solovei: (haikyuu - inward squeeing)
Some auxiliary activities that may enable reading but are definitely NOT reading on which I've spent more time this weekend than actual reading:
  • Setting up Calibre exactly how I want it
    • This includes creating a custom series-like column that tracks in-series Discworld reading order, as well as sub-series.
  • Trawling Project Gutenberg (as well as its... slightly more opinionated Canadian offshoot) for public-domain books I never got around to reading;
    • Incidentally, it turns out the original Gutenberg is a pretty good source for those lovely monochrome ink illustrations that I was trying to figure out the name for a few months ago (does anyone know? I mean stuff like this); if I can get them cleaned up in photoshop/CSP they might make really nice transparent .pngs
  • Fixing metadata on the above
  • Also fixing metadata on all the books I had laying around from the 2019 Hugo Voting packet
  • Making some custom fanfic covers so my Kobo will look nice (I showed[personal profile] isis the one I made of her fantastic Being Ray Kowalski and she seemed to like it! ♥)
If you're thinking "Solo, you seem to enjoy organizing things around you hobbies more than you actually enjoy your hobbies!" -- well, you might be right. I don't know when I first became aware that I can easily fall into hyperfixation mode when I'm doing fiddly little classification/metadata work, but  it's probably at least partly responsible for my choice of higher education, job, and volunteer work...


In terms of ACTUAL reading, I finished An Unseen Attraction; this was my first KJ Charles book, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I'm always a fan of shifting/alternating POV if it's done well, so that was nice to see. I think I'm realizing that my favourite kind of "romance" (a term I'm going to use carefully for a variety of personal reasons that I'll talk about later, maybe) books are ones that lean towards the plot-heavy or at least have a central mystery/problem/adventure for the characters to solve. Because like, if I want just the "will they realize their feelings?" and the aftermath of that -- well, that's what fanfiction is for, isn't it? 

The blurb describes it as a slowburn, but honestly I thought it was a bit quick? If anything, it took a bit too long for the mystery to start happening, rather than the smut - though the smut was quite good, I am not complaining -- loved the vague Dom/sub undertones and that the characters don't necessarily fall into those stereotypes. Learned some new words (thank you, Kobo dictionary feature!) and more than I thought I would about taxidermy. Will probably check out the two sequels if my library has them.
solovei: (Misc - Owl)

Spent a lot of time on Fanlore in the last couple of weeks because of IFD, trying to get links archived in any kind of systematic fashion. Starting with due South fanfics for now (soooo many Crack Van recs) and even there, in a fandom that you'd think would be more online than some others, there are dead links and deleted journals and stories that were only ever printed in a zine. And sure some of those probably vanished with intention -- an author goes pro, removes all fannish works from the internet, or maybe gets harassment over something they wrote, or just lose interest in fandom and don't want to maintain a site anymore. So I do occasionally feel like... archiving something without asking the person first is a bit iffy. We can't know, really... What sorts of things get saved because they're valuable and good, and what sorts of things just languish in an attic somewhere until they're discovered and become valuable due to surviving for so long?

Also, splurged and bought myself a Kobo e-reader last week. (Which I can actually use now, after an extremely fraught couple of days where I was fairly sure I'd gotten a defective on; it miraculously started working again just as I was heading out to take it back to the store). Currently trying to tweak Calibre and FanFicFare to my liking, as well as going through my backup drives trying to find ebooks I already have that I can add in. This is my first e-ink device, and it kind of feels... like, weirdly magical? Here's this thing that looks like paper and weighs almost nothing and but can store more books than you'll probably ever read in your lifetime. Don't like the font? Nothing stops you from changing it to Comic Sans or Papyrus or making it super huge. Oh and also it's made out of teeny tiny capsules floating in oil. Magic!

Currently reading "An Unseen Attraction" by KJ Charles, because I remember someone reccing it years ago -- my library only had an ebook copy this entire time so I couldn't read it until now \o/ I'm not very far in (chapter 2) but I'm a sucker for this time period, as well as for shifting POV, so I feel like I will enjoy it.



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