#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

1. Tagged
2. Knife of Dreams
3. I don't actually have any at the moment. You can't go too wrong with Agatha Christie though, so I would definitely read The Mystery of the Blue Train.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. A Prayer for Owen Meany
2. Lolita comes to mind right away, though I've never actually met anyone who doesn't think it's excellent
3. Historical fiction, I guess (The Pillars of the Earth)

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Never. I already spend more time looking at my phone than I'd like to. Reading books on it would kill my eyes.
2. I had the original Kindle, which I used to take on the subway when I lived in New York. Alas, it died, so I guess "books" are my favorite device now ?

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Philip had not yet got used to sleeping alone.

(First line of Chapter 4, Part II - it's taking me a LONG time to finish this book 😄)

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Both. I like a short, propulsive novel, but also longer world-building novels.
2. The tagged book is a good example of the former, an illustration of the events that could lead us into a Third World War.

#sundaysoapbox @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Two days late with this one, but that's how life has been lately 🤯

It depends on the person, but I recommend these ones a lot:

📕 Slaughterhouse Five
📘 Jitterbug Perfume
📗 Stoner
📓 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Thanks for the tag @TheRiehlDeal !

In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house.

#ThoughtfulThursday @MoonWitch94

Thanks for the tag @TheSpineView !

1. I never set reading goals, but even if I did they'd be out the window already. Work has been nuts since the New Year. I haven't read a single page in 2021.
2. Derivative
3. Tagged (hopefully I can finish it by summer 😂)

Tag @Ast_Arslan @IuliaC @RaeLovesToRead @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @RamsFan1963 @bthegood

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. Seeing my second book be published and having my third (and probably last) be accepted for publication. Greatest challenge was making simple small talk with people again after so much time in isolation.
2. I read more great books this year than ever before. Picking a best book would be impossible, but my favorite might be the tagged one. Absolutely hilarious.
3. My parents' health improves.

#sundayfunday @ozma.of.oz

1. The Man Without Qualities was like nothing I've ever read before.
2. Brian Moore. Both The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Luck of Ginger Coffey were excellent.
3. Received a NYRB book of the month subscription for Christmas! 🙂🌲

Kind of a snore, and further confirmation of my belief that most prequels subtract from a story more than they add. Sometimes a little mystery about a character's origins is a good thing. Recommended for Wheel of Time superfans only, and then only after you've read the entire original series.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. Definitely, especially if I don't know much else about the book
2. That's a tough one. I like many different types of covers, and sometimes don't even know I like a certain style until I see it. Something clean and timeless, like the NYRB books, is always good, though.
3. Tagged

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. A stress-free day, which - since it's just going to be my wife, daughter, and me - seems likely.
2. Yes. We got 6 inches of snow last Saturday, and the forecast is showing another inch or so on Christmas day, which would be perfect. After New Years it can all melt as far as I'm concerned 😄

Tag @RaeLovesToRead @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @jdiehr @Ast_Arslan @Reggie @Vansa

Thanks for the tag @RaeLovesToRead ! Here are my top 21 of 21.

Given how Wheel of Time heavy the second half of my year was, I almost forgot how many great books I read during the first half. I had quite a run of 5⭐ reads, from Man Without Qualities to The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne to Masters of Atlantis to We to Stoner. Hard to pick a best overall. Here's hoping next year is just as good!

Tag @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @IuliaC

#thisorthat

Paperback
Fiction
Meet my favorite character
Not allowed to re-read
Standalone (this was the toughest one 🤔)
Fantasy
Enemies to lovers
Bookstore

Tagging anyone and everyone!

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

A cold wind gusted through the night, across the snow-covered land where men had been killing one another for the past three days.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. I'm still not sure if "literary fiction" is truly a genre rather than a general descriptor of work that transcends its genre, but if I picked that I guess I'd say Nabokov. As a backup pick, I'll say Humor and Wodehouse.
2. I try to be as picky as I can before deciding what to read and to finish everything I start, but for some reason I can't finish The Count of Monte Cristo. Some other book always pulls me away.
3. ?

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. All the old crooner stuff - Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, etc.
2. Mulled wine is a Christmas tradition for us, and the smell seems to fill the whole house. Also, anything cinnamon-y.

