Well, since I'm here now...
I can also give a short bookish update. I haven't read too much since last time but my fingers have informed me that they want all the blood to dry before I do more stitching [slight exaggeration for comic effect].
In a shocking turn of events, I have read only one whole posh murder book:
The Detection Club - Ask A Policeman
The Detection Club is/was the club of golden age crime writers from Christie to Sawyers to many others who regularly met and discussed murder but were allowed to do it because they were famous. Apart from all writing their own books, they also did some round-robin/collaborations that have been mostly forgotten today. I wonder why.
Narrator: she has a pretty good idea why.
It's just not that good. The basic premise is: Author 1 introduces a crime, authors 2-6 write about a sleuth who finds a solution. But there's a twist...or two:
Twist 1: It's not 'here's a solution and here's an alternative solution and here another' but 'here's a solution. No, actually this solution is the true one. What happened during solution suggestion 1 still happened but the sleuth was wrong. No, actually this solution is the right one.' which results in a very awkwardly constructed case even for golden-age standards who...you know. I love them but you can't look at the logic that much or it collapses.
Twist 2: the authors don't send their own sleuths, they swap them around. Meaning Helen Simpson and Gladys Mitchell, an author I've never heard of and an author I am vaguely aware of swap sleuths and so do Anthony Berkley and Dorothy Sayers, an author I know and an author I know and like. The result is supposed to be a humorous parody but parodies work not that well if you don't know the source material. And while Sayer's take on Berkley's Sheringham was nice, Berkley's jokes about Lord Peter boiled down to: Look at him! He posh! Isn't that funny! I went to Oxford, I know jokes!
Further reading:
Romance:
Georgette Heyer - Faro's Daughter
Heyer is very hit and miss and that was...a miss. She can do some highly entertaining things with battle of the sexes but the issue here was that he could have ruined her and her entire family and she just didn't care and just annoyed him further. And obviously, I know that it's a romance and that it would turn out all right but...the characters didn't and yet the female MC acted as if she didn't care what disastrous consequences her actions could have and I just couldn't turn off my brain enough to forget about it.
Annabelle Greene - The Vicar and the Rake
I am fairly sure of two things: The author of this book has written fanfiction and is a fan of KJ Charles. Parts of this book read like fanfiction and I don't mean in a good way. Basically, everyone is very busy having emotions All The Time and then there's a paragraph of plot happening, more emotions, a paragraph of extremely convenient resolutions to the plot. I don't mind that much in certain fanfictions. Especially TV shows tend to cut back on the emotions because they need all the space to tell the plot of the week so I happily read a fic that goes 'And then he was abducted by a serial killer because /shallow explanation but his partner figured out where he was by /shallow explanation and saved him and then they had three chapters of emotions about it because there's a non-zero chance that the show also did that plot but with less shallow explanation and fewer emotions.
But this book isn't a Cold Case fanfic but...an actual book and I get grumpy if the characters just fall over clues in between extensive yelling about their sad childhoods. (Ironically I ended up caring much more about the not-even-beta couple (because they did not officially end up together) of the brother of the rake and the sister of the vicar who really should have just run off together and left their brothers to deal with the mess they gotten themselves into...tbh part of the reason I like rake-brother that much because my reading of the book coincided with a certain group watch and I just pictured him like this:
was that based in anything beyond both just don't get paid enough for this shit? No. Did it probably increase my enjoyment? Yes.
Otherwise: this book features a secret group of (posh) gay men and a dude who has a snarky valet who is better at punching people than the average valet. Are they carbon copies of Lucien and Crane? No, but it kind of jumps at you (also there's a kitten that increases the saccharine levels immensely which as another GR-reviewer pointed out is a Cat Sebastian thing apparently?)
The prose was good and the book had interesting characters but...it didn't do enough with them.
Fantasy
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic
I impulse bought this and expected a supernatural scary gothic mystery. I got horror. Someone pointed out that this might be a deliberate bait and switch because of the title and the rather...harmless blurb which is possible. (I read a bit and then looked at the GR page where it's shelved as horror and an explanation from the author that the racist family patriarch is named Howard as a special fuck you to H. P. Lovecraft but I guess not everyone checks GR). If it's deliberate it's a bit...stupid. Because I do not like horror at all. I mean mainly because often horror is equated with extreme gore which tbf doesn't happen in this book but it made me realise something else I don't like about horror. The evil is evil...just because. Oh, there is a Very Racist Family. And they are also very rich and have done lots of damage due to being very racist and very rich. But they have more power than other racist rich families thanks to the power of...an evil mushroom that gives almost-immortality and other fun powers. The mushroom isn't racist. If it had grown in a house of Tumblr social justice warriors (admittedly unlikely in 1950s Mexico) it would have helped them to destroy everyone who ever liked a Problematic(TM) post. Even Evil Dark Lords who want to conquer all of Fantasyland have a bit more...reason behind their actions.
Also, the main selling point for the love interest in this book is 'unlike the rest of his family he dislikes the evil mushroom' which is...*sigh* Why is Heterosexuality?
Curtis Craddock - The Last Uncharted Sky
The finale of my beloved fantasy musketeers. Was it perfect? I mean there were some convenient plot conveniences but I don't really care. It was a feelgood read. I mean people died. Some died horribly but those really deserved it. Which was feelgood. And the characters did their best and that didn't solve all the world's problems but it was enough to make things better. And that was good. And the characters continued to be delightful and I just enjoyed it a lot. A Lot A Lot. I like the series, in case you hadn't noticed.
