotten into that one. Then last night the ebook of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places became available through my library, so I expect to be reading that and nothing else for the next few days. Right now I'm about a quarter of the way through and pretty well engrossed, though so far I'm not enjoying it nearly as much as I did Gone Girl, which kinda ate up my life when I read it last year.

Oh, and I skimmed a library book called 10,001 Ways to Live Large on a Small Budget which I'm pretty sure is just a compilation of blog posts from Wise Bread. It's pretty repetitive and silly but, you know, nice for glancing through, lots of lists of little tips for saving money on groceries, gifts, etc.

I hadn't read any fic in ages, but I had some insomnia Friday night and went looking around the AO3 and ended up with a really nice long X-Men WIP called Pantheon by Yahtzee. It's a Roman slave AU mainly an Erik/Charles love story but also featuring Logan and Rogue and Emma and some other people. At the time I was reading over the weekend it was at four out of eleven chapters but the author just posted another one tonight, so it's now up to just under 50K and I have more achy sad fic to read while curling up with my cat and ignoring my other responsibilities tonight.

I also started another Erik/Charles fic, it's like one of us woke up by kaydeefalls the other day. It's a long canon-divergent AU and all Charles POV (Charles is my favorite) with peril and feelings and I'm enjoying that one a lot too.

I never really got into this fandom but now I feel all nostalgic for it. :) I guess there's another movie coming out next year and ... I can't even really say I'm looking forward to it because I kind of expect there to be a lot of disability fail along with the same kind of gross sexism and racism we saw in XMFC. But also James McAvoy's beautiful face! Feelings about found family and community! Erik and Charles and their doomed love! <3 <3

I've only read a few more pages of those novels I mentioned last week, Flight Behavior and Purple Hibiscus. Man, life is different when you're not traveling.

In other news, I am happy with my Festivids assignment. B suggested a song that I like a lot and we're planning on rewatching the source together soon. I have a bunch of ideas for treats I could make but I think making my official assignment plus one treat is a good goal to aim for (you know, after not making any vids all year).