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auroracloudTime for our non-regular weekly book babble!
The last book(s) I read
The last thing I finished was a Finnish YA historical fantasy novel, which was lifted somewhat above mediocrity by its delightful portrayal of its setting, both the time and the place. Too bad the characters and the writing weren't equally engaging, but I might be curious enough to pick up the sequel once I've had some distance from this one.
I feel like I can hardly read a novel in my native language without bitching about it. Why, whyyyy don't people here write novels the way I like them? Either it's supremely depressing and sort of... so busy posing as Serious Literature that it fails to be engaging at all (well, to me), or it's commercial/genre fiction and apparently those don't have to be good quality books. And sometimes books manage to be both! I do find stuff to read in Finnish that I utterly love, but it's often something other than novels - non-fiction, short stories, poetry, travel writing, things that straddle the border between fiction and non-fiction. Or sometimes, translations, but I usually read English books in English, and from non-English languages they rarely translate the kind of books I'm into. Even if they translate genre literature, it's the too-depressing kind. Oh well, I should probably get around to reading some of that translated Chinese SFF before I complain more.
Anyway, enough about that. Else I'll be writing about my relationship with my country's literature for the rest of the evening. The last thing I read before that book was Emily Tesh's novella Silver In the Wood, which I adored. It's a beautiful, tender story about the Green Man, his woods, and a young man who falls in love with them. There's folklore, fae, awesome plants, and good supporting characters. It's lyrical and lovely. Can't promise it's everyone's cup of tea, but it absolutely is mine. This is shaping to be another darn good year for novellas.
I've also read parts of history books for fiction research, because I had to take them back to the library so I needed to finally stop ignoring them. Alas, they were the kind of history books that make the era all its people sound unspeakably boring and stuffy, and make me stop wanting to write historical fiction. I probably need to find something different next.
Though I try to remember that even if 99 % of the people were exactly that boring and stuffy, there's got to have been that 1 % who chafe against it and are interesting to write about. Also about 95 % of the people were commoners and poor and mostly illiterate (uh, I'm guessing as to the actual percentage, but I know my country had a very small upper class for most of its history). They sure as heck didn't have time for the kind of stuffiness that may have plagued those people whose memoirs and letters have made it to 20th and 21st century historians and been deemed worthy of writing about.
What I am reading now
I've been listening to the audiobook version of Red, White, and Royal Blue, because audiobook is what my library had and it finally arrived to me. If you haven't happened to hear of this, it's a romance between the (fictional)son of a (fictional( female president of the USA and a (fictional) British prince. The book is every bit as delightful as everyone says it is and I have far too much fun with it, and I never proceed this fast with audiobooks but I do with this one. It's funny, but also has surprising amounts of depth and political content, and is more psychologically astute than I tend to expect of romance novels. (I don't read a lot of them, due to not being into 98 % of the het romance tropes, and my local libraries, though otherwise great, have very little in terms of same-sex romance novels, but I guess this one was popular enough to slip through. Sometimes I buy f/f romance, but I don't have a lot of money to buy books these days.) I'm also very envious of the AU these people live in, when it comes to politics. Just saying.
I've also been reading The Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone, which is very interesting and has lots of extremely kick-ass space lesbians. It's also rather... dense in terms of worldbuilding and such, so although I find it delightful, I usually can't focus on it more than 1-2 chapters at a time. So I've been trying to take lighter books on the side. Now I've also made a start with Alexandra Rowland's A Conspiracy of Truths, which seems very promising.
What I'm Reading Next
No idea, really. I've got several things I want to read, also from my own bookshelf, but by the time I'm done with all three of the above, I'll probably get my plans thrown aside by the arrival of yet another library reservation or three. I need to learn to not make so many reservations at once.
The last book(s) I read
The last thing I finished was a Finnish YA historical fantasy novel, which was lifted somewhat above mediocrity by its delightful portrayal of its setting, both the time and the place. Too bad the characters and the writing weren't equally engaging, but I might be curious enough to pick up the sequel once I've had some distance from this one.
I feel like I can hardly read a novel in my native language without bitching about it. Why, whyyyy don't people here write novels the way I like them? Either it's supremely depressing and sort of... so busy posing as Serious Literature that it fails to be engaging at all (well, to me), or it's commercial/genre fiction and apparently those don't have to be good quality books. And sometimes books manage to be both! I do find stuff to read in Finnish that I utterly love, but it's often something other than novels - non-fiction, short stories, poetry, travel writing, things that straddle the border between fiction and non-fiction. Or sometimes, translations, but I usually read English books in English, and from non-English languages they rarely translate the kind of books I'm into. Even if they translate genre literature, it's the too-depressing kind. Oh well, I should probably get around to reading some of that translated Chinese SFF before I complain more.
Anyway, enough about that. Else I'll be writing about my relationship with my country's literature for the rest of the evening. The last thing I read before that book was Emily Tesh's novella Silver In the Wood, which I adored. It's a beautiful, tender story about the Green Man, his woods, and a young man who falls in love with them. There's folklore, fae, awesome plants, and good supporting characters. It's lyrical and lovely. Can't promise it's everyone's cup of tea, but it absolutely is mine. This is shaping to be another darn good year for novellas.
I've also read parts of history books for fiction research, because I had to take them back to the library so I needed to finally stop ignoring them. Alas, they were the kind of history books that make the era all its people sound unspeakably boring and stuffy, and make me stop wanting to write historical fiction. I probably need to find something different next.
Though I try to remember that even if 99 % of the people were exactly that boring and stuffy, there's got to have been that 1 % who chafe against it and are interesting to write about. Also about 95 % of the people were commoners and poor and mostly illiterate (uh, I'm guessing as to the actual percentage, but I know my country had a very small upper class for most of its history). They sure as heck didn't have time for the kind of stuffiness that may have plagued those people whose memoirs and letters have made it to 20th and 21st century historians and been deemed worthy of writing about.
What I am reading now
I've been listening to the audiobook version of Red, White, and Royal Blue, because audiobook is what my library had and it finally arrived to me. If you haven't happened to hear of this, it's a romance between the (fictional)son of a (fictional( female president of the USA and a (fictional) British prince. The book is every bit as delightful as everyone says it is and I have far too much fun with it, and I never proceed this fast with audiobooks but I do with this one. It's funny, but also has surprising amounts of depth and political content, and is more psychologically astute than I tend to expect of romance novels. (I don't read a lot of them, due to not being into 98 % of the het romance tropes, and my local libraries, though otherwise great, have very little in terms of same-sex romance novels, but I guess this one was popular enough to slip through. Sometimes I buy f/f romance, but I don't have a lot of money to buy books these days.) I'm also very envious of the AU these people live in, when it comes to politics. Just saying.
I've also been reading The Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone, which is very interesting and has lots of extremely kick-ass space lesbians. It's also rather... dense in terms of worldbuilding and such, so although I find it delightful, I usually can't focus on it more than 1-2 chapters at a time. So I've been trying to take lighter books on the side. Now I've also made a start with Alexandra Rowland's A Conspiracy of Truths, which seems very promising.
What I'm Reading Next
No idea, really. I've got several things I want to read, also from my own bookshelf, but by the time I'm done with all three of the above, I'll probably get my plans thrown aside by the arrival of yet another library reservation or three. I need to learn to not make so many reservations at once.