Kai Meyer - Imperator
Actually an Audible original audio written by the author I was obsessed with as teenager who turned out to have fewer questionable views. It's set in 1960s Rome and features a young woman who wants to discover her mother's killer and a private investigator who is hired to investigate the gruesome murder of an artist. It turns out the two are connected. Shocking I know. But the how was actually unexpected. A couple of other twists weren't quite as unexpected also because it leans heavily on the pulp mystery/thriller tradition and those stories have certain tropes. But overall it was fun and I'm looking forward to the sequel (fun side note: it's one of his stories for the adult audience of which there are many but from what I remember about the older ones...they dealt with heavier topics but also...not Too Much. Imperator features the sentence "You have always served best by sucking cock" which did evoke some weird emotions in me)
Sharon Shinn - Troubled Waters
There's this Tumblr post that talks about romantic fantasy and there's a sentence along the lines of "Unfortunately the genre has a massive boner for monarchy" and oh boy does this book have one. And how massive it is. And the way it was presented sadly ruined the story about a charming con artist for me. Which is a shame.
Habsburg related books
Ludwig Winder - Der Thronfolger (The Heir to the Throne)
A novel about Franz Ferdinand. The book cover tries very hard to convince us that Winder was an almost as important voice in German language Prague writers as Franz Kafka. His Wikipedia page is not quite as convinced of the fact but then Wikipedia doesn't know everything either.
It's essentially a book about Franz Ferdinand and his family, written by someone who absolutely hated him and his family and that occasionally is hilarious. It actually starts off with his mother Maria and suggests that she deeply hated her husband and her lot in life, her husband and just everything and also didn't care about her child when she was pregnant because it's not like he could ever achieve anything...until she learns that Maximilian - the emperor's younger brother - met an unfortunate end at the end of a firing squad because that means now the line of succession goes Rudolf > her husband > her son and then she's like "That's achievable." and does an emotional 180° and is like "Yeah! Children! Great! Sons! So much better! Let's make many!" White Male Scandinoir writers have created women with more depth.
Is it a good book? No. Was it fun? Oh yes.
Sigrid-Maria Größing - Tragödien im Hause Habsburg (Tragedies in the house of Habsburg)
The author already wrote books about the more famous tragedies: Sisi, Rudolf and Franz Ferdinand so this book goes for the less famous ones, or the ones you don't immediately connect with Habsburg. So we get Marie Antoinette, Leopoldina, who married the Brasilian emperor and then probably died from his abuse, the above mentioned Maximilian of Mexico, and Karl, the last emperor who refused to sign away his rights as emperor and so was not allowed to stay in Austria and didn't receive any financial support and died in poverty.
The way the blame for these tragedies is distributed is...interesting. Marie Antoinette was naive and influenced by evil relatives and saw too late what was going on which...yeah she's not that wrong there.
Maximilian was totes liberal which is why he accepted the crown of the Mexican emperor and really wanted the best for all the Mexicans. But evil bloodthirsty half-Azteck Benito Juárez just had it in for him and hat him killed (now I am only a white girl who has no idea about the indigenous people of Mexico but spent half an hour on Wikipedia which is probably more research than the author did but it seems that Juárez' mother belonged to an indigenous tribe that had nothing to do with the Aztecs? But I was honestly somewhat confused). Which is...one way of seeing things.
Karl just believed so much that being an emperor was a duty given to him by God, he couldn't just sign it away. Presumably, the Austrian government should just have indulged him.
Leopoldina? Poor thing. Let me use the phrase "If only she had said something" about 125431 times in the chapter on her. I mean...yeah. For her tragedy, there would have been a much clearer solution than for the rest which involved lots of politics but...unfortunate implications. Lots.
Other non-fiction
Who Was Jack the Ripper?: All the Suspects Revealed
As they say: I am back on my bullshit. Reading JtR non-fiction. This one is...an anthology? of sorts in which 11 authors present their theories (+ one who says 'we'll probably never know' but in many words). It's fairly short so there's not a lot of space for each other to develop their theory which leads to stuff like 'We have zero evidence that X stayed in this boarding house at the night of the double event but it would have been in his prize range and I will now give you a timeline of his movements that fits with the hypothetical stay in this place' which...isn't overly convincing. So I remained unconvinced by the theories I didn't believe before reading this and nodded along with some theories I already thought weren't completely outlandish. I am not sure if that was the goal of this book.
Robert Harris - Selling Hitler
A book about my favourite con: the fake Hitler diaries that fooled a large publishing house but it was kind of asking for it and eminent British historian, Trevor Roper, because he thought "Which forger would be insane enough to forge 40+ volumes of diaries and various other Hitler memorabilia? And besides, I have been informed that the handwriting matches a genuine Hitler document from the archives.", not realising that Konrad Kujau - the forger in question - had a lot of time on his hand and not only forged 40+ diary volumes but also the 'genuine Hitler document' that had ended up in the archives.
It's kind of hard to tell this story that's an omnishambling smorgasbord of incompetences, desperation for a scoop, willful blindness (Kujau put AH in brass letters on each diary, only - depending on the source he either couldn't read Fraktur himself or couldn't find As - so he took Fs meaning lots of people had a supposedly Hitler diary in their hands with a huge FH on it and went...so what?) and...more incompetence honestly, without it sounding really absurd and funny despite...y'know being sort of about Hitler. And Harris does have occasional fits of 'But you know...Nazis. They're bad actually' and also does occasionally get lost in random details that are not that relevant for the big story but it was still a good read.