Book Roundup

[unicornduke]

I think I've posted a bunch on other platforms but not here. The libby app is amazing and also very good for reading books. There's been a minor kerfuffle with my local library, it closed for a month because part of a wall fell down so getting new books is slightly more difficult. They moved to a new temp location but hours open are very limited.

A list of books I've read lately and enjoyed

• This Poison Heart by Kaylnn Bayron - plants, mysteries and magic. Excellent and I actually bought a physical copy. Sequel coming in 2022
• The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna - fantasy world, incredible plot and storytelling, amazing ending. sequel coming in the next year or so I think
• Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire - a ghost story told by the ghost. delightful and not too spooky. Second book in the series also very very good
• Cinder by Melissa Meyer - Cinderella story meets cyberpunk. very very good, only note is a major plot arc involves a pandemic which hits different these days
• All Systems Red by Martha Wells - now I understand the murderbot hype. I read this book three times in a day, it was so good.
• Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse - incredible worldbuilding, amazing descriptions, great plot. does end on a cliffhanger and book 2 of 3 is coming out soonish
• Hungry Hearts - an anthology with the focus on food. mostly feel good stories but a few darker ones as well
• New Suns - an anthology of speculative fiction writing by authors of color, really really good stories
• The City We Became by NK Jemisin - not the book she's well known for but an incredible story about people and New York City. Just really good.

There's been some others but I will leave it here.

Comments

[oracne]

Good to know about the Black Sun cliffhanger! I feel okay now about putting it aside for a while. (I got started, but wasn't in the right mood.)

MURDERBOT IS THE BEST.

[unicornduke]

I found the first third of Black Sun was a little bit hard to grasp everything but after that, the plot rocketed along and was thoroughly enjoyable. But yeah, cliffhanger.

I love murderbot and I barely met it

[recently_folded]

I've pretty much exclusively read digital books since 3/19, when we stopped going out. Libby is indeed a solid app and I appreciate the ability to tag books myself so I can keep a "to read" list so I don't have to browse when I want my next book RIGHT NOW. My only current disappointment is that it doesn't sync across devices. If I'm reading on my tablet and open a book on my phone, I have nothing other than the text itself to paw through to find my place. I can't tag on anything other than my tablet, although I often prefer to browse on the laptop, meaning I have to keep a manual list of recommendations I see when reading on the laptop to look up manually in Libby when on the tablet.The rest of the app is so smooth that I find this inexplicably lacking and annoying.

As noted above, MURDERBOT IS THE BEST. Also some good murderbot fics exist on AO3, should you burn through the limited collection of canon and need more.

[unicornduke]

I only got my library card in May due to many things including my library having limited hours before the pandemic. It's very nice to be able to read for ten minutes at various points in the day.

Thank you for the tag info! I didn't realize I could do that and now I can start tagging some to be reads as I see them elsewhere.

The murderbot books are in high demand currently although I adventured and got the second one! I'll start looking into fics once I read through most of them I think.

[recently_folded]

One other great thing about Libby for popular books is that you can place a hold and get notified when it's available. And then you can postpone it by a place or two in line if you're too busy at that particular moment. Their time projections are poor, in terms of how long the wait will be, so inevitably if you've got 5 holds, 4 of them will come in all the same week even though their expected availability was weeks apart. Oh well.

You can also game the "recommendation" feature to get a jump on a new book. For example, I figured that the library would be getting the new Becky Chambers as soon as it was released. So I searched for it, got the screen that shows it's not yet in the collection but that I could recommend the library get it...and automatically be put on the holds list for it should they do so. I think I was the very first one to get it! I've done that several times in the immediate pre-launch period for popular sequels and it gets you much higher on the list than waiting for it to be purchased and then signing up with the multitudes.