It is a sad day when you know you shouldn’t get behind a ship in a book but you do anyway (before the characters even met… so all throughout the first book and much of the second…) and you then see your ship sink before your very eyes. 😭 I swear my time on tumblr has poisoned me and I start shipping couples in books where I should NOT BE SHIPPING lol.

But ah well, I love all the other things about the book (well, except for the person who inserted themselves between my OTP and made my ship sink… who I find very boring and spoiled…) and shall soldier on with a heavy heart, thinking wistfully of what could have been. This is definitely not a romance book, so I must not allow the tragedy of my delusional romance bring me down.

But anyway! The reason I am here is because, as you may be able to tell, I haven’t been super into dramas lately (although I am watching Lovely Runner, which is… fine) and I know there are some fellow bookworms on Dramabeans! So I thought of something that would allow me to stay engaged with the community even if I’m not watching much.

You know how we have the What We’re Watching threads? Well, what if I started a weekly What We’re Reading post on the fanwall? Genre does not matter! I am a fantasy girlie at heart but I am open to any and all genres and would love to hear what Beanies have to say about their recent reads, whatever they may be.

Please let me know if there is interest!

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    I have been reading this book which I’ve loved. Hope you don’t mind me posting a great review:
    “ This short review makes me want to read this even more:
    “Memoir

    Christian Cooper has been birdwatching in Central Park for decades, but a spring migratory excursion took a dramatic turn on May 25, 2020, when a woman refused his request to leash her wandering dog, per park regulations. He was hoping to spy a ground-dwelling bird called a mourning warbler and knew that her unleashed pet would make his quest impossible. After she refused and Cooper began filming with his phone, Amy Cooper–a white woman of no relation–announced that she was about to call the police, adding, “I’m going to tell them that there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her blatant use of “weaponized racism” went viral. As Cooper aptly sums up the incident in

    Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World (Random House, $28, 9780593242384), “Fourteen words, captured amid sixty-nine seconds of video, that would alter the trajectory of two lives.” This encounter happened on the same day George Floyd was murdered.

    A year later, Cooper was invited to attend a birding festival in Alabama. As he walked across Selma’s infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, he reflected on the day that bridge became a bloodbath in 1965 and on the travails his ancestors must have endured. “In that context, my incident in Central Park is just an asterisk,” he writes. “More than a year later, it remains exceedingly strange for me–the notoriety, that I’d even be mentioned in the annals of the nation’s racial strife.”

    Throughout his wide-ranging memoir, Cooper is a thoughtful, enthusiastic narrator. Growing up as a Black kid on Long Island, New York, in the 1970s, “I was rarer than an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the very white world of birding,” he writes. “As I simultaneously struggled with being queer, birds took me away from my woes suffocating in the closet.” Cooper gradually came out to family and friends, beginning while studying at Harvard in the 1980s. He went on to become one of Marvel’s first openly gay writers and editors–aside from birds, his other passions include superhero comics and sci-fi and fantasy–and introduced the first gay male Star Trek character in the Starfleet Academy series. In entertaining prose, Cooper reminisces about his life, writing especially poignantly about his often-difficult relationship with his father.

    Tying these multifaceted strands together is no easy feat, but Cooper does it well. He peppers the text with helpful tips for beginning birders while recounting vivid excursions through Nepal, the Galapagos, Australia and, of course, his beloved Central Park. Generous soul that he is, Cooper writes that outrage shouldn’t be focused on Amy Cooper. Instead, he concludes, “Focusing on her is a distraction and lets too many people off the hook from the hard, ongoing examination of themselves and their own racial biases. . . . If you’re lo

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      Thank you so much for sharing this book as I only heard about the incident and it’s great to hear the context of the man. I think your post got cut off.

      I am very late to the party as my access to the site has been limited due to the multiple issues with slowness and lost comments etc.

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        Thanks for alerting me to the last sentence being cut off!:
        “ racial biases. . . . If you’re looking for Amy Cooper to yell at, look in the mirror.”

        –Alice Cary

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          No worries at all☺️ It happens to us all and thank goodness for the foresight to write the essay posts offline so we have a copy to copy and paste from when this happens.

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      Cooper’s ordeal got a lot of press coverage—not only for what happened to him, but for what happened to his accuser, a woman named Amy Cooper, in the aftermath. What she did was truly reprehensible, but the response was way out of proportion to the offense. She lost her job, received death threats, was subjected to doxxing, and was driven nearly to the point of suicide. Christian Cooper himself said he felt sorry for her, refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation against her, and encouraged people to focus on the problem of systemic racism rather than on the actions of this one individual. If only there were more people with his objectivity, compassion, and strength of character!

