Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper
Spear of Light by Brenda Cooper
Building Harlequin's Moon by Brenda Cooper & Larry Niven [re-read]

Nimona by ND Stevenson
Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin [re-read]
The Watchtower by Elizabeth A. Lynn
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler [re-read; book starts in 2024: it's all sci-fi years from here on out, kids]
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler [re-read; the first time I read this I kind of resented it for ruining the hopeful ending of the first book (as sequels are wont to do), but I felt better about it this time around (also Octavia Butler predicted MAGA in 1998!)]

Jumper by Steven Gould [re-read]

Started:
The Last Human by Zack Jordan


Due to tumblr discourse, I feel like I should specify that I'm not reading to better myself or impress other people. I'm reading to have fun. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

World War Z by Max Brooks [re-read]

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Fledgling by Octavia Butler [re-read]

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke [re-read; also saw the movie for the first time]

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

The Telling by Ursula K. LeGuin

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut [re-read]

Frostwing by Richard A. Knaak [re-read; did not actually contain the scene I thought I vividly remembered from it and was overall kind of meh]

Cell by Stephen King [re-read; curious to see the movie]

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson [re-read]

Started Robogenesis also by Daniel H. Wilson.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
by Orson Scott Card [all re-read one last time before discarding because of the author being a terrible person]

Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Dead Voices by Abigail McDaniels

The Devourers by Indra Das

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Some parts of the ending were satisfying. Other parts less so.

But I'm glad I did it. I feel a satisfying sense of completion.

I started the [Re-]Read July 5th, 2017, so it's been the last two years of my life (give or take a week).

But really I started 20 years ago in high school: reading the first book for the first time. A classmate who saw me reading other books of that ilk recommended it to me and even lent me his copies of the first few volumes. I started acquiring my own copies after that and have been carting them around with me every time I move. Eventually, I stopped rereading them every time a new volume came out and decided to wait for the end. Many years and a literal Death of the Author occurred before I finally had the complete set and could start at the beginning again.

Now to read what I think is the slimmest book I own, Why The Whales Came.

The re-read portion is finished, and I'm starting in on the final four that I have never read.

New Spring (the prequel that I just finished) has been my favorite thus far. I think Jordan is a better author when he concentrates on fewer characters at a time. Having Lan and Moiraine be the only POV characters made the narrative go more smoothly.

(Slowly.)

Five months in and I'm just starting book 3. They sure are hefty little paperbacks.

[Note to self: According to publishing order, New Spring comes after Crossroads of Twilight.]

...but sadly he's mean and bite-y and aiding and abetting in child abduction-y.

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer

To my fannish_library_fest posts:

Fannish Bindings for a Fannish Library

A Lyrical Ode to Libraries
And I've got two more to add: White Blank Page by Mumford & Sons and Do It Anyway by Ben Folds Five ("sometimes you'll like the cover and that's precisely why you'll love the book").

[Almost] forgot the ficlet.

Why is it that when I read fiction about a topic I'm interested in, I could read for days, but when I try to read non-fiction about a topic I'm interested in, I read for five minutes until... Bored Now: Kitty! And then I drag myself back and read some more until Bored Now: Internets! And it's not for lack of interest. I mean, the whole reason I took "Topics in American Book History" was wanting it to be about the structural and manufacturing processes of book production, but while there were hints of it throughout the course, the majority of it was cultural analysis of what does it all meeeeeeeeeaaaaaan? So, for my "Formal Essay" final writing project whatchamawhosit, I decided to do a research paper on the stuff I wanted from the course, so that I would actually get the information. And it is interesting! Like the switch from leather to cloth and casing-in versus binding on boards and changing it so that instead of one person binding the book start to finish, it's all assembly line tasks, so that they could hire less skilled workers on the cheap and eventually replace them with machines (who will eventually rise up and take over the earth!).
So here I am all, "I want to know this!" and my brain is just like, "Nope, naptime!"

So of course I forgot all about buying text books or else I might have tried ordering them earlier, so I could get them used.
Fortunately, only one of my classes even has books. Unfortunately, it has six. Five of which I managed to purchase at used book stores around town.

First stop: Murphy-Brookfield Books where I got Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives for $6.50 (as opposed to $17.95) and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography for $15 (which isn't that much less than the $17.92, but my copy is a hardback from 1951* (and came with a book sleeve/case thingy) with like, marble paper on the covers and illustrations inside, so there).

*Which could get me in trouble since he said he wanted a specific edition, but the prof is my adviser, and based on what I know of him, I think I could be all Flaily Hands Book Nerd (which is honestly what happened) about it and he'd be okay.

Second stop: The Haunted Bookshop which is officially has the best book shopping experience because there is at least one cat in the store and zhe was adorable and let me pet zir. There I got Charlotte Temple for $3.95 (take that $17.54), Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man for 50 cents (only $2.50 new, but I saved a whole $2), and I got The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (as opposed to Selected Tales) for $20 (which in this instance is a splurge, but I get more stories for my buck and it's a two volume hardback set, and really, I could get a brand new so-called "perfect" (adhesive) binding and it would fall apart sooner than my 1982 hardbacks and they are prettier besides, and I mean really, it's Poe creeptasticness, what's not to love?)

So of course neither of them had the most expensive book that's also the one I need to have to do reading from in advance of Thursday's class and of course they only have one copy in the library and it's checked out and on hold, so it's too late to order it online and I'll have to pay full (almost $50!) price for Perspectives on American Book History. I hate paying full price.