Daughters of Doubt and Eyerolling

Category: For Honour and Glory

Sceptre Autumn Reading Program

Hello hello, season of cozy blankets, rain and tea. While not everyone has been waiting for you, we are certainly excited to get into full autumn mode. And since our summer reading lists were just so much fun to put together and worked exceptionally well, we decided to go ahead and come up with lists for autumn as well.

TheLadyDuckOfDoom:

  • Beowulf: A New Translation
  • A Question of Navigation
  • Dawnshard
  • Monstress Vol. 4
  • Escaping Exodus
  • American Hippo
  • The Dark Archive
  • Fortune’s Pawn
  • The Library of the Dead
  • Shards of the Earth

  • The Outside
  • Queen of Sorrow
  • The Last Continent
  • King of Thorns
  • The Calculating Stars
  • Neon Birds
  • The Unspoken Name
  • Die Türme von Eden
  • Chaos Vector
  • The Autumn Republic
  • Before They Are Hanged

TheRightHonourableHarpyEagle:

  • Velocity Weapon
  • Ninth House
  • Die Türme von Eden
  • In the Watchful City
  • A Letter to Three Witches
  • The Hemlock Cure
  • The Unbroken
  • The God of Lost Words
  • The Lady Astronaut of Mars
  • Inside Man
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built
  • Under the Whispering Door
  • Sea of Rust
  • The Red House Mystery
  • Driftwood
  • Unnatural Causes
  • Mrs England
  • Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
  • Pages & Co
  • Freshwater

TheMarquessMagpie:

  • Before They Are Hanged
  • Empire of the Vampire
  • Die Eroberung des Südpols
  • Drei Kameradinnen
  • Escaping Exodus
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
  • Inside Man
  • Shadow Captain
  • Finders Keepers
  • Eroberung
  • Drachensaat
  • Song of Susannah
  • Gingerbread
  • Das Erbe der Elfen
  • The Dark Vault
  • Medea
  • If You Go Down to the Woods
  • Zone One
  • Home Body
  • Windschiefe Geraden
  • The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing
  • The Wych Elm
  • Des Teufels Gebetsbuch
  • Stories of Your Life and Others
  • Nur vom Weltraum aus ist die Erde blau

Summer Reading – 2 months later – Short Reviews

There was a draft of this post lingering here for a whole month, the first words had been typed here, left dangling. The state of my summer reading is comparable.

It take ages to read a book, mainly because I’m focusing on so many other things right now. But today is day 1 of my reading weekend, I have finished my current read and finally take some time to give you all an update. There were 29 books on my summer reading list, and I’ve read 14 of them. I don’t care if I will manage to read 15 books in a month (I probably won’t, but who knows). You can find our lists here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPlieZ_hTB7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Making a reading list for the season has helped me tremendously with reading what I actually wanted to read, and helped me decide while still having the ability to choose. The unread books will go back on my TBR shelf and I will pick new ones for my autumn list. Nevertheless, I read a whole lot of books I’ve been looking forward to reading for a long time:

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers: It only took the first chapter before I was hooked, like every other book by Becky Chambers, it was beautiful. The whole Wayfarer series can be read out of order, so if you see one in a bookstore, just grab a copy.

5/5 Duckies

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather: Nuns at the edge of the universe in a living spaceship? Count me in. Great novella, and the sequel was just announced, too. Perfect time to go and read it, it’s a short read, too. A perfect weekend read!

5/5 Duckies

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo: I think everyone has heard of the Grishaverse by now. While I loved the Six of Crows duology, I hated the Sankta Alina books, because of Alina. The last book, King of Scars, was ok. This time though, the setting felt too much like WWI in disguise, with extra special effects for the Netflix show sprinkled on top. The Grishaverse ends here. For me at least.

3/5 Duckies

The Relunctant Queen by Sarah Beth Durst: Book 2 of the Queens of Renthia surprised me. I liked the first one, but it had a certain YA feel to it. Book 2 drops all of that and becomes a beautiful fantasy story with characters of all ages and professions. Young Queens and mothers. The characters are fleshed out very well, and I do look forward to putting book 3 on my autumn TBR reading list.

5/5 Duckies

Now, I’m off to read The Library of the Unwritten, which is not on my Summer TBR List, but was specifically bought to celebrate my self-care reading weekend. TheRightHonorableHarpyEagle does recommend the series a lot: https://scepticalreading.com/2020/11/hells-librarian-is-a-badass/

Meanwhile, I am already pondering what to put on my autumn reading list. Any suggestions?

Sceptre Summer Reading Program

Welcome to our self-organized, highly individual, just for fun summer reading program. Each of us has created a list of books we really want to read, but somehow haven’t picked up yet. So, picking them for our summer reading seemed entirely logical. Given our success with challenges or reading lists so far, it’s highly unlikely we will follow through with them. But, as we all know, planning is half the fun.

