November Group Read: Check in the First

[glinda]

The first week of the challenge has reached an end. Time to share with the class your triumphs and tribulations. Finish a book? Make a start on something that you've been meaning to get round to for ages? Or finally accept that that one book everyone recommended you is just not your thing and you're never going to get past the second chapter?

New participants, what obstacles have you faced? (Other than the umm...elephant in the room that is current affairs...) Regular participants, what tips and tricks do you have to offer? Are you a break yourself in easy with a short book person? *raises hand* Or perhaps you prefer to start with something chunky while you're full of enthusiasm?

Successes and failures below the line please!

Comments

[glinda]

I broke myself in with a short book! It was actually much shorter than I realised - and I couldn't honestly recommend it to anyone over the age of eight - but it's done and Yang and Grogg is off the TBR shelf! I've started in on my second book Modern Scotland by James G Kallas which is not very modern but is more of an interesting historical document in it's own right! I'm about a third of the way through it now.

[goodbyebird]

🙌🙌🙌

[peaceful_sands]

Good that the latest book is interesting even if not actually modern :) You're doing well with it though.

[goodbyebird]

Gonna be honest, I haven’t read a single word. Given that all my ebooks are on my mobile, I pick that up and well. DOOM.

[peaceful_sands]

Oops! Maybe next week will go better :)

[glinda]

Oops hopefully less doom scrolling and more ebook scrolling next week, when hopefully things will be less...up in the air...?

[goodbyebird]

MUCH LESS UP IN THE AIR YES :DDD

[glinda]

:D :D :D

[fred_mouse]

Sympathies. I've managed to trick myself on this one by moving ebooks to a device without data.

[peaceful_sands]

I've finished the two I was already reading last week 'The Outcasts' by John Flanagan and 'River God' by Wilbur Smith. I actually quite enjoyed the first but the second not so much.

I also finished 'The Monk who Sold His Ferrari' by Robin Sharma which I found more irritating than enlightening unfortunately. Very few new ideas in it and the presentation didn't work for me.

I'm now a little over half way through 'The Sealed Letter' by Emma Donoghue and just under a third of the way through 'Fractured' by Teri Terry. I hope to finish the first of these either tomorrow or Sunday but the latter will probably take me all week and that's if I get the time to concentrate on it.

'Artemis' by Andy Weir is likely to be the next on the list.

[glinda]

That’s excellent progress, though a shame some of them weren’t very enjoyable - but at least they’re done now!

[kalloway]

iirc, four books (two volumes of manga included) and one anime series in and terribly distracted by all my interlibrary requests coming in at once. And doomscrolling. I've definitely been doomscrolling more than I'd like.

Library books have been a mixed bag, but that's okay. Nice thing about the library is that if I get a clunker, I can give it back the next day.

[glinda]

Yay for progress! That is the distinct advantage with library books, if you don’t like the book it can just go straight back rather than sitting around taunting you with it’s unreadness!

[blueswan]

I gave myself a goal of finishing all the almost done books I've been planning to get back to. There were six books in the pile. I finished to first book in the pile. I literally only had the last three pages to go. If they are all like that i will be done by tomorrow if I don't get distracted. Two of the books are the comic trades for The Old Guard, I started book one and then realized i should wait until I had book two so I set it aside and surprise, never picked it up again. I'm about 75 pages into All is not forgotten, but I may not finish it, I had a pretty strong feeling that it wasn't a book for me which is why it got set aside. Beoewulf needs to be read aloud, so I just need to pick times when I'm alone in the house. I really dislike reading and having people hear me. Bury my heart at wounded knee. Yes, that one. I've been meaning to read it for literally decades, but it is a hard read, so I need to take breaks in order not to over react.

After looking at what I have to read, I realize it will take me a week or more to get thru them, but I will just stick with these until I finish them or decide not to in the case of the one book.

[glinda]

Almost done/half-read books is a really satisfying target to have! You get the satisfaction of finishing more things, plus I find it’s easier to abandon books in that category because if I’ve given it a second attempt then I’m really sure it’s not for me.

[steorra]

I did not manage to make any progress on the two books I'm hoping to finish.

I did, however, a couple nights late at night while I probably should have been in bed, read the introduction and the first couple chapters of the historical brewing/farmhouse ale book my colleague lent me. Not a lot of surprises yet, given that I've read the author's blog thoroughly so already have some background on the topic, but it's still interesting.

I also read a webcomic that I hadn't planned to read, O Human Star. I had read most of it a while ago, but it wasn't yet finished being written, and when I came back to it this week, it was done and I could read the whole thing.

[glinda]

Oops, distraction ahoy! But that’s still progress just in a different direction than expected!

[tamsin]

I've started two books from my tbr pile but both of them turned out to be pretty boring, so I eventually gave up on them. At least they're no longer occupying shelf space.

[glinda]

Progress! Perhaps not the kind you’d hoped for, but definitely a net good thing!

[fred_mouse]

I picked 10 ebooks that I've started (or opened, which registers as starting) to finish at least four. My trick for getting motivated was to pick the one I've read previously, which I was about 2/3 of the way through, and finish that one. Which I have! And then I celebrated by reading three collected volumes of the *Giant Days * comics (so, vol 1-12) which are adorable, but not actually on the selected list. And then I finished off something that I worked out was not on the list, because I'd put a different one of the related series on my list.

I've also kicked one off the selection, because I've read it before, and it is too uncomfortable now.

So I'm quite please at myself at the moment.

[monksandbones]

This week was pretty disastrous as far as reading, sigh. Almost all I read was twitter as I refreshed it constantly! I did read a few pages in the one book I'm working on, and planned to read some more over the weekend, but then forgot it in my office on Friday. On Saturday morning I read around 20 pages of the other book I'm reading right now, but yeah, not great progress. I hope I'll do better at staying off twitter this coming week and get some reading done!

[lebateleur]

As you can see, I'm behind on both reading and checking in. (Oops...) I briefly cracked open nos. 4 and 8 on my list but mostly just obsessively hit 'refresh' on news sites.

I think this week will be more conducive to making progress, though. :D

[glinda]

I think world events have been conspiring against us all this week, so we should take all progress as a victory!