Tag @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @IuliaC @Ast_Arslan @julesG @AmyG @xica

A nicely done thriller about the ease with which a Third World War could start, well-paced and engaging throughout. The characters felt somewhat two-dimensional, at least at the beginning, but in this case I think it worked to the story's advantage. The reader is given just enough of their personalities and histories to understand what motivates them... ⬇

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

It surprised her still, even after twenty-four years, the way from horizon to horizon the vast expanse of ocean could in an instant turn completely calm, taut as a linen pulled across a table.

It's tough to review something like WoT without spoilers. All I can say is that 99.9% of this book was - to borrow Thom Merrilin's word - "exquisite". 14 books might be too long for a series (I've made the case myself that WoT could probably stand to have a couple books' worth of padding shaved off), but there's no doubt all that time spent among this world and these characters paid off in the end. There were as many deaths as there were...?

When you're writing an 11,000-page epic, it's only right that The Last Battle gets a 217-page chapter all to itself! I'm torn between wanting to plow ahead and read the whole thing tonight and taking my time to savor these last few hundred pages. I've been totally immersed in this series for the last several months. I think my next book will need to be something about coping with loss 😂

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Putting up the tree, decorating, listening to Christmas music, and drinking cocoa the weekend after Thanksgiving.
2. The second half of the last book of the Wheel of Time. After so many months I can't believe I only have 400 pages to go!

Tagging anyone who is interested!

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. None. I'll be driving half the time and visiting family the rest of it, so reading will have to wait.
2. All of it! Stuffing is probably my favorite if made right, but my wife also makes these Brussels sprouts with bacon and a maple glaze that are just about the greatest things ever 😋

Tagging everyone who's interested!

And then there was one! I was curious whether Sanderson could possibly tie up all the loose ends Jordan had left for him, but going into the finale I have to say that he's done an admirable job so far. No minor characters with unfinished business get neglected, yet the story rightly stays focused on the core group that's been with us from the beginning. It's a neat balancing act, and Sanderson manages to pull it off without a hitch.

#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

1. Tagged
2. Has to be a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup
3. Can't think of one off the top of my head, so I'm going to cheat and go with a TV show I recently watched for the first time, Over the Garden Wall.

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. I don't really do reading goals. I have time set aside each day to read, and that's enough. The last thing I need in life is another deadline to stress over.
2. A Memory of Light. At this point, seeing how The Wheel of Time ends is all I care about.

Tag @IuliaC @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @Ast_Arslan @julesG @AmyG and anyone else who wants to join

Normally when a new author steps in to finish a beloved, deceased author's work, the results are pretty uninspiring (see: every Dune book Brian Herbert ever wrote). Luckily, this is an exception to the rule, the best installment since Lord of Chaos, and maybe of the entire series so far. Jordan left enough source material behind that the story is still unmistakably his, and with a three-book limit and the ending already written, Sanderson 👇

Renald Fanwar sat on his porch, warming the sturdy blackoak chair crafted for him by his grandson two years before.

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Either Shakespeare and Company in Paris or Powell's in Portland.
2. Yes, also known as my Litsy TBR.

Tagging whoever is interested!

The end is nigh! Book 11 was originally supposed to be the penultimate book in the series, and it shows. All the building tension of the previous few books gets a release valve here, as pretenders to various thrones are dispatched with, wandering armies are crushed or absorbed by rivals, and old enemies form uneasy alliances as Tarmon Gai'don looms on the horizon. This is the last book Robert Jordan finished before he died, and 👇

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. The Hardy Boys! Every birthday my grandma would give me a Hardy Boys book and a savings bond, which is just about the most grandma present I can imagine (except for maybe a card with a five-dollar bill inside; that was left to my Great Aunt 🤣).
2. Rainy 🌧
3. We found a contractor to fix our garage! 🏠

Yawn! This was very much a "bridge" book. The Big Event that closed out Book 9 is revisited here half a dozen times, from the viewpoint of multiple factions spread across the world, as we see what they were doing and what their reaction was when it occurred. It's an effective narrative device given how huge and momentous the Event was, but still, it takes up the first 300 pages of the book, and the rest is just build up to the inevitable climax ?

