Just a Little Book Talk - Share Your Current Books Chit Chat

Both very valid points! Good counterargument there!

Oh neat! I've been meaning to read that. How was it?

Good to know!

I just finished Sign of Four. Just have Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and I have completed all of Sherlock Holmes!

Last Christmas I discovered an American-Lithuanian author named Ruta Sepetys whose books are placed in different time periods of the 20th Century. So far, I've read "Between shades of gray" (life of a 15 year-old in a gulag), "Salt to the sea" (4 teenagers, a Lithuanian nurse, a Prussian deserter, a pregnant Polish girl and a young Nazi who believes in Hitler's propaganda struggle to survive the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" that left about 9000 dead), "I must betray you" (Bucharest, December 1989, relatively similar to what every Romanian family experienced). This Summer I read "The fountains of silence" (an American and a Spanish Republican falling in love during Franco's reign). All I can say is that all these novels have powerful subjects about which lots of people would prefer to remain silent about. I'm waiting for her newest book to be published in October and I have high hopes!

Oh! I didn't realize others could post and share their current reads on this thread.

I'm on book 10 in my official reread of Wings of Fire and I've reached That One Scene that makes me want to chuck the book across the room. Actually, the entire book is... a lot worse than I remember. Dx

I desire to know the details. It's been a while since I was there.

And I changed the thread title to make it make a bit mire sense lol. XD

It's the scene wherein Winter is rightfully fearful and angry because his friends are doing mental gymnastics to defend the dragon who possessed him with magic and sent a plague and supersoldiers to wipe out his entire tribe. The scene wherein everyone acts like he's being unreasonable for? wanting to save his tribe and family from genocide? getting upset that Darkstalker took away his agency and manipulated his mind against his will?? especially after he was traumatized by the Pyrite experience?? And nobody is listening to him or taking that threat seriously???

Qibli picks an inappropriate time to be funny (again) and completely trivializes that trauma. Moon's like "Darkstalker's not evil, i've seen good in him, he's trying to do the right thing, he just does it differently than we would, why are you so mad." Qibli thinks Winter's being a self-righteous ass for trying to make Moon see the truth and scolds him. "How can he yell at Moon if he really loves her?" How can you, Qibli, and you, Moon, gaslight and victim-blame Winter (your friend and potential love interest) if you really care about him? How can you possibly still sympathize with Darkstalker after everything he's done?

And the smashed vase. Moon cutting her palm and Qibli bandaging it for her while Winter continues freaking out, apparently oblivious to the harm he's caused. So unnecessary. I hate it when authors resort to trashing the character development of one love interest just to make the other look better. And later Moon says "please don't break anything else" which is weirdly antagonistic and so not needed like?? Winter didn't smash the vase on purpose?? He was having a fully-justified panic attack and knocked it over by accident. That's all. He didn't threaten or insult anybody even though he was upset. Winter was the only character being sensible here imo.

And yet. All of Winter's growth is shoved aside and the narrative treats him like a jerk just to prop up Moonbli. Everybody is behaving ooc here, Moon and Qibli most of all. The scene does them a disservice as well. They're supposed to be smarter than this! They're supposed to be more compassionate than this! And then not even 3 pages later Qibli contradicts himself and calls Moon out for sympathizing with "a very lonely brainwashing genocidal murderer." which is almost identical to what Winter was trying to say. But Qibli gets away with it because he's Qibli, I guess. Wth Tui. please write characters consistently for at least one chapter i beg you.

I recently finished an advanced reader copy of The Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, which was quite good. I'm currently reading Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

Wow I totally agree. To the part that’s bolded: YEAH FR!!! If I was in his place I’d be even more upset if Moon said that, plus that’s kinda passive aggressive which IS THE MOST ANNOYING THING EVER IMO.

I just finished reading Pachinko and it was very interesting as a Korean-American reading about the hardships that my ancestors faced during that time period. It was also really good at portraying genrational trauma.

Also Reading Scarlet Letter for the first time for my lit class. It's really interesting I don't know why people say it's boring. Maybe the prose is hard to understand? But I think if you take your time any english prose becomes readable.

Finally got back into reading in the past month. I started out with Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart, but I took too long to read the book so it was returned automatically ;w; it’s a brand new book so the chances I’ll get to read it again won’t be for a while.
I’ve moved onto another Rob Hart book instead called New Yorked. It’s a murder mystery / thriller if I remember correctly. It’s been pretty good so far, the chapters are quite long. I’m only 52% of the way because it’s a 400+ page book. I’m really hoping that I can finish this one soon because I think I’ve figured out who killed the victim.