more mystery quilt, more books

Another fairly unproductive quilty week for me, aside from the mystery quilt...

This week the block parts started coming together to make whole blocks!

Salem got in on the action to help me sew.  Or rather demanded some love.  Either way, I took a break to give her what she wanted and she was on her way.

I expect the next two clues will tell us how to put the quilt top together, but I wonder if there will be some secondary patterns that emerge?

Friday evening my throat started feeling scratchy.  So far, it's not been much  more than that, so I'm hopeful it's just a new allergy or a reaction to smelling the residual fumes from the floors being repolished at work, but I decided to take it super easy yesterday.  Because I could.

Gabby kept me company and made some good biscuits.  (Well, I guess that video isn't going to upload...instead you get this still shot...)

Since she stays in my bedroom (do not fear, this cat has a pretty good setup with all the necessities and a lot of extras - like four cat beds, two window perches, a cat tree and a LOT of toys!), she was excited to spend most of the day with me yesterday.  I read and napped and hoped I'd feel better today.  I don't feel worse, so I guess that's good enough?

Speaking of reading...another two books finished this week!

First up:

Though I found this in the fiction section at a used book sale, this is, in fact, non-fiction.  The story of a young woman who wanted to contribute to the war effort (WWII) and ends up telling the right person at the right time and she is recruited to be a spy, working in Spain.

Spain is a neutral country, so there are people from both sides of the war doing all sorts of things there, and it's a good place to do her job.  Of course she has a job as a cover, but she manages to work her way into much of society of the time and that is also a good place to learn a lot of things.  It is also a good place to meet a rich man who turns out to be in line to inherit the title of Count.  So I'm not sure when she marries him she becomes a princess, but I'm not entirely sure how the titles and structure of such work over in Spain.  (Or anywhere, if we're being honest!)

She does get into a few dangerous situations, but the author admits from the very start that his book is based on a couple of her autobiographies as well as some research, but her stories vary some from one to another, so maybe she wasn't in as much danger, or maybe she can't share all that she did that WAS that dangerous.

In all, it was an interesting story, but there were a lot of name and place drops that didn't help me any.  Maybe to a history buff, they would, but I was more interested in HER story, not the story of the war.  And particularly not in a name-place-date manner, as I've said many times that is why I nearly failed history class in high school.  I don't care to memorize that kind of stuff.  I want the STORY!

Anyways, not bad, not great.

And on to this one...

The blurb says two older women go on a road trip to visit the grave of a famous singer (not sure if she's real or not - never got around to caring enough to look), but turns out it's a tool to tell the story of the women.  More the story of one than the other, it spans most of their lives, as they met early in school and stayed friends throughout.

They both grew up poor and though I believe American-born, their Slavic parents made them stand out as "other."  They married men that weren't what they thought they'd be, had children that turned out to be trouble or are now estranged, and generally didn't have good lives.  One (the driver and instigator) seems boisterous and outgoing, the other seems more timid and introverted, they seem to balance each other out.

But.

(Spoiler alert)

They never actually make it to the grave.

Perhaps that wasn't the point?

In general, not what I was expecting (not entirely) and not what I'd have chosen if I'd known.

But the publisher (Spinsters Ink) has me intrigued, as they choose to publish from underrepresented authors and books featuring underrepresented groups of people - in this case, elderly women.  I thought that was pretty cool.

So two books that were both kinda "meh" this week.  But the one I started next is good.

And one of my blog readers commented that they don't even try to read a book unless it has been given four stars.  That got me thinking about what I read - I go to used book sales and the cover draws me in (or the title) and I read the blurb and decide if it's a yes or no from that.  Definitely a chance to miss out on some good books if I'm not in the mood for their content at the time of shopping, but I also am not interested in rushing out to read what everyone else tells me I should be reading.

So I thought I'd type my ratings into a database and compare them with GoodReads ratings.

You can see here the trendline is that GoodReads and I tend to agree that good books are good (the upward trend line), but it also shows that I'm all over the place compared to them.

So I teased it out a little more and here are comparisons of what I thought were the worst books of the last 15.5 months and what were the best to GoodReads ratings.

Clearly I have a different opinion of what a "good" book is compared to the rating of whatever GoodReads uses.  (And I also compared some of these ratings to the StoryGraph, which is user defined in its ratings and they were quite similar to the Amazon-based values.  Maybe those are also user-generated?)

And clearly I liked a number of books a lot better than the average as well.  But did I rate any of them the same?  Since the star rating can go more than quarter star jumps in GoodReads, it's not as easy to compare, but I did a little visual search and came up with this:

So obviously I agreed on some, but jeez don't ask me what they are.

And now that you've asked, I have to go figure it out...

A few of these are new enough that I've talked about them on my blog.

Okay, enough nerdiness and talk about a book tracker app that I really don't like (it was more user-friendly for this project, so it got used, but I may not be using it much longer because the StoryGraph is so much  more fun!) and time to go snuggle kitties and rest some more.  Let this scratchy throat decide what it's going to become because I'm SICK OF IT!  (It needs to progress into something else or just go away.)

Happy quilting (and reading),

Katie