Still reading The Crystal Shard by R. A. Salvatore. First book of The Icewind Dale Trilogy, and The Legend of Drizzt / Forgotten Realms series (publication order).

Book is pretty fast paced and full of action. Really enjoying it.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?


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  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    I’m mostly an audiobook guy, though I have both hardcover and audiobook preordered. I doubt I’ll really read the physical copies, but I recently decided to refresh my bookshelves with some of my favorites just for the sake of having them and the Stormlight Archive quickly became a favorite once I finally buckled down and just bought all the audiobooks to listen straight through.

    I’ve read some of his random smaller stuff. I thought the premise of Rithmatist could have been a pretty fun VR game. I haven’t read Mistborn yet, but it’s definitely on my radar. One of my biggest things is availability, though. My binge on physical books the last couple weeks was an outlier, but I generally can’t afford to actually buy anywhere near as many books as I read. They’re mostly not as substantial as Stormlight Archive, but according to goodreads my new books this year are still comfortably in the triple digits, so I need libraries and subscription libraries to fill in most of the volume or I’d go broke pretty quickly. I definitely want to read Mistborn, but I’ll probably wait a while, because my self control on buying books can get me in trouble if I’m not careful.

    • Mitchie151@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The first mistborn book is a bit on the nose, it comes across as a bit of a weird mix of teen romance meets classic teen fiction rebels vs fascist empire. Probably not Sanderson’s best work as it is on the older side now, but it gets way way better after the first book (as many Sanderson series do). The Wax and Wayne mistborn books are awesome, so don’t give up after the first one!

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        lol if you looked at my goodreads you’d see plenty of cheap, casual reads. I like a variety of styles, as long as it’s not super stilted and I can get some flavor of the author’s personality. I’m guessing that it won’t be an issue.

        I appreciate the advice that it picks up though.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        lol I pretty much listen to audiobooks all day while active doing other stuff. If I really wanted a high number, I’d either stop re-listening to stuff or go through the hassle of tracking every time I listen and let goodreads count all those towards this year.

        I hate the effort of actually adding stuff to goodreads though, so I definitely don’t care enough to count how many times I read books.

        • dresden@discuss.onlineOPM
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          2 months ago

          Hehe, fair enough.

          I can’t multitask at all. If I am listening to audio-book, I need to stop everything and just listen to it, but then it gets boring because I am just listening.

          I like numbers though, stats, graphs, charts, lists. Those are fun, so try to log everything I can. Don’t care about sharing them, but they are fun for me.

          • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            I want to replace goodreads, because it kind of sucks and my preference would be showing (and tagging/blurbing/listing) books by author/series instead of individual books, but none of the alternatives do what I want and I never seem to have time to roll my own version.

            But on the plus side you can export your lists through the website, so I keep up the tracking I can there with the intent of eventually doing it myself and doing some basic self hosting.

            • dresden@discuss.onlineOPM
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              2 months ago

              I just care about cataloging books, with proper info, and LibraryThing is great for that. My only non-complaint is that it’s not self-hosted, but I semi-regularly export my books, so it’s all good.

              I can understand about not getting time to roll your own version. I have been trying to do that for a game cataloging app for over a decade, starts with some new tech every year or so then get busy with stuff and forget about it.

              • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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                2 months ago

                I can’t function without the bulk edit tool goodreads has. My actual goodreads list is 1400 books and I need to be able to go through groups of 50-100 checking boxes to make lists. My real preference for fiction would be to be able to tag by series/author.

                Just remaking my “high quality psychology/adjacent” books list by typing every name one at a time is way more than I can stomach.

                • dresden@discuss.onlineOPM
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                  2 months ago

                  There are some features for that in LT, power edit or something, though I haven’t actually explored them in depth, or even looked at them in years, so I could be wrong about those.

                  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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                    2 months ago

                    It could have evolved since I tried it. I think I’ll probably still end up targeting my own, though, because I don’t care about any of the social stuff, but do really want to be able to treat series and authors as first class citizens. (The idea being to share a list of favorite series with brief blurbs about what I like about each, ideally kind of ad hoc so I can quickly create a list without rewriting every thought I’ve had about it but tailor it to a specific person or conversation.)

                    But yeah, limited by my commitment to it I guess.