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Rodel Ituralde hated waiting, though he well knew it was the largest part of being a soldier.

#wondrouswednesday @TheSpineView

1. Crossroads of Twilight
2. Taking my daughter and her friends trick or treating
3. Getting a good night's sleep for once.

Tag: @Ast_Arslan @IuliaC @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm

Wow, it's been a year already? Where has time gone?? 🕑

Thanks for the tag @Ast_Arslan !

1. No, though Edward Gorey is always a good choice
2. If they show up they'll be sorely disappointed, since I'll be across town escorting my daughter and her friends 🎃

...falling asleep, he would follow the ghostly mothers who left St. Cloud's in the cover of darkness, and boarded the horse-drawn coach car, or, later, the bus which replaced the coach, and gave Homer Wells his first sensation of the passage of time, of progress. Soon after the bus replaced the coach, all bus service in St. Cloud's was discontinued. Thereafter the mothers walked; this gave Homer further understanding of progress.

Her method was rigorous and messy. She presented great clumps of uncapitalized, misspelled, and unpunctuated words, and demanded that the clumps be put into proper sentences, meticulously punctuated and correctly spelled. She then corrected the corrections; the final document- she employed a system of different colored inks -resembled a much-revised treaty between two semiliterate countries at war.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. No
2. Yes, if one-track (all Wheel of Time, all the time so far)
3. I'm solo parenting this month, and grateful for having a daughter who's so easy to look after!

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Both, I guess. I suppose it depends whether you're taking an expansive view of what constitutes Witches and wizards or sticking with the traditional "pointy hat and robe" variety.
2. Expansive would be WoT (Aes Sedai = witches, Asha'man = wizards). Traditional would be Discworld (hooray for Rincewind!)

Tag @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @Ast_Arslan @j9brown @IuliaC @julesG

Ok, this one was a bit much. Well past the halfway mark of the series now, and we're still adding new factions and new characters, and spending too much time lost in the minutiae of regional political intrigues (I get that the struggle for Andor's Lion Throne is important, but do I need an exhaustive primer on every major house and possible claimant?). It's such a snooze that the last 30 pages seem to come out of nowhere, and you wonder why 👇

The lanterns cast a flickering light, more than enough to illuminate the small room with its stark white walls and ceiling, but Seaine kept her eyes fixed on the heavy wooden door.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. No
2. I hate social media. After a long hiatus, I got back on Facebook to have an easy way to keep in touch with family, and every time I scroll through it I come away feeling worse than when I started. Litsy is probably the only site I actually enjoy engaging with.
3. A teleconference I had to lead for work and have been dreading is finally over with! 😌

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. I prefer crime novels, in the Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett vein
2. Class. When I think of crime novels I think of the underworld, street-level crime. When I think of cozies, I think of drawing rooms and the aristocracy.

I can see why people who read this at the time it was published found it disappointing. This was very much a "set-up" book; all the different factions that were put into motion at the end of Book 7 spent Book 8 getting where they needed to go. If I had been waiting a year or two for this to come out- and knew I had a year or two until the next installment -I might have been underwhelmed. But since I have the advantage of reading the ?

Ethenielle had seen mountains lower than these misnamed Black Hills, great lopsided heaps of half-buried boulders, webbed with steep twisting passes.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

1. None, other than my own, personal quest to conquer the Wheel of Time.
2. Carrots, roasted Brussels sprouts, corn, peppers (except green)...really I like most vegetables, so long as they're fresh and grown organically
3. We finally found a contractor to fix our siding 👷‍♂️

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Tagged
2. I like that it's part of the WoT, and I'm invested enough in the series at this point that anything that advances the narrative is all right by me. What I don't like is that it's advancing very slowly, one of those books that seems to exist just to move pieces into position for the big homestretch a few books further out. Oh well, no pain, no gain!

Some mark book 7 as the beginning of the dreaded "slog", but I enjoyed this one. Maybe it was the momentum of the last book carrying over. Things did slow down some by the end, but never quite dragged. One thing I appreciate about this series - it doesn't short change just how much work and planning would go into conquering the world and uniting the populace behind a single leader. Rand might be the chosen one, the "Dragon Reborn", but that ?