September Reading!

[sweet_sparrow]

Hey all! I'm feeling a wee bit swamped in stuff. (And the final days of September/beginning days of October are looking set to be an emotional rollercoaster.)

So I thought I'd inquire into everyone's reading a little earlier. (Obviously, feel free to wait to answer or not answer at all.) What have you been reading in September?

I'd expected to get loads of reading done with classes started up again, but I feel sorely disappointed. That may be because September has been an abysmal month for reviewing, though.

Books I've Read:

Ancient Irish Tales by Cross & Slover (Sorry, lazy. Their names are long.)
Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
Complete Short Fiction by/of Oscar Wilde
Far from You by Lisa Schroeder
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (dnf)
Haiku by Patricia Donegan
Mella and the N'anga by Gail Nyoka
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger (I've been trying to say something about this book since I finished it.)
The Sound of Water by various poets
Tricks by Ellen Hopkins
Writing with Power by Peter Elbow

It's actually not much different from other months. That's about 12 books. My favourite was definitely Mella and the N'anga. I may finish Cybele's Secret before the month is out, but we'll see... I've also been reading Casting the Runes and Other Stories. Soon I shall be all out of coursework mandatory reading... Well, except for LotR, but I know I like LotR and cannot call it 'mandatory'.

What's your reading been like?

Comments

[quackaquacka]

Here's the list of everything I've read this month. I did something a little different this month - kept track by day of what I was reading, instead of just posting in groups of 10 - and I think that actually made me read more, because this has been the most prolific month so far. I don't know why that is, but it's interesting.

http://quackaquacka.dreamwidth.org/1491.html

[sweet_sparrow]

... Seriously, I want your reading speed...

Also looks like an incredibly varied reading month was had. ^-^ Did you enjoy most of the books you read?

[quackaquacka]

Looking back on it, there are only a couple I'm a bit 'mmm, well that was...disappointing'. I enjoyed most of them, and there's a couple that I outright loved, and will definitely keep re-reading.

I'm not really difficult to please when it comes to books - there's only one book I started this year that I haven't finished, and I only dropped that for moral reasons - but the flip side of that is, when almost everything is enjoyable in its own way, it's hard to find things that are amazing, that I will keep re-reading over and over again and not tire of them.

[sweet_sparrow]

Mmm... I miss the days when I was easy to please with books... I didn't really mind that I only found few amazing things, I think. Nowadays I yoyo between being ridiculously easy to please and ridiculously hard. Makes it hard to predict whether I'll like something or not based on blurbs and what other people say, but makes it easy to predict whether something that's not working may get better.

As long as I can sort-of skillfully explain to myself why I'm not finishing a book, I'm happy to let it go.

[quackaquacka]

Well - it's a bit difficult to describe, but I'm easy to please in that there's what I like and if it falls into that category (certain types of book, certain types of stories) then I'll probably, barring extreme circumstances, enjoy it; no matter what genre or age category, or...whatever it is. But there are whole swathes of books I wouldn't enjoy, so I don't really look at them which is probably why there aren't many I don't finish. Not that I don't try books out of my comfort zone, or in all sorts of different genres - it's a bit hard to explain, really, since it's not a concious thing. Does it make sense?

[sweet_sparrow]

In that strange way that things sometimes make sense, yes. ^-^

For me the trouble is that I find it very easy to like a story's premise or its characters, but it's incredibly hard to get me to like prose. (I am a prose-snob, but I'm perfectly happy with less than stellar prose as long as it doesn't hurt to read and the story is engaging.) It... seems to balance itself out somehow, but damned if I know how. o_O Still working on that.