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    Last month I read a few books, including The House in the Cerulean Sea. And I liked it so much, I re-read it this month.

    I’ve been trying to decide if I should read Conversations with Friends, or the series Six of Crows, or Ace of Spades, or what. But because I keep trying to figure out what to read next I end up reading nothing (and go back to webtoons).

    And what are you reading, mindy?

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    YES YES YES to this!!
    I
    Honestly, I’ve been reading mindless webtoon a lot more than I have been reading actual books— probably why my “to be read” list of actual books is ever growing, why there’s a pile of biographical books sitting on my desk (wherein I’ve only cracked open 2). BUT!!! I did recently get back into the book, “Anxious People” which is on my Kindle, but honestly, this one has been going real slow, like a snail’s pace

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    I had bought this book when it came out but somehow I never got around to read it. Just picked it up – A brush with shadows.

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    I haven’t started them yet but I have both Funny Story by Emily Henry and Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez on my kindle. Both Romcoms. Oh and trying to slowly catch up on Apothecary Diaries and Yona of the Dawn, Mangas, that are so good.

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    I watched Lockwood and Co on Netflix, it wasn’t renewed so I was curious about the whole story, so I started the books. I’m reading the second one, I have ordered the 3 and 4 and learnt that the 5th was translated in French yet…

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    A great idea Mindy!

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    Mindy this is such a great idea and I look forward to having this space as I just add them to my WWW post. Unfortunately, I only do audiobooks at the moment and have burned through my credits 6 months early! So I have to rely on what is available for free until I can get some more credits. It will be great to hear what other people are reading though and see if there are some to add to my list.

    I have had site issues for a few months now and I wonder if others are experiencing it too so may have missed this post like I did. It may be worth flagging the idea on an Open thread so others can be made aware. There was a request for a group read and that lead to the DB book club membership I have tagged in the current members who may be interested in your weekly hosting of current reads post:
    @indyfan @mellowarmadillo @attiton @elinor @ahjummaaa @toomuchtv @wonhwa @jls943 @cayong03 @babylilo @ruhi0101 @petrolia @acacia @dramaforever
@zindigo @linarrick @ndlessjoie @sonai @kdramajoy

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      This week, I reread Deadeye Dick, a Kurt Vonnegut novel I got in 1983. I was at my parents’ house, clearing out my bookshelves! Yesterday I read Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto (did I get the rec for that on here? I can’t remember who told me to read it.) I also read the DB bookclub book The Sense of Wonder which I won’t spoil except to say it was PERFECT for us. Also a graphic novel called Gaytheist by Lonnie Mann.

      I wonder if there is a way for you to borrow audio books from the public library. We can do it through my library. It’s worth exploring. I don’t listen to books very much, but I have borrowed some when I couldn’t get the book in print or when I had to drive somewhere. Hearing a book in your ear is so intimate–it’s really unforgettable. Especially if the book starts with a graphic sex scene, which did happen to me once–walking through my neighborhood with my face on fire.

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        I read Rental person who does nothing a few months ago so maybe you saw it in my WWW one week.
        I am impressed you have read this quarter’s DB book club read already! I hope you made notes for when the questions come out.
        I need to join the library I am sure they do have audio books available I didn’t think of that.
        That unfortunate episode re the raunchy opening scene must have been a real eye opener😳 poor you.

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          I listen to audio books from the library but find that I have to use Audible for more recent books like the ones chosen for the DB book club reads.

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          The book was really good. I finally found an actual paperback of it in a Little Free Library. It’s called The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. I think it’s not for everyone, being a combination of explicit queer sexuality and a ton of academic allusion and name-dropping. Yet I really loved how the memoirist wrote about her relationship with her partner, and some of the names she dropped were people I admire.

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      I’m often unable to load this site, or it loads so slowly that I move on to the things I have to do for the day. I guess I’m glad to hear it’s not just me. I’d be here more often if this weren’t an issue.

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    I’m on board with a “What We’re Reading” conversation! I’m always interested in learning about books that other people have enjoyed.

    Like @mindy I’ve been watching fewer dramas these days, especially the Korean ones. I read a lot—both for my own pleasure and as part of a book group I co-lead. I loved our most recent book—Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. It’s about a group of people from around the world who have gathered for an opera recital at the home of the vice president of an unnamed country in South America, and who are taken hostage by a terrorist group. It was inspired by an actual hostage situation at the Japanese embassy in Peru in 1996.

    I’m not a big fan of the fantasy genre, but I did enjoy the parallel-world novel Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Some of my other recent favorites:
    A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
    Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson
    Shadow Divers, by Robert Kurson
    Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
    The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson
    Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

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