glinda: a cartoon dragon reading a book by flickering candlelight (reading dragon)
glinda ([personal profile] glinda) wrote in [community profile] readingtogether2023-11-08 05:05 pm

November Group Read: Check-in the First!

The first week of the challenge has reached it’s conclusion. 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? Dedicated way too much time to reading today just so you don’t have to admit you only read two chapters this week? (Or is that just me?!)

Successes and failures in the comments below!
illariy: a woman opens a colourful letter (letter)

[personal profile] illariy 2023-11-08 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Aaah, I have mostly failed in my reading challenge. I have read but very little and only free samples on the Kindle app, none on my target books.

I have also taken on a new book, which is now the most urgent to read, as it is for a module I am taking at uni. The book came in on Tuesday, so yesterday, and so far I have only looked at the table of contents.

My partner and I have to select a topic for a project soon and do a small, oral-only presentation on our topic and our selected format on 20 November. So the time frame is short and this week, I have to do 150% of the hours I usually work, one whole day added. No idea when I am going to read at least a part of that book because the weekly exercise in the other module I am taking is taking a long time this week, too. So stressed.
illariy: a woman sits and leans against a giant white question mark (question mark in my head)

[personal profile] illariy 2023-11-14 08:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you for your encouraging words! I am finally doing some reading of the coursework book and that is going very well and is turning out to be a good source. Hopefully, by the time of the next check-in, I'll have a little progress on my challenge books, if only 15 min or one chapter.

Hope your reading is going well. :-)
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 08:10 am (UTC)(link)
Sounds like you’re having a really challenging time with work and course commitments. Stay strong
illariy: a young man swings his hair (boy hair swing)

[personal profile] illariy 2023-11-14 06:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, you got that right. Thank you for the good wishes! I particularly need them right now as I just found out on Sunday that I lost my job effective 24 November and am now in a mad scramble to apply for benefits (extra hard for students here) and search for a new job all while juggling uni responsibilities. Ugh.
autumndaze: (Amity)

[personal profile] autumndaze 2023-11-08 11:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I read the first 176 chapters of the "Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint" webtoon, which I've been putting off for ages despite hearing a lot about it. Absorbed me for like 3 days (I'd have gone faster if I wasn't in the middle of National Novel Writing Month). Absolutely loved it. Now I plan to pick up the novel. I'm glad because I tried finishing some books I'm in the middle of and was bored to death by all of them.
autumndaze: (Default)

[personal profile] autumndaze 2023-11-16 12:04 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you :D
illariy: uhura smiles (uhura: smile)

[personal profile] illariy 2023-11-14 08:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Lots of progress, yay! Also extra good for reading it despite procrasting for a long time.

Also, it is always good to find new media one truly enjoys so I am very happy to hear you are likely picking up the novel and definitely going to enjoy the rest of the webtoon, yay! :D
autumndaze: (Default)

[personal profile] autumndaze 2023-11-16 12:03 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah I'm up to date with the webtoon now (there's five episodes that are paywalled, but they get de-paywalled one at a time, so I'm keeping up to date with the Wednesday schedule). And I'm 42% of the way through the novel at the moment, and loving it! I plan to go back to it once I'm done with "Dark Heir" by C.S. Pacat, which I'm currently focusing on. So that should be tonight or tomorrow at some point.

I partially waited on ORV cause I knew it was long and I have so many other things to read, but the fact the webtoon is 99% free to read legally was very appealing, particularly when I was reading so much boring stuff. And goodness am I glad I finally read it T-T I got a friend into it as well and we been screaming together.
illariy: uhura smiles (uhura: smile)

[personal profile] illariy 2023-11-18 06:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, very neat that the new episodes get de-paywalled.

So happy to hear you enjoy the novel, too. Wishing you lots of progress on Dark Heir and then more fun with the novel :D

Exceedingly cool that you also got a friend into the webtoon so you can now enjoy together. That is just the most joyful thing, to share a fandom! :D
starandrea: (Default)

[personal profile] starandrea 2023-11-08 11:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I love your strategy of reading a lot today so as to have more than two chapters to check in with (even though two chapters is GREAT)! Because at the end of the day, motivation is motivation! ♥

For myself, across both paper books and audio books, I've learned something important this week: sometimes fiction is easier to follow than non-fiction. This isn't true for me across the board, but this week I encountered it twice and changed what I was doing because of it.

