What Am I Reading Wednesday - April 7

Now on April 8th, because I'm doing April Fool's Day a week behind schedule.

What I Finished Reading This Week

Gideon The Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
This one was an odd duck for me. My reaction, I think, is mainly due to the fact that marketing hype and reviews led me to expect one book, and it was something else.( Read more... )

I can’t quite say I liked this novel as a book. But I did form vivid mental images of the settings and characters. I did like Gideon and Harrow as characters, despite their complete lack of chemistry. Indeed, I liked all the characters. I don’t feel like this was an excellently executed book and I didn’t feel particularly satisfied once I’d finished it. But it’s weirdly grown on me since in a way I can’t really explain.

Binti: The Night Masquerade – Nnedi Okorafor
This was a swing and a miss. Instead of exploring themes of identity, belonging, and tradition versus modernity (as she seemed poised to do at the previous novella’s conclusion), Okorafor focused on giving her protagonist a series of increasingly improbable and poorly fleshed-out superpowers. By the series’ conclusion ( cut )

It's self-indulgent and iddy. And there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. But neither are they what the marketing promised, and because I came to the book looking for the latter but ended up with the former, I'm a bit disappointed. Combined with the fact that the series reads somewhat like a draft where all the ideas are on the page, but the language needs to be polished, these novellas ultimately went wide of the mark for me, despite their latent potential.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Curses – Laure Eve
Laure Eve’s The Graces was one of my surprise favorites from last year’s reading, and it’s a delight to return to its characters here.

Women Of The Golden Dawn – Mary Greer
This week’s chapters covered the founding, growth, and implosion of the Golden Dawn, and W.B. Yeats’ archly matter-of-fact description of Aleister Crowley’s antics is priceless.

A Thousand Ships – Natalie Hayes
I’ve read the first chapter, and so far this looks set to be the novel Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was marketed as but wasn’t.

Spellbreaker – Charlie Holmberg
Thirty percent of the way in we’ve had our meet cute moment and the first intimation that some of the main character's assumptions about her mysterious anti-mage employers may not be as accurate as we’d first assumed.

The House On Vesper Sands – Paraic O’Donnell
As deeply enjoyable this time through as it was during my first read.

The Silver Bough vol. 2 – F. Marian McNeill
This week I read the chapter on Easter, completely blanking on the fact that I'd already finished it several weeks earlier.

The Mirador – Sarah Monette
I'm trying to knock this one off my longstanding "reads in progress" list.


What I'm Reading Next

I acquired a new hardbound notebook, and that, amazingly, was it.

これで以上です。