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February Reading
Feb. 29th, 2024 10:04 pmI liked doing the reading post in January and thinking about books is better than thinking about family things! so here's another one.
Recent: Not all that recent now, but I finished Imre at the beginning of the month and I did actually enjoy it very much. It's very Edwardian, both in style and attitude, but along with the Weird Ideas about ethnicity there's also a sincere attempt to refute misogyny in gay male culture. And idk, the romance is just sweet.
Also read Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer and loved that too! And this one actually has surprisingly little in the way of Period Typical Attitudes. People respect each other's boundaries (or, at least, the good ones do) and there's a very nice portrait of life in urban boarding houses in the late 19th century.
Read Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher, which I loved all the way through, but I finished it at a point when I had kind of a lot of pain and PMS, which means I have ended up with no ability to comment on it. I liked the ground wights. Oh, also halfway through I decided Wren should ditch her party and marry me. Possibly I have a Type.
Reread an early Cat Sebastian, which, well, it's nice to see how much she's improved.
Still reading and listening to a lot of RWRB fic. I don't think there's anything I want to specifically call out as good, but it's nice and non-demanding. At least as long as I stick to AUs or shove it into the wish-fulfillment area of my brain rather than the class-conscious part. Oh, and I relistened to the first chapter of Life of Crime the other evening, that was great.
Current: In the middle of the climax of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love - thank god for skip-the-line copies, I have been reading this very slowly over the last six weeks. Recommended if it sounds at all like your kind of thing. Hopefully I will finish it on my commute tomorrow.
Have started The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole, because sometimes reading about living in a dystopia is, what's the word, sympathetic.
Last year I read The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth and wondered why she doesn't have the same reputation as, at least, Ngaio Marsh or Josephine Tey. Now I'm reading The Coldstone and finding it somewhat less impressive. Possibly because of SAD and possibly because it doesn't have any characters I straight up like as much as I liked Jane Smith. But the bit I read today had some very fun sneaking around at night pretending to be a ghost. Also a bicycle. I should read more books with bicycles.
Also I got Poetic Designs by Stephen Adams (one of my university professors) from my brother (we should have two copies between us, but mine has disappeared in a box somewhere) and am rereading that for nice practical unemotional nonfiction and nostalgia.
Future: I am going to pick up a gay sci-fi regency romance that I found in the local library and hope it is as awesome as it could be. And either Sixpenny Octavo by Annick Trent or One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny, depending on whether I feel more like even more regency or even more medieval by then. And I have If You'll Have Me by![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
eunnieboo on hold at the library.
At some point I'm going to go through my reading file and run the stats to see if I'm actually reading more queer fiction this year than usual. Probably not, honestly.
Recent: Not all that recent now, but I finished Imre at the beginning of the month and I did actually enjoy it very much. It's very Edwardian, both in style and attitude, but along with the Weird Ideas about ethnicity there's also a sincere attempt to refute misogyny in gay male culture. And idk, the romance is just sweet.
Also read Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer and loved that too! And this one actually has surprisingly little in the way of Period Typical Attitudes. People respect each other's boundaries (or, at least, the good ones do) and there's a very nice portrait of life in urban boarding houses in the late 19th century.
Read Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher, which I loved all the way through, but I finished it at a point when I had kind of a lot of pain and PMS, which means I have ended up with no ability to comment on it. I liked the ground wights. Oh, also halfway through I decided Wren should ditch her party and marry me. Possibly I have a Type.
Reread an early Cat Sebastian, which, well, it's nice to see how much she's improved.
Still reading and listening to a lot of RWRB fic. I don't think there's anything I want to specifically call out as good, but it's nice and non-demanding. At least as long as I stick to AUs or shove it into the wish-fulfillment area of my brain rather than the class-conscious part. Oh, and I relistened to the first chapter of Life of Crime the other evening, that was great.
Current: In the middle of the climax of Gwen and Art Are Not in Love - thank god for skip-the-line copies, I have been reading this very slowly over the last six weeks. Recommended if it sounds at all like your kind of thing. Hopefully I will finish it on my commute tomorrow.
Have started The AI Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole, because sometimes reading about living in a dystopia is, what's the word, sympathetic.
Last year I read The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth and wondered why she doesn't have the same reputation as, at least, Ngaio Marsh or Josephine Tey. Now I'm reading The Coldstone and finding it somewhat less impressive. Possibly because of SAD and possibly because it doesn't have any characters I straight up like as much as I liked Jane Smith. But the bit I read today had some very fun sneaking around at night pretending to be a ghost. Also a bicycle. I should read more books with bicycles.
Also I got Poetic Designs by Stephen Adams (one of my university professors) from my brother (we should have two copies between us, but mine has disappeared in a box somewhere) and am rereading that for nice practical unemotional nonfiction and nostalgia.
Future: I am going to pick up a gay sci-fi regency romance that I found in the local library and hope it is as awesome as it could be. And either Sixpenny Octavo by Annick Trent or One Night in Hartswood by Emma Denny, depending on whether I feel more like even more regency or even more medieval by then. And I have If You'll Have Me by
At some point I'm going to go through my reading file and run the stats to see if I'm actually reading more queer fiction this year than usual. Probably not, honestly.