First a success: I did finish a Chinese graded reader, yay! It was fiction, pretty straightforward, and I'd been meaning to start on these graded biographies I've had for a while, so I went to one of those next. That was a failure, because the biography was so hard I thought it was a much higher level than the fiction story I'd just read. But no, it was actually supposed to be easier than what I'd just finished!

I concluded that in a fiction story I have expectations about what's going to happen next (in conversation, in someone's daily routine, maybe even in the way a story is told) that make it easier to understand words in context, whereas in a biography there's no way to guess what's coming next (unless you already know the life story of the person you're reading about, which may have been my disadvantage). It was the difference between reading fictional dialogue: "what are you doing here" "oh I'm getting the mail, did you hear the news" "no what news" etc., which is pretty predictable, and a biographical account: "he didn't graduate from high school, so he started looking for jobs to do while pursuing his musical career," which is completely unpredictable (to me). (And also I'm not going to lie, this biography was a little boring in addition to being very hard to follow.)

So I put the biographies away and went to thriftbooks.com and found some more graded fiction. I'm reading a "harder" one now (two chapters so far, cheers :D ) and it's still way easier than the "easy" biography. (It's also more interesting!)

Second, I found a similar phenomenon when I idly switched from audiobooks to audio dramas: the audiobooks were fiction, and there was dialogue, so that was good, but the audio dramas had people acting out the dialogue, and that made comprehension so much easier! I was so surprised by the difference that I renewed my efforts to find audio dramas I actually want to listen to, instead of just whatever was around when my Audible credits were about to expire :)
Edited 2023-11-08 23:21 (UTC)
starandrea: (Default)

[personal profile] starandrea 2023-11-10 07:13 pm (UTC)(link)
However, I've been writing lots and watched a lot of films so I read even less than expected. I managed three chapters in the end yesterday, taking me to five chapters for the week which isn't terrible!

Nice! I'm impressed that you more than double your weekly output in a day! :D

Also it's neat that you know exactly what took the place of the reading time, and that the activities of writing and watching films seem to have so much in common with reading in terms of world building, expanding horizons, seeing different perspectives, etc. Sounds like a win overall! ♥
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 08:08 am (UTC)(link)
Well done with your accomplishments- it’s important to enjoy your reading rather than being discouraged. With audiobooks I find the narrator makes a huge difference to both my enjoyment and my ability to even follow the story.
kalloway: (SaGa Albert 1)

[personal profile] kalloway 2023-11-09 02:50 am (UTC)(link)
I have absolutely moved some books off The Shelf, but at least seven of them were to a sale box. (I mean, still good!) I'm four volumes into the manga Hikaru no Go right now; I finally got the ending volumes a few years ago and just haven't gotten around to reading the whole thing straight through. I already know I won't like the ending, but if I like the rest enough, I'll hang onto it otherwise it'll also go in the sale box.

peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 08:06 am (UTC)(link)
Sounds like progress.
taichara: (DLN-00)

[personal profile] taichara 2023-11-09 07:27 am (UTC)(link)
I got through a few rpg zines out of the gathering pile, along with three digest-sized rpg books (all these run from 36 to 120 pages): Sherwood, Micro Circuits, The Archon Ruins, Bridgetown, Acid Death Fantasy, Fleaux!, and am halfway through The Electrum Archive.

I have discovered that some of these have been waiting so long, I've since gotten utterly aggravated as hell atuninterested in the authors and may be thinning the collection >.> I also suspect this will keep on being the case as I chew through the pile >.>;;
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
It might not have been your original intention but it’s still progress because what you’ll ultimately be left with is the things you want.
taichara: (Gerard -- armour)

[personal profile] taichara 2023-11-13 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Not to worry, I'm currently attacking the remnants with the equivalent of a battleaxe *ha ~*
cactus_rs: (books)

[personal profile] cactus_rs 2023-11-09 10:22 am (UTC)(link)
I finished a short story collection I bought for a friend's birthday (can't hand someone a random book without knowing what's in it IMO!) and honestly it clocked in at such a middling level of quality that I'm almost embarrassed to give it to him.
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 08:04 am (UTC)(link)
Shame it wasn’t a good one.
peaceful_sands: butterfly (Default)

[personal profile] peaceful_sands 2023-11-13 07:55 am (UTC)(link)
Late feeding back, so try8ng to work out where I was at on the 7/8th :

I’ve finished The Lost Present (didn’t personally enjoy but it was only short): The Plea ( this was like a legal thriller type thing - enjoyed this for the most part) and The Broken Kingdoms - a good one for fantasy lovers.

Moved onto persuasion, the life-changing magic of tidying up and embers in the wind.