It's going really well...
my "fight the physical tbr-pile" challenge.
A little before and after picture:
As you can see: one book less but also another added (on the side because I'm afraid its format is going to upset the very delicate balance of the pile): A biography of Henriette Anne (a daughter of Charles I).
Not pictured: 20.000 Reiseleiter which I already read. A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, which hasn't yet arrived.
That's what happens when you forget how much stuff you (pre)ordered before you make these posts while full of new year motivation.
Ehem.
Well...I read things.
Markus Barth - 20.000 Reiseleiter (20.000 Travel Guides)
Markus Barth is a stand-up comedian whom I quite like (and not to be confused with or related to Mario Barth who is also a comedian but horrible). Two years ago he and his husband decided after some health-scares to no longer postpone their plan to travel Europe with their camping van any longer and just do it now. So they (and their dog) did exactly that and travelled through (South, Central & Southeast) Europe for four months. Pretty early on he posted little anecdotes about their journey on Facebook and soon also asked his followers for tips on where to go next/what to do in X - hence the title. He kept writing about the trip on Facebook and later asked if people would possibly be interested in the whole thing in book form, with some more stories he hadn’t yet posted and pretty much everybody went YES.
It is very much a book written by a stand-up comedian. I had a phase where I read a lot of stuff written by comedians and unless they write about the time they hunted Nazi war criminals in Syria*, their books all have quite similar formats: stories/anecdotes that fit on one page, one and a half at most and have a joke-density that means they would also work well as part of the programme (in fact when I saw him live recently he did use some material from the book). But it’s also very much a book by a stand-up I like a lot and it’s not like I was expecting life-changing revelations or that the book would clean up my room after reading so I was fully satisfied and laughed a lot about Kafkaesque experiences in Czech wine-bars, gay pride in Croatia, meetings with British couples (who have different attitudes towards Brexit) on camping-grounds in Slovenia and the stupid idea to cycle in Lisbon.
*Christian Springer is an outlier and should not be counted
Gregory L. Norris - Half-Life
So I write for Love in Panels, a romance review blog. And because I had my Only read about posh people getting murdered phase I did not have much to offer them since November which made me feel slightly bad. So I went on NetGalley and requested a few interesting sounding titles. I ended up getting Half-life, which from the blurb sounded like a nice paranormal gay romance. I started reading it and then send a series of desperate Life-Updates to ikel89 and once I had finished I screamed in two different discord servers about how bad it was.
Spoilers ahead because the true horror of this can't be fully expressed otherwise.
Immediately in the first scene, we see Whitney, our narrator, entering a building. That building is very cold and Whitney tells us that he can feel his cock and his balls shrinking. And I thought: Great. This is one of those books that reminds over and over again us that our hero is a manly man with a cock because we might forget otherwise.
He continues and finds his zombified boyfriend who has already turned cold and his skin has turned grey. But Whitney informs us that his grey and cold feet still look very sexy because this is also one of those books where hotness takes priority over everything else. I was already...less than confident about that I would enjoy the rest of the book but I didn't yet know just how much I would hate it.
After Whitney admired his bf's sexy and dead feet we get a rather sudden and unannounced time-jump that goes back...a few days? a week? Who cares and are told how we got there. And Whitney got there because his parents are in serious financial troubles. The exact problems aren't gone into because the author needs the space to talk about manly sweat, sexy dead feet and stuff but it seems like their business failed. Whitney's uncle refused to help them with money but offered him a job at his restaurant (and to live rent-free at his house). Whitney hates that but instead of...idk looking for another job somewhere else he takes the offer.
At his uncle's house, he meets Griffin. And they hug immediately and Whitney notices that Griffin's clean manly sweat smells of summer rain and pine trees...What kind of sweat-coniseur is that guy? And how long did he have to hold his nose to the guy's armpit to get that? “Is that fir? No something else...ahh! It's pine!” - “Please go away. You're creeping me out.”
