The long overdue book entry
I think part of the reason I haven't written this earlier, is because the most memorable reading experience was Spinning Silver and I feel like I have already shouted at everybody about it and didn't want to repeat myself over and over again. So I keep it short: If you haven't, go read Spinning Silver! It has great female characters that are more diverse than 'she's strong because she punches people' and plays beautifully with fairy tale motifs without just going 'This is Rumpelstiltskin/Cinderella but longer and the characters have names'.
Which makes for a nice segway to the next book because I also read Aliette de Bodard's In the Vanisher's Palace aka the lesbian, post-apocalyptic, Vietnamese Beauty and the Beast with dragons. Say that three times fast. Anyway, it is very much Beauty and the Beast. Yên gets sold to the beast/dragon Vu Côn. Not by a bumbling father but by much more sinister village-elders and that's where things get interesting: Yên is, surprisingly, not overly fond of that and at first Vu Côn more or less goes: deal with it. And at first, the conflict mostly revolves around that: Yên being all 'nobody asked me and this is my life' while Vu Côn is all 'you do this because I said so and I know best' (in her defence: if she hadn't taken Yên, the elders would have killed her because this is a cheerful post-apocalyptic dystopia but at no point do they sit down and discuss things like reasonable adults because both have Issues(TM)). I very much enjoyed this take because -duh- the original Beauty and the Beast definitely had some issues where consent was concerned and doing a retelling where the beast's ark is explicitly about them learning to ask or at least discuss things before doing something that changes the other's life dramatically.
There were also things I enjoyed less. One of them wasn't really the book's fault. It's just that I am now really sure that I don't care about dystopias/post-apocalyptic stories at all. Now I can say that I tried a whole book (well novella-sized book) and that I liked the characters in the book but everytime some worldbuilding came up and we were told about the apocalypse and how shitty everything is now, I just tuned out because I. Did. Not. Care.
The other things that was well...at least a bit weird:
(and forms of address).
Now I do get it. All German has that English hasn't is a formal and an informal form of address and I do think there are already nuances that can't be fully conveyed by just callings someone John/Smith/Mr Smith in English. And Vietnamese has a lot more. But this book was written in English. Which leads to paragraphs like:
Character says "I did this"
Narration: Character used a gender-neutral first-person pronoun when talking.
or "And she used a form of address that was just about still acceptable for a student talking to a teacher" and phrases like elderly aunt/little sis being used between people who are not related since I guess that's the closest approximation of the meaning of that address and well...it felt strange.
Perhaps it's my fault because I read 99% western-centric fiction and never really had to bother with pronouns beyond "Some languages also have a formal and informal you but the usage is slightly different than in German so translated Swedish fiction often comes with a translator's note that in Sweden it's common that people who are just work-colleagues use Du with each other while in German that would be a Sie-situation and that isn't exactly an overwhelming mental leap.
I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say with that. Perhaps that I should read more diverse but also that I am not very happy with how the author did it. (Perhaps a simple note at the beginning with some more background on pronouns would have already helped? Idk)
Then I read...Teacher's Pet Volume 2. And yes, this was an anthology about students fucking their teachers (as in yoga-teachers, fitness-trainers, personal tutors, rarely actual college-teachers and if they did, they sensibly waited for the end of the semester). In my defense Lee Walsh whose Salt Magic Skin Magic I enjoyed a lot had a story in it and it sounded like it would be feature stories with diverse settings (historical, contemporary, fantasy) but I got two historic fantasy, one contemporary fantasy and the rest plain contemporary and contemporary romance is another thing I just do not care about. And the Walsh story did remind me that while I loved Salt Magic once the characters got past the drooling 'OMG that guy is so hot...SO HOT'-stage, I did not love the first bits with all the drooling. And her short story was basically one character drooling and stopping once the drooling was over, aka where it was just beginning to get interesting for me.
I am also continuing my British Crime Library Classics obsession and read The Murder of My Aunt, by Richard Hall whose Excellent Intentions I quite enjoyed. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much. Or at all. Basically, I hated everybody in this story and wanted them all to die but the actual murder only happened on the last page and then not even everybody died which was extremely disappointing.
I also read The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by an author I am too lazy to look up now and was basically a 'desperately trying to cash in on a popular thing with a flimsy connection' thing. In that case, the popular thing was the Arsenal football team with a murder that happened in the stadium, while they were playing. Then the team didn't play any vital role anymore, only their manager popped up now and then, so that the author could write 'And the Arsenal manager said to the Yard detective' because only fanfiction writers love epithets even more than the auth of The Arsenal Stadium Mystery.
It was also odd in the sense that everybody was surprisingly sensible for a character in a mystery novel, aka being helpful and open when the Yard detective asked them a question. The only exception was the mistress of the murder-victim who had a kind of ridiculous failed evilness going on and who was the most entertaining and memorable character of the lot.
Currently reading: Murder with politics and relationship problems. Murder with magic and dog-racing. Murder with magic and very important artefacts.