Quests & Challenges

Today I finished the bird chapter of Gary Bogue's [b]The Raccoon Next Door[/b], an informative and entertaining nonfiction guide of urban wildlife accounts from the California Bay Area and how readers everywhere can live in harmony with their animal neighbors. The greyscale illustrations by Chuck Todd are so lively! [quote]What is your favorite genre to read?[/quote] I am evenly torn between xenofiction fantasy (huge fan of Wings of Fire and Guardians of Ga'Hoole) and animal science nonfiction (my current collection is mostly about dinosaurs and birds).

[quote]What is your favorite genre to read?[/quote] Fantasy, but especially genre-bending fantasy--urban fantasy, magitech, that sort of thing! Daily reading: Listened to some more of The Count of Monte Cristo earlier! There was a scene that broke my heart, where Edmond is talking to Mercedes and it's clear that she knows it's him and I think he realized that, but he still kept pretending to not be Edmond Dantes. He tells her about how, in the past, he nearly married the love of his life, before circumstances tore him away from her, and by the time he returned, she had married someone else. She asks him if he forgives her for this betrayal, and he says he does. ;o; I also finished up the current event story in Fate/Grand Order (FGO doesn't have voice acting and the stories are pretty long, so I'd say it counts). This event, Water Monsters Crisis, was all about helping the Trung sisters defend some innocent creatures called Con from aquatic monsters that wanted to eat them. I honestly felt like a lot of the story was kind of weak, but the ending got me tearing up. In real-life history, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, leaders of a rebellion, died when they tried to escape their pursuers through icy waters. In the game, a point is made that they, especially Trac, don't feel qualified to lead anyone, and don't think they managed to change anything in the end--but at the end of the story, they've been deified as gods of fortune, and choose to sacrifice themselves by using their new divine water-based bodies to purify cursed waters, going out this time with full confidence in their own greatness. It's moments like this that make me love Fate as a series :')

A couple chapters of Uzumaki by Junji Ito today, it's a tired day so I don't think a lot of reading will get done. Either that, or it'll be all that gets done.

What is your favorite genre to read?
I've always gravitated towards fantasy and scifi, though lately it's been more scifi and horror as I've found the fantasy genre is... very samey.

Wrote some more of my book, introducing a mentor!

Fantasy! Gotta have talking animals or animals being the main focus.

Read more chapters of "The S-Classes That I Raised" and one chapter of "Allowin Singulier-Weyrd".

Daily question:
What is your favorite genre to read?
Fantasy! I especially like when fantasy elements are blended with reality. It's a theme with a lot of possibilities.

Here's one of today's poems, Resolution:
I give up wanting to be whole.
To be strong.
To be beyond criticism.

Instead,
I will be creative with my empathy.
I will not curse my flaws.
I will live in the light of honest vulnerability.

I will look at a sculpture and understand
that need is what calls art from bare stone.
Perfection calls to nothing.

---

Probably Sci-Fi. A good thought experiment or what-if scenario is a good way to get me intrigued and hooked in!

I read another couple of chapters of Toilers, and was treated to a lecture on jargon that was apparently no longer used by the time the book was written, along with references to historical figures I do not recognise. Classic Victor. I wish my copy had footnotes...

What is your favorite genre to read?
I'm not sure. Horrorish/weird fiction??? Gothic horror.

April 15th:

not sure what the last book I read last year is, but the last book club book I read was Muir's Princess Floralinda, a modern take on the princess in a tower trope.

as for daily reading...have I mentioned I'm doing a bookshop crawl this month? going around and visiting a lot of the independent bookstores in our area. one of the books I picked up was Tabitha Brown's cookbook. I really love the no measurement style!

SCI-FI!!! oh it's not even a competition, whatever it is that they're putting in sci-fi books knocks everything else out of the park ^__^. when i was a kid i used to be huge on dystopian sci-fi novels (the 'uglies' series even if that's also young adult, 'newsflesh,' 'slaughterhouse-five,' 'a clockwork orange' if you're a believer, stuff like that) but now i've got such a soft spot for short stories too. if you've ever got time to kill i'd recommend just going to "free speculative fiction online" and picking a story at random to try :]. bleedback... hunger's truth... griefworm... another big favourite is the entire collection of 'bloodchild and other stories' by octavia butler because every single one of them is such a hit, although i will confess 'the evening and the morning and the night' is so special to me <3