*rings bell*
Jul. 30th, 2025 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rydra_wongtroyswann would like people to talk to about Prophet, please:https://troyswann.dreamwidth.org/1130697.html
Also, if anybody wants to talk Prophet with me, please do.
rydra_wongtroyswann would like people to talk to about Prophet, please:https://troyswann.dreamwidth.org/1130697.html
Also, if anybody wants to talk Prophet with me, please do.
Almost forgot it's Wednesday
Jul. 30th, 2025 01:55 pmanehanRecently read
Currently reading
Too many books.
Up next
Let's get through some of the RIPs first, okay?
- Ginn Hale, Wicked Gentlemen. A collection of two M/M romance novellas following two men from very different walks of life, living in a dystopian setting. It was surprisingly enjoyable. It was very clearly a work of a relatively inexperinced author, but the world-building and the characters more than made up for it (and also for the horrifyingly bad epub file, which, no, I won't shut up about).
I think the first novella would have benefited from being written in third person rather than first, though. A sentence such as "the moon spread its light across my face and bare chest" would be unfortunate even in third person, but in first person it's just tragic. - Lee Welch, Seducing the Sorcerer. An M/M romance in a fantasy setting. The MC, Fenn Todd, is a former groom, current vagabond, who accidentally acquires a flying magical horse, and just as accidentally crashes that horse into the courtyard of the court sorcerer's tower. It's a charming and somewhat whimsical novel, nice enough to read when you just want to relax, but I don't think I'd ever re-read it. It doesn't have enough substance for that. However, kudos to Welch for conveying Fenn's working-class dialect through word choices and syntax rather than non-standard spelling. It worked really well.
- Priest, Coins of Destiny, vol. 1. If I see "the scion" used as an epithet for a character ever again, it'll be too soon. The scion this, the scion that, time and time again. For fuck's sake.
Currently reading
Too many books.
- Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo. A quarter of the way through. I liked Maxwell's debut, Winter's Orbit. This is set in the same universe, so it's probably no surprise that I'm liking this as well. The first fifth was pretty stressful reading, because it deals with loss of autonomy and being a victim of state injustice, and I don't expect it'll get much less stressful. When I first started this, I totally lost myself in it. Surfaced two hours later, shaky with adrenaline.
- Xue Shan Fei Hu, The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish, vol. 3, which is just as ridiculous as the name suggests.
- Plus nine others.
Up next
Let's get through some of the RIPs first, okay?
Wednesday!
Jul. 23rd, 2025 05:52 pmanehanRecently read
Aliette de Bodard, The House of Shattered Wings & The House of Binding Thorns. I feel like I spent half the reading time arguing with de Bodard's choices, which didn't make for a restful reading experience.
They've got the same problem Shelley Parker-Chan's The Radiant Emperor duology: too many main characters and therefore not enough space to develop those characters, leading to the author leaning too heavily on a single defining characteristic for them. And just like Parker-Chan, de Bodard chose to lean on misery. If "woe is me" were a genre, these books would be picture-perfect examples of it.
You know how sometimes authors switch to a different set of main characters within a series? Freya Marske's The Last Binding series comes to mind; the switch killed any desire I had of continuing past the first volume. Well, in this case, a complete switch would have been a blessing. There's only so many times one can read about someone's spiral of self-castigation and misery before it gets stale, and the best parts of the second book were the parts with the new or less-known characters. (Well, most of them. One set of them was cast in the old mould of melodramatic navel-gazing.)
To be fair, though, I still pretty much inhaled these. Addictive, but frustrating.
Currently reading
Priest, Coins of Destiny vol. 1. A hundred pages in, and not really feeling this yet. Priest appears to be a mixed bag for me. Some of her novels I love (Stars of Chaos, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire), others I very much don't (Guardian, and now this one too, apparently).
Ginn Hale, Wicked Gentlemen. This one, on the other hand, is keeping my attention, though it suffers from having the worst epub file I have ever seen. It's so messed up that I actually opened it up to see whether I could fix it easily. Alas, I would've pretty much had to redo the whole thing. It was an unholy mess, which isn't surprising, I suppose, given that it's apparently been exported straight from a bloody Word document. Holy fuck.
Up next
I've bought the sequel to The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns, so maybe that one. Or maybe I need more of a break from this series. We'll see.
Only two more days until my summer holiday, so I will have plenty of time to read then, even if I spend twice as long on a novel than I would normally do on account of all the ranting.
Aliette de Bodard, The House of Shattered Wings & The House of Binding Thorns. I feel like I spent half the reading time arguing with de Bodard's choices, which didn't make for a restful reading experience.
They've got the same problem Shelley Parker-Chan's The Radiant Emperor duology: too many main characters and therefore not enough space to develop those characters, leading to the author leaning too heavily on a single defining characteristic for them. And just like Parker-Chan, de Bodard chose to lean on misery. If "woe is me" were a genre, these books would be picture-perfect examples of it.
You know how sometimes authors switch to a different set of main characters within a series? Freya Marske's The Last Binding series comes to mind; the switch killed any desire I had of continuing past the first volume. Well, in this case, a complete switch would have been a blessing. There's only so many times one can read about someone's spiral of self-castigation and misery before it gets stale, and the best parts of the second book were the parts with the new or less-known characters. (Well, most of them. One set of them was cast in the old mould of melodramatic navel-gazing.)
To be fair, though, I still pretty much inhaled these. Addictive, but frustrating.
Currently reading
Priest, Coins of Destiny vol. 1. A hundred pages in, and not really feeling this yet. Priest appears to be a mixed bag for me. Some of her novels I love (Stars of Chaos, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire), others I very much don't (Guardian, and now this one too, apparently).
Ginn Hale, Wicked Gentlemen. This one, on the other hand, is keeping my attention, though it suffers from having the worst epub file I have ever seen. It's so messed up that I actually opened it up to see whether I could fix it easily. Alas, I would've pretty much had to redo the whole thing. It was an unholy mess, which isn't surprising, I suppose, given that it's apparently been exported straight from a bloody Word document. Holy fuck.
Up next
I've bought the sequel to The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns, so maybe that one. Or maybe I need more of a break from this series. We'll see.
Only two more days until my summer holiday, so I will have plenty of time to read then, even if I spend twice as long on a novel than I would normally do on account of all the ranting.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
