Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I am deeply annoyed to inform you that I loved Martha Wells’ All Systems Red just as much as everyone told me I would. I’ve already finished Artificial Condition, I’m reading Rogue Protocol, and I’ve got Exit Strategy on deck. I hope you are all VERY proud of yourselves.

Murderbot ended up rather overshadowing the other space book I read this week, Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate. This is not really fair, as they are such different types of space book that except for the fact that I read them back to back, I probably wouldn’t have compared them. Murderbot is a shot directly to the feels; To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a quiet, meditative book about space exploration, with professional and mostly emotionally balanced scientist protagonists who eagerly log the strange and lovely life forms of the solar system they are exploring.

Ever since chantefable posted a link to the Youtube channel “How to Cook the Victorian Way” I have been a devotee, so when I saw that there was a book version, How to Cook the Victorian Way with Mrs. Crocombe, I gobbled it right up. None of these recipes are ones I would cook myself (well, maybe some of the biscuits?), but the book is chock full of interesting tidbits about Victorian cookery, so well worth a read.

AND FINALLY (these are all pretty short books, so there are a lot of them) I zoomed through the latest Baby-sitters Club graphic novel, Claudia and the New Girl, which is based on my favorite Baby-sitters Club book and as such almost inevitably couldn’t quite live up to its source material… but I’m so glad that these graphic novel adaptations exist to introduce the Baby-sitters Club to a new generation.

What I’m Reading Now

As aforementioned, the third Murderbot novella, Rogue Protocol. I kind of love Miki, the world’s most enthusiastically perky robot, and even more I love watching Murderbot go OH GOD STOP.

Also continuing my Newbery Honor project with Walter Dean Myers’ Somewhere in the Darkness from 1993. Myers has a sort of Hemingwayvian telegraphic style that I don’t find very appealing, but the book is at least pretty short.

What I Plan to Read Next

If I can wrench myself away from Murderbot for a bit, I’d really like to read Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, so the five people who have it on hold after me can get a crack at it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

YES YES YES YES YES YES

Welcome to the Corporate Rim, baby! Oh the fanfics that can be written!

[osprey_archer]

I hope you know that you are an EXTREMELY bad influence and it was your personal Murderbot fanart reblogs on Tumblr that sucked me into this.

[asakiyume]

Smug apologies offered :D

[rmc28]

Oh well done!

[asakiyume]

I do my best ;-)

[rmc28]

"I am deeply annoyed to inform you that I loved Martha Wells’ All Systems Red just as much as everyone told me I would."

Hurrah, that is excellent news, and also you being annoyed is exactly appropriate for this series :-P

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I really feel that Murderbot would feel a deep kinship to this irritation. UGH WHY DO I GOTTA CARE ABOUT THINGS, Murderbot and I could chorus in unison.

[evelyn_b]

I keep thinking I'd probably love All Systems Red and then not getting around to reading it. I love what I've heard of the premise, anyway. One of these days!

[osprey_archer]

On the one hand I want to encourage you to read it, on the other I feel that I should cry out "Escape! Escape while you can..." even as the series sucks me deeper and deeper into its maw.

[oracne]

WE ARE very proud of ourselves.

[osprey_archer]

As you should be! (I say bitterly, typing in a brief pause before returning to chapter 4 of Exit Strategy.)

[ancientreader]

Ah, Murderbot! Welcome to the club.

If you don't object to e-books, you might be interested to sign up for Tor's mailing list. It's not spammy and there's a free book to download every month. *cough* As a promo before the Murderbot novel came out subscribers could get all the novellas for free.

[osprey_archer]

Oh goodness, I think another source of free ebooks in my life might crush me. Gutenberg.org has already resulted in a dangerous backlog that never seems to get any smaller no matter how assiduously I read. (This is of course my own fault for downloading all those World War I memoirs and then getting distracted by a very VERY long cnovel...) But thank you for the thought!

[ancientreader]

LOL forget I said anything, just expunge it from your memory!

[lucymonster]

Murderbot!!!!! Oh, man, I have to go back and read all of Murderbot. I adored every word of the first two but stalled out for some reason on three. But I love ART so much and apparently ART comes back.

Also, Claudia and the New Girl was exactly the Babysitters book I was thinking of in your girl crush post the other day! It's been so long I couldn't remember the title, but yessss, all those rapturious descriptions of Ashley's style. I might try and check out the new graphic novels myself. Just glancing at the covers, they look adorable.

[osprey_archer]

I very much enjoyed Miki, the perky bot in three, but Miki is appealing in a VERY different way than ART. But I've heard that ART does come back in the novel! (Have not started the novel yet, but I have finished the fourth novella, so the novel is next on my list.)

The graphic novels gave Ashley a VERY different aesthetic than she had in the book, which left me ever so slightly piqued, but at least they capture the rapt intensity of the whole thing. Plus I had forgotten that when Claudia told Mimi about meeting Ashley, it reminded Mimi about how she fell in love at first sight with Claudia's grandfather, so how's THAT for a parallel?

[ladyherenya]

Yay! Murderbot!

[osprey_archer]

It took me a while to hop on the Murderbot bandwagon, but at last I've arrived!