Queer

#Readathon Mid-Event Survey

2022, Art, Books in Bed, Dewey's Readathon, Non-Fiction, Queer /

Funny. I’ve done a million #readathons and I’ve done very few mid-event surveys. I wonder why. Very weird.

  • What are you reading right now?

I’m going back to the Once Upon a Book Club book, The Roughest Draft.

  • How many books have you read so far?

I’ve finished three books – but I was 1/3 of the way through one of them. So far, I’ve finished Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Part (I was 110 pages into it when I picked it back up today), I read Create Your Life Book, and of course The Woman of Andros.

  • What book are you most looking forward to for the second half of the readathon?

I think I’m most looking forward to finishing The Roughest Draft. All of those presents to open along the way!

  • Have you had many interruptions? How did you deal with those?

Well, the chickens refused to go directly from their day time grazing yard back to their night time area. It took two of us and a lot of cajoling to get them to all move in the right direction and stay in the right area. I mean it’s not like it took an hour to round them up but it was a good 15 minutes. That’s pretty much the only real interruptions, so far.

  • What surprises you most about the readathon, so far?

I’m doing better than I expected, considering how tired I was when I got up this morning. I’m about 450 pages down – that’s not going to break any records but all things considered, I’ll take it. If I can get another 300 pages done before I call it a night, I’ll be exceptionally happy.

My mid-event snack.

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Competence

2019, Books in Bed, Favorites, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

We got lucky and TW found the third book in The Custard Protocal, Competence on the shelf at the library. I read most of it during #Readathon but couldn’t quite manage the last hour it would have taken me to finish it last night. I think this series has grown into itself, after what felt like a bit of a rough start. (Or maybe I just missed the original Soulless characters so much that it took me some time to grow into the series?) The South American “vampires” were awesome as was Percy’s solution for their problem.

Great #Readathon book, great addition to the series.

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Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power!

2018, Books in Bed, Feminism, Fiction, Queer, Young Adult /

Shortly after we moved to Chicagoland, we discovered a small independent bookstore in the next town over and found ourselves visiting it every year, on Christmas Eve, to purchase books for all of the kids. Yay, Book Bin! When we moved back to Florida, we inadvertently stumbled upon an bookstore in Fleming Island and that’s become our yearly shopping spot – but we don’t necessarily shop on Christmas Eve. This year we went on Black Friday.

While we were browsing, TW stumbled over a couple of baskets of ARCs of books and found a couple that she was interested in. I was skeptical because you’re really not supposed to sell those AND there were no price tags on the books… turns out, you get to choose one free for every $50 you purchase. I won’t tell you how many we got free (4) but an ARC of Lumberjanes Unicorn Power was one of them.

Friendship to the max! Lots of fun music references (Blondie’s Bring On Me on accordion? Sleater Kinney? Yes, please.) Unicorns that are pretty but smell really yuk. There’s also a non-binary or trans person with they/them pronouns. Totally fun!

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Down Among the Sticks and Bones

2018, Books in Bed, Favorites, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

The sequel to Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones was about Jack and Jill and their doorway “adventure.” Good story, even if it was bloody and sad. I’m not sure I’d have saved my sister if she’d done what Jill did. Jack’s a better woman than I am.

The next book will bring us back to Eleanor West’s boarding school. I’m looking forward to it.

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Five Children’s Books

2018, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, Fiction, Queer /

I ordered some Halloween books for the little boys and forgot to blog about them. So here they are:

Bonaparte Falls Apart was a big hit with Pippin.

ET: The Classic Illustrated Storybook – It’s the story of ET with great illustrations. I didn’t have time to read it to Pippin when I was babysitting.

Spooky Pookie – this one was cute. Squishy liked it but mostly just wanted to carry it around and look at it by himself rather than have me read it to him.

You’re My Little Pumpkin Pie – I didn’t like this one quite as well, (I wouldn’t), but Squishy seemed to enjoy me reading it to him. He sat all the way through and didn’t try to take the book away from me, lol.

Princess Princess Ever After is a book I saw on some list of LGBTQ books in June or maybe October? I don’t know but it was in my Evernote mixed up with other LGBTQ titles. It’s a graphic novel for young middle grade kids. It’s cute – princess rescues princess and rescues a prince and then the other princess kind of rescues everyone and becomes queen. Then some amount of time passes (a lot, I’d guess) and the princess comes back to the castle to marry the queen. I could have done without that marrying the queen bit (patriarchy, etc. etc.) and time passed without us seeing the princess or the queen at work. That kind of stinks. If you were going to do that, it should be a series where we watch the kids grow up, do their own things, and then come back together again. (I clearly have strong thoughts about this book, lol.)

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Every Heart a Doorway

1 Comment / 2018, Books in Bed, Queer, Sci Fi and Fantasy /

I did finish Every Heart a Doorway during our #FakeReadathon on Sunday. It’s a quick and easy read so there was little reason for me NOT to finish it. Also, it was good.

I thought it was YA but quickly realized that it wasn’t. It definitely was not. It was also a lot darker and creepier than I expected it to be. Not that I really knew what to expect… this book has been in my Evernote TBR file for more than two years. I only barely remembered anything about it. And I didn’t realize it was part of a series until Saturday.

I enjoyed it enough that I’ve already reserved the second book at the library.

Oh, I almost forgot… this one has a Transgendered character (who I assume is a character we’ll see again in the rest of the series) AND an Aesexual character (who I believe was only in this first book — but I’m not really sure since this is fantasy and anything can happen in fantasy.)

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#ReadathonBingo!

2018, Books in Bed, Children's Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, cookbooks, Dewey's Readathon, Favorites, Queer /

Woot. I didn’t even know about #Readathon Bingo until I woke up this morning and loaded all of the Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon links I like to keep open when I do #Readathon, so I’m pretty pleased that I was able to adjust my TBR plan (who am I kidding, I didn’t have a plan) and get a Blackout!

#Readathon Bingo Blackout
#Readathon Bingo Blackout

To get it, I had to read the short stories/essays I mentioned earlier today and track down a book with a male protagonist… TW’s Comic Con LGBTQ Mystery Box to the rescue (thanks, Momal!) In it was The World’s Greatest Love: Vol. 1. and that fit the bill nicely!

Speaking of The World’s Greatest Love… typical Manga. I kind of wish it had been written by a man, I think it might have been slightly different… the best part was the information about the world of Manga publishing. That was really interesting.

Besides that book, I also finished Dinner Illustrated and found a lot of recipes I’d try. I’m almost tempted to buy it. I wonder what TW thinks of the book.

After that, since I was waiting for the dogs to come in, I read two children’s picture books about gender/non-binary. Both were well done. I’d recommend them: I’m a Girl and Introducing Teddy.

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Saving Montgomery Sole

2018, Books in Bed, Fiction, Queer, Young Adult /

I’m pretty sure Saving Montgomery Sole arrived because I saw a list of LGBTQ books during Pride month and I reserved a bunch.

This one is written by the author of Skim and if you’ve read Skim, I think the writing here will feel familiar. At least it felt familiar to me. The problem was that I didn’t particularly like Montgomery, though I understood her and why she was struggling. If empathy is all I can really summon for the main character, the book is not really going to be one of my favorites. (I liked all of the other characters more! Every single one of them. OK not the stupid minister.)

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