TheLadyDuckOfDoom:

  • Fortune’s Pawn
  • Rule of Wolves
  • Seven of Infinities
  • The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
  • The Haunting of Tram Car 015
  • Dark Archive
  • The Reluctant Queen
  • American Hippo
  • Neon Birds
  • A Longer Fall
  • A Question of Navigation
  • The Outside
  • The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
  • A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
  • Way of Thorns
  • The Autumn Republic
  • How To
  • Velocity Weapon
  • Merciful Crow
  • Carpe Jugulum
  • Sisters of the Vast Black
  • Deal with the Devil
  • Bridge of Souls
  • One Day All This Will Be Yours
  • Shards of Earth
  • United States of Japan
  • The Thief
  • Ashes of the Sun
  • A Big Ship at the End of the Universe

TheRightHonourableHarpyEagle:

  • A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
  • Bridge of Souls
  • The Thief
  • Deal with the Devil
  • Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen
  • For the Wolf
  • Nine Nasty Words
  • Arsenic and Adobo
  • The Dictionary of Lost Words
  • Master of Revels
  • Prime Deceptions
  • The Calculating Stars
  • The Butterfly Effect
  • The Beholder
  • Just One Damn Thing After Another
  • The Devil’s Thief
  • The Library of the Dead
  • A History of What Comes Next
  • Firebreak
  • How to Mars
  • Daughter of the Salt King
  • Swearing is Good For You
  • The Octunnumi

TheMarquessMagpie:

  • Iron Gold Reread, for….
  • Dark Age
  • The Final Empire
  • Temper
  • Sharks in the Time of Saviors
  • The Outsider
  • The Blade Itself
  • Snuff (Discworld)
  • King of Scars
  • Sins of Empire
  • Hyperion

  • Tyll
  • She Would Be King
  • Orfeia
  • Harrow the Ninth
  • Identitti
  • Life on Mars
  • Dune Messiah
  • The Betrayals
  • The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Please be gentle, 2021

We all can agree that 2020 was… well, let’s say challenging for all of us. I wonder what this year has in store, but taking a bookish look at it is a sure way to get our hopes up. So, here we go.

I am sure our monthly Buddyreads picked by the Otherland staff will continue to be a source of joy and lead to interesting discussions with my fellow Sceptres. The next Buddyread delivery will be accompanied by some other books I ordered, so the year is off to a good start.

Usually I’m not really good at keeping track of new releases, but there are some I am really excited about:

  • Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee
  • two new Becky Chambers books, the fourth Wayfarer book will even get here as a signed preorder thanks to TheLadyDuckOfDoom
  • Broken by Jenny Lawson
  • Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire
  • The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Apart from that, there are a couple of books already waiting on my shelves that I finally want to get to:

  • Dark Age by Pierce Brown – I excitedly preordered a signed edition back in 2019 and it has been waiting for me ever since
  • Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb, to finish the Farseer trilogy
  • 5 (!) books by V.E. Schwab
  • Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker
  • The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin – also signed, also silently judging me from its place on the shelf

As always and against my better judgement, I also get really excited about reading challenges at the beginning of the year. The Goodreads challenge is the only I’ve really stuck with in the last couple of years, but I always take a look at Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge and the Popsugar Reading Challenge. I usually plan books for most of the categories in January and forget all about them by April at the latest. But still, the planning is a whole lot of fun.

It’s that time of the year/month

Open the sparkling water, the first half of the year 2020 is over! We haven’t run out of toilet paper, we have mastered the art of wearing a face mask and looking stylish in it, and we’ve managed to get through some books during quarantine – though not as many as I had hoped for, because: homeschooling. It’s time to look back at what I have managed to read so far and take a look at the challenges that I’ve pledged to participate in, it’s also time to come up with the very tentative TBR for July.

My Goodreads Challenge says I’ve read 131 books out of the 200 I want to read this year. Not bad! Actually, it’s probably a few more that I just forgot to add because they were textbooks or non-fiction. Do I remember what all of them were about? I’d like to shout “Yes, of course!” Honestly though?! I remember the outstandingly good ones, I remember some really bad ones, and I know I read a lot of stuff in between. If you asked me what the best read of the past six months was, I’d probably say my re-read of the Veronica Speedwell series culminating in the most recent fifth book of this series A Murderous Relation – comfort read more than anything else. I knew what I was in for and I liked every letter of it. But, I might also point you to Gideon the Ninth, or The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, or Why We Sleep, and even the most recent ones Goldilocks and If It Bleeds stick out of the pile of read books.

At the beginning of the year I signed up for several bookish challenges, like read one book set in each of the 51 European countries, or read as many books by a certain author for a month, or following a set of prompts for the seasons of the year, or a prompt for each month, and so on. A few weeks back I decided that I don’t want to do any prompted challenges at the moment. The only goal I still want to stick to is read 200 books, which I think is an achievable goal for me. I even deleted all my records of the books I had already entered for the other challenges with prompts. It felt liberating, like that time I decided to pull the bookmarks out of books that had been hibernating on the shelves for too long. Not having to find books and read them because the fit a certain prompt in a challenge felt too constricting right now. This way I can pick what I fancy, which is just what I like doing so much.

As always, the tentative TBR is made up of the mountain of ARCs that I requested (why so many, though?!) and was approved for (Yay! Thank you publishers!). Add the mountain of books that I have started and want to get through – Godsgrave is among them, also Dev1at3, These Broken Stars (I’m not a fangirl, it’s pure coincidence), Dreyer’s English, Alphabetical, Sorry I’m Late, … I know I won’t finish them all, but a girl may dream.

The only solidly planned read for the month is the Sceptre Buddyread: M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again. Though, furthermore, there’s Glücklich die Glücklichen by Yasmina Reza (translation from the French) for my postal book club; and a possibly maybe read for the Terry Pratchett book club I’m hosting on Litsy (a very bookish app, the webversion can be found here: Litsy.com) is Johnny and the Bomb, which we’ll be discussing on July 7th, and from July 8th on we’ll be reading Pratchett’s Jingo. While we’re at it and since we’re nearly done with the Dev1at3 buddyread, TheLadyDuckOfDoom and I might follow that up with the just released final book in the trilogy, Truel1f3.

So much for a tentative TBR, this all sounds like a very well-planned adventure. Let’s see if I fancy sticking to it.

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