Unfortunately, Griffin is the boyfriend of Whitney's horrible cousin November. She has always mocked him for being gay and for being poor and also smells of deception and decay because she's a horrible female and we can't have a likeable woman in our romance full of manly men with cocks and balls and whose sweat smells like a walk through the woods (pine).
Due to reasons that are too boring to go into Whitney figures out that something is wrong, googles “Dark Magic Mind Control” because who wouldn't think of that first thing? And then figures out that his horrible female cousin is mind-controlling Griffin and many other people in the area but before they can escape her, she has sacrificed and zombified Griffin to get even more power. Whitney confronts her, she yells that he is a disgusting gay because it's always a great idea to use homophobia as a shortcut for evilness. I'm having incredible pleasant flashbacks to all the Harry Potter fanfics where Ron and/or Dumbledore and/or Hermione yelled at Harry how horrible he is after they caught him with Draco and/or Snape and/or Voldemort.
She also informs us that her father actually wanted to help Whitney's dad with money but she's also mind-controlling her dad and made him invite Whitney because she just hated him so much (because he’s gay...I'm not sure if you've noticed but you can recognise evil people because they're all homophobes) she wanted to sacrifice him. And anyway, we couldn't have a man being an asshole, without a horrible female making him do things.
Whitney yells I FORGIVE YOU, horrible cousin turns into dust...or flowers. Idk. And no. It did not make more sense in context. Then Whitney gives Griffin blow-job that has the power of true love and un-zombifies him and they live happily ever after. No, I did not make that last part up. It's like an update on Sleeping Beauty...if she wasn't a woman because women are bad...and wasn't sleeping but a zombie...and it wasn't a kiss but...*sobs quietly in her pillow*
There were also more books about murder: two of them actual Golden age novels: John Bude's Death in Cheltenham Square which was quite boring and also didn't think highly of its female characters...but in the "They're all stupid" way and not "they're all evil mind controlling witches" way which is...technically an improvement but also not really good. And Lois Austen-Leigh: The Incredible Crime and the author is actually related to Jane Austen (some great-great-niece) but somehow got from her ancestor's novels the moral of "If a woman just learns to be subservient to the man she will know true happiness" which...is not what I got. Not even from Northanger Abbey and it felt like it was trying to be Northanger Abbey but with crime novels. Only that Northanger Abbey had a heroine obsessed with gothic novels who jumps to conclusions the moment someone acts slightly odd and then it turns out that it was all mostly harmless and The Incredible Crime has a level-headed heroine who hears from approximately 235 different sources that something strange is going on and witnesses a fair number of strange events herself and then the book bends over backwards to explain to us why all these highly illegal seeming activities were completely harmless and as a reader that makes me feel very unsatisfied.
There was also A Testament to Murder by Vivian Conroy which is a new novel but set in the 1920s and which features the ever-popular set up of "Family members who cannot stand each other and who all hope for a rich inheritance from the uncle nobody can stand, either are staying together because plot" and it was...OK. Mind you after Half-Life it was a case of "I have learned to live with a very flexible definition of OK" because it was all a bit...too much. There's usually one or two characters in those types of novels that are utter caricatures: the gold-digging wife, the self-proclaimed artist who never creates anything, the truly horrible patriarch...but the majority of the characters are at least more or less normal but in that book, every single one was one and then there are about five twist-endings of which at least one was too much. I might give the author another go to see if she doesn't go as overboard in her other novels because under all that "too much" was at least a nice mystery and if she doesn't try as hard to by Full Of Twists And Surprise it might be entertaining enough. But I am not rushing out to buy another book by her.
The final murder was actually a contemporary one. And not even set in England but in the Caribbean.
