What book(s) are you reading?

[Tasty]

Does your library have an online aspect? If they offer downloads via Overdrive you can download via MP3 and keep the downloads forever.

Meant more epubs and PDFs. 😬

[Stro]

Yeah it works the same for ebooks

[chronovore]

Anybody fucks with DRM free ebooks? Is there a good store for such? Want to stay as legit as possible.

Calibre is a massive pain and I used to have it working quite well, but something in the chain has broken down in the last year (between Google Play's DRM, Kindle's DRM, Adobe's Digital Editions software, Calibre, or all of the above.) So I'm trying to buy DRM free from the start if possible.

Tor's books are DRM free, IIRC.
Your library may have an online version where you can check out, read, and "return" the books. That's not DRM-free, but it is literally free to sign up for and enjoy.

[EchoRin]

Love is a Mix Tape - An autobiographical memoir about a man who lost his wife after about 5 years of marriage. Quite a tribute to her that I'd be smitten by if someone did the same for me.

The book mainly deals with the time the two shared together and as you might have guessed by the title, how music connects these various times. You also spend a portion of life prior to him meeting his wife and then the process of him dealing with life after her death.

As someone who also has music being an everlasting  constant presence around me, this book was very relatable in many ways, but it's not the key to enjoying the book or not. Even I wasn't aware of many of the tracks brought up, or even in some cases the artist altogether. It's not important to know them as the author is able to give you enough info to infer a point about a connection or how a song fit with a certain moment. If you do know exactly the song or the artist, bonus points for you, but it's unnecessary in getting the point across.

I enjoyed getting to know this couple and their way of life, family ties, eccentricities, hopes, fears, even the average boring day to day married couple nonsense. It's all very romantic and them being people who sort of seem like I would take to helped my enjoyment as well.

When the wife unexpectedly dies, it really took my breath out. And you know from chapter one that she isn't going to make it, but man when the moment came it still knocked me on my ass. The portion after her passing is also a testament to who she was as a person. People really loved her and she touched many of them.

I'm always scared of the idea that once I die or someone I care about dies that they merely become a footnote that will soon be forgotten. Especially as time goes by. If I or they didn't leave something substantial behind they just slowly fade and become a distant memory that soon has no impact while the people that they knew, friends, family, husband / wife, keep on going on and get to experience so much more while the dead are left behind. With this woman in the book though, you can see that if you were worth a damn to people on a human level the memory and impact still can live on. That's kind of comforting. I mean I don't know if I would have that impact haha, but hey there's hope.

The book was a really nice read. Always love when music has a big tie to a story as music is really a personal thing that is sort of an extension of us. Sometimes we like music just for the sake of it. Happens to me all the time. Other times though it's because we feel a deeper connection to it. It speaks to us on a personal level. Sometimes due to the lyrics. Other times the feel of the music. Or both. Music is versatile like that.  I love that.

If you got a mushy heart and music is a constant presence around you, I recommend the book.

[Potato]

That sounds depressing.

Anyway, I'm on to Son of a Liche by J. Zachary Pike. Someone here recommended Orconomics a while back and I loved it. Great satire and genuinely funny.

[Bebpo]

So I stayed up until 5:45am last night finishing Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives #4: The Rhythm of War. Finally got up with the entire Cosmere universe MCU-style storyline.

Rhythm was ok, it's a good book, but being the second to last book in a 6,000 page+ five book series it started boxing in a lot of plot points and storylines to make a final book possible and I'm not that happy with some of the directions it's setting up. I feel like if Winds of Winter come out I might get a similar feeling. Early books create potential and make everything exciting possibilities whereas later books reign things in and it gets less interesting/exciting.

Rhythm has some great stuff, but overall is probably the weakest Stormlight book or on par with book #1. I honestly have no idea if he'll pull off a great book with the final book. Could go either way, but at least he writes fast so it won't be that long to find out since it's planned for fall 2023 release. So just 2.5 years out.

At this point more excited about the other Cosmere major series finishing with Mistborn Wax & Wayne book #4 out in 2022. Feels more potential there for an interesting exciting story.

But yeah Cosmere is cool and was absolutely worth reading it all. These next two books are essentially finishing up the first half of Cosmere and then time for intermission books before the next big series start.

[Bebpo]

Ok, so gonna finish up some books I've got lined up next(Norell & Strange, more Yahtzee stuff, GRRM edited short story collections, etc...). But went peeking around for recommendations for a new fantasy/horror/sci-fi multi-book series to give a shot and just picked up (some YA):

Malazan vol.1
Belgariad vol.1
House of Shadows vol.1
Arc of a Scythe vol.1
Inkheart vol.1

as well as Sanderson's Skyward YA series, which I'll probably read not too far out since I like his writing and stories enough I think I'll enjoy his non-Cosmere stuff.

