go to the library.

ROMANCE NOVEL: Pride and Prejudice

i have a secret to share. i've been using the audiobook versions of cover art (sometimes with audiobook-specific details sloppily edited out) to make the covers i use for my bingo look good square. don't have to do that this time. this one i actually listened to on audiobook! i haven't listened to audiobooks since elementary school, when i would get into races against the read-along headphone corner passages which i invariably won. i got a job recently that involves a lot of opportunities to listen to audio while working, so i've decided to see if i can make audiobooks work. it's a lot harder for me to keep track of what's going on without being able to set my own pace or read up on the page (i am a very different reader than i was in elementary school) and pride and prejudice was... a choice... for a starter book (i was going to do a reread to make things easier but then my first choice wasn't avaliable for borrow and i just kind of accidentally started p&p), but it's going alright! i've definitely improved at comprehension from the start of the book. audiobooks will probably never be my preference but when it comes to reading at work it's pretty peak. i'm not really much one for romance novels (i faithfully ferry the patreon reviews to my romance novel friends), but my mom a while ago did a watch of every p&p adaptation and told me a little about them, so this is kind of a "something to talk to my mom about" read. they started doing a very funny (to me) thing a few years ago where they suddenly got really into netflix's halmark-esque romance movies and would call me to tell me all about how they didn't make sense and everyone acted very stupid, and also romance novels, which are also full of people not behaving sensibly enough for my mom's standards, and none of this was surprising to me except that it was happening, because my mom has always held this opinion of romance as a genre. but they really enjoyed the pride and prejudice movies, which makes sense - jane austen as a writer is quite known for her grasp of both sense and sensibility. overall, i found the book to be an extremely dense account of narrative events in which a lot of almost nothing happening is described in summary. i really enjoyed all the actual scenes, and definitely got their chemistry when they spoke to one another, but i wish there wasn't such a close ratio with the connective-tissue and-then-they-went-there-and-had-a-lovely-time stuff. i do really like that after they've established actual mutual interest they're a couple of embarrassed goobers

NOT ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH: a second, smaller book bingo

i've decided to try and get a bingo using only translated books and books by translators, for personal pretention reasons i won't go into here, because this isn't that bingo board. i've read a few for it but i wanted to post this without them so that the minor adjustment i made to the board is comprehensible

COMIC, MANGA, OR GRAPHIC NOVEL: 17776: What football will look like in the future by Jon Bois