Robert Thorogood - A Meditation on Murder
It's essentially a tie-in for the TV-Show Death in Paradise. Which is a show for people like me who want to feel slightly morally superior to people who watch Midsomer Murders. Because, you know, Midsomer Murders is funny because every episode Barnaby says to his wife “Sorry Joyce for having to leave our picnic/aunt Edith’s birthday dinner/the celebration of Upper Forthingstockshire’s 734 year anniversary but someone was murdered with an ancient dagger/a cheese-wheel/a laminator and I have to solve this case now.” while Death in Paradise is funny because each character has exactly 1 (one) quirk that can be amusing in at least 3 (three) different ways and that offers much more variety. Also at one point, they kill the main character off and the rest of the team are emotionally compromised by this for almost half an episode.
A Meditation in Murder features DI Richard Poole (who does end up as a murder victim in season two but who will live forever in the books, apparently) whose quirk is that he has a stiff upper lip because he is British™. And the book is actually written by the creator of the show but I still want to complain about how OOC the characters are. Because that stiff upper lip? It’s so stiff you could drive an SUV at full speed into it and then you'd have a destroyed SUV and a lip without even a tiny scratch. And while TV!Richard is sometimes a bit exhausting but mostly just loveably quirky, book!Richard is annoying most of the time. And reading a whole book with an extremely annoying main character is...not fun, so even though I enjoyed the mystery itself, I’ll give the books a pass in the future.
Shonna Slayton - Cinderella’s Dress
This was a book that must at one point passed my Goodreads dashboard and sounded interesting enough that I put it on my wishlist and now I saw that it was part of Kindle Unlimited and I thought “Hey! You could use your subscription for something that isn’t posh people being murdered”
And the premise was nice: During WWII Kate, the heroine lives in the US and one day her grandmother’s sister and brother-in-law arrive who’ve fled from Poland and after some back and forth she learns that her family is apparently descendants of the Keeper of the Wardrobe of Cinderella and have to take care of her dress. And it started off not too badly. Kate’s mom wants her to model and act and pushes her from one audition to the next while ignoring that Kate does not want to do that at all. So it was nice to not just go “Cinderella’s evil abusive mom who yells at her and forces her to do all the hard work” but still have a mother who doesn’t really care what her daughter wants (or rather doesn’t comprehend that her daughter could want something different than she does) and I thought that this could make for some interesting dynamics but then I got distracted by the arrival of the Polish relatives.
Who were so clearly written by a monolingual with access to Google Translate.
Mostly there was a lot of tak and nie in their dialogue or lines like “Dziękuję! Thank you!” and if they were talking just broken English without Polish phrases thrown in it still sounded wrong. As in: I didn’t buy that someone whose mother tongue is Polish would make these word-order mistakes in English. But I also didn’t want to swear on it since it’s not like my Polish is very good. And guesstimating how speakers of a language that is not my native one would speak another language that also isn’t, is hard anyway.
And then I read on and suddenly there was the sentence “She was my siostrzany, my sister” and I went “I am like 95% sure this is wrong, but I only very narrowly passed my Polish exam, it’s 11 pm. and I’m tired, my Kindle doesn’t have a Polish dictionary and I’m not going to get up and fetch my phone to look it up so I’ll let it slide.”
And then I picked it up again on the next day and got to the beautiful sentence “How was szkota, school?” and then I decided that, if I’m reading monolinguals-doing-bilingual characters I at least want one who can copy & paste from Google translate correctly and not confuse a ł for a t and quit. (I also looked up siostrzany and it means sisterly and now I’m wondering how bad the author’s online dictionary was).
And in non-linguistic nitpicking, I had by then reached the 28% mark and knew about as much about the plot as I wrote above: sort of bad mom, relatives with Cinderella-related secret and the descendant’s of her step-sisters apparently also play a role but nothing beyond that. And that was also roughly what I knew from the blurb of the book and once I’m close to ⅓ through a book I do want to know a bit more than that.
Currently Reading: Dragon Dung is magic. But mostly I'm waiting for A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery to arrive. Y U hate me Deutsche Post?