Was thinking about picking up First Law vol.1 but it was pretty expensive for the physical and I'm grabbing enough stuff.

Where do I even start if I want to finally read Lord of the Rings? And don't say The Hobbit. I read that in school as a kid and I'm good.

Hopefully one of those fills the gap now that I need a new Ice & Fire, Dark Tower, Cosmere.

[Madrun Badrun]

I wouldn't recommend Malazan unless you have the time to read them all through.   Also warning with Malazan and seeing your reading habits, the last 25% of each book is a huge rollercoaster ride so if you hit page 800 at 7 PM you might be reading well into the morning for the next 300. 

[Bebpo]

I mean...I have nothing planned to read for the next decades of my life outside a Cosmere book here and there and Winds of Winter (lol). Not really attached to any other on-going series or authors currently.

So sure, if I like a series I'd read it all.

[Madrun Badrun]

Ya, I just mean it's not really a series you can put down once you start, either to take a break or read other stuff, otherwise you end up forgetting half of it since a lot of the time what is relevant in the current book happened like 3 books ago.  There is a kind of momentum to it and if you interrupt it, it tends to make progressing really hard.  Kinda like stopping a Fromsoft game towards the end and coming back to it after a few months - most of the muscle memory and where to go and what still needs to be done is gone lol

[Bebpo]

Read Defending Elysium the sci-fi detective thriller novella Sanderson wrote early on before he turned it into a YA series with Skyward.

Was solid, not much else to say about it other than I read it in one sitting over about 90 mins. I liked it enough that I'll read Skyward later this year.  Just entertaining stuff, nothing too deep or new but I like how his stuff reads and there's a good amount of twists and turns and action and mysteries and likeable characters.

Probably will read most of his free novellas at some point:
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/brandon-sanderson-online-library/#freebooks

[Tasty]

Want to get Sharon Stone's book even if it's probably ghostwritten.

[Bebpo]

I'm almost done reading The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew. It's a graphic novel biography of Singapore's most famous comic writer which intermixes pages from his comics throughout his life. His comics were very political during major events of Singapore during the 1940s on with WWII and Japan's occupation of Singapore and the British return occupation/rule and SG's eventual independence. Really fascinating book and I'm learning a lot of about Singapore's history.



Also started on the anthology Dangerous Women curated by GRRM and Gardner Dozois last night. Read Joe Abercrombie's short story, which is my first introduction to his writing. Was...ok? Entertaining, but a pretty nothing story and just an action scene really. Action read well enough, but wasn't enough to get a feel for his writing.




Which also prompted me to want to read some horror short stories so I got back to Jonathan Langan's The Wide Carniverous Sky short story collection. I read City of the Dog last night which was good but my main issue with all his short stores in these books are they're really interesting pieces and then they end undercooked without much of the lore explained since they're short stories. It's why I kinda shelved this about midway even though I liked the stories. I just don't find them satisfying at the end because so much is not explained. His novel The Fisherman was really fucking good, but it was a novel length so he had more time to go into story stuff. I should look and see what he's been writing these last few years.

[Bebpo]

Ok, finished The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and discovered that the author that it's a biography of doesn't actually exist and this is all a fictional creation and all the example pages from his works over 50 years are Sonny Liew showing a diverse style as he tells the story of a political activist comic writer living through the liberation and self-rule of SG.

Was really good and I learned a lot about Singapore's politics. I had never researched the country and discovering that it's heavily authoritarian still is crazy. I went there in 2017 or 2018 and had no idea about any of this stuff. At least it seems a little better now that books like this can be released and aren't being banned outright with authors exiled or imprisoned or something. But I saw they still pulled the arts grant money for the book because of its views, so still shady.

Welp, definitely not moving to Singapore. Good book though.

[benjipwns]

First actual book I've read in a while since the libraries shut down:



Was kinda dry, lots of reciting facts and stuff but I enjoyed some of the stories about the movies. The Battlefield Earth chapter really felt like it downplayed how much Scientology bankrolled that thing though to focus on how fat John Travolta was getting. Sometimes I found juicier quotes about the movies/behind-the-scenes/etc. on Wikipedia than in the book. I was also surprised that it ignored some movies that it just offhand mentioned, like Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis which lost like $50 million or something, for movies that ultimately did turn a profit and were just troubled productions. Also felt it kinda downplayed that part during production of The Cotton Club where Robert Evans got involved with all those drug people and someone got murdered.