Reading has happened
And it turns out just not posting anything does not make the list of books I mean to write about shorter. Who would have thought?
Fantasy
Sam Hawke - The Hollow Empire
The sequel to City of Lies where I liked the very high-stakes murder mystery a lot and had no strong feelings about the characters. The sequel is less murder mystery and more conspiracy thriller-ish including "bad guy tries to frame the good guys for a crime" which is one of my least favourite tropes. Additionally my feelings about the characters didn't change much so I'll give further books in this series a miss.
Yangsze Choo - The Ghost Bride
In 19th century Malaysia, Li Lan, the MC in the book comes from an impoverished family and is offered to become the Ghost Bride of the son of a wealthy family who died under mysterious circumstances. When she refuses, he starts haunting her. If she wants to have peace again he has to find out what's behind his death. So it's kind of another mystery...and Li Lan investigates by conveniently overhearing about 2356 conversations and coincidentally stumbling over 325 important items. Now it does make sense in context that she can't go full old-lady-sleuth from 1920s British novel because...duh poor unmarried woman in very patriarchal society but...that doesn't make her method of investigation less annoying.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Guns of the Dawn
A book that was advertised to me as "If Jane Austen wrote fantasy" and it's not wrong. In a Regency-ish world there is a war between Emily the MCs fantasy England home country and its neighbours (which is surprisingly...probably closest to being fantasy Germany). By now the war has been going on for so long that fantasy England started drafting women, despite the gender roles otherwise being very regency. So Emily goes to war, thinks about how she would much rather be doing embroidery and thus made me instantly love her. It does not stop her from kicking ass otherwise and then...it's hard to say too much without spoiling too much but I guess you can describe it as...discovering that his is a not that unusual fantasy novel plot told from a very unusual perspective.
Marina Dyachenko & Sergey Dyachenko - Vita Nostra (dnf)
A book that wasn't not necessarily bad but aggressively Not My Thing. This book does not spark joy. I made it a quarter through it and that has been...teenagers being blackmailed to attend a school of "special technologies" where they are then being emotionally abused. What are these special technologies? Well, they're so special they can't really be described so the book sort of glosses over them and we mostly focus on all the emotional abuse instead.
Call me a spoilsport, but I want to read something slightly cheerier. I had toyed with the idea of getting a non-audio copy that would be easier to skim-read because parts of this books are intriguing but according to reviews there is going to be body horror later on which also does not spark joy, so I guess I'll just mark this down as it's not you it's me.
Nghi Vo - The Empress of Salt and Fortune
A novella with quite an epic plot. But unlike most other novellas who try to tell an epic plot in a short space it didn't feel like it was crammed in. The whole story had the feel of...a myth or a legend. And with that came a certain...detachedness from the characters. I still fully understood their motivations but...didn't really feel with them. And when I read a book I want to do that and enjoy the relationships between the characters (which were also told in a very legend-like "And then they fell in love" way). So this was another it's not you it's me.
Romances
Courtney Milan - The Duke Who Didn't
This heterosexual regency romance did give me some Red White and Royal Blue Vibes. Bear with me. It was also set in a world that is slightly better than ours. In this world there's a small town in England that is mostly populated by POC where they can live in peace and don't have to deal with White English People(TM). The heroine is a Chinese woman and the hero is a half-Chinese dude who so far had failed to tell her (or anyone in the village) that he's the duke who owns the land the village is built on. Before he can reveal that to her [Spoiler]and she can tell him that she knew that anyway they banter. And banter some more. And then they land in an inn and she pays the innkeeper to tell them that There Is Only One Bed. No really. And then they banter. And there's a side-plot about her father's sauce but it is also...not terribly exciting and very very low stakes. Like RWARB it might have worked better for me as novella because the cutesy-ness got very repetitive.
KJ Charles - The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting
This makes an interesting contrast to the Milan one because it is also technically low-stakes. There's no murder to solve, no demons trying to kill anybody...but unlike The Duke Who Didn't, it did manage to convince me that it mattered anyway. I was convinced that these people would be miserable if their relationship didn't work out. And...I was genuinely wondering how they would get to their happy end because...unlike Duke it actually built up some conflict between the witty banter.
Adella J. Harris - The Marquess of Gorsewall Manor (dnf)
Thomas is a respectable solicitor...until he gets caught during a raid on a molly house and imprisoned. He does manage to escape but only with the clothes on his back so he takes to prostitution to earn money for food but eventually, he collapses from exhaustion...and that's the end of chapter one...
Fortunately, he gets picked up by a hot Marquess whose library is in need of cataloguing and after only a few more pages Thomas lets the hot Marquess know that he wants to jump him...I had expected him to be a bit more careful after his prison experience but then, the way he talks about it does make it seem like it was mostly uncomfortable beds and subpar food so it probably wasn't that bad anyway...and that's my problem with the book: the characters didn't seem to feel much and so neither did I...
Jackson Marsh - Deviant Desire (dnf)
The hero is a charming rogue and by rogue the author means he sexually harasses others (:
Your Childhood Heroes Are All Grown Up Now
Rocky Beach - Eine Interpretation
This is a noir graphic novel about the grown-up Three Investigators/Drei ???. The backstory is that one of their childhood adventures went wrong and ended another friend of them dead. Now they're all adults and haven't talked to each other in ages but fate leads to them meeting again...and of course getting involved in a crime. The art was great and I did love the scenes in which they talked with each other and very awkwardly tried to deal with the death of their friend but the crime story itself was...weak and it felt like someone had written a random noir-style story and then shoehorned the Three Investigators in...all with a dash of "White German dude writes about racism/police violence in the USA after being there on holiday one" which...well.
Kai Meyer - Sieben Siegel
Among Meyer's very extensive output were also the Sieben Siegel books, a fantasy series about 4 kids who discover that magic is real and that there are witches in their picturesque small town. It was aimed at a slightly younger audience than most of his other output (more MG than YA) which also means I was slightly older than the intended audience when I discovered him and so I read a few but never developed very strong feelings for them.
Now there's an Audible original audioplay that's aimed at an older audience...but not in the sense of a sequel with older characters...no the protagonists are still all 13/14 but their adventures are somewhat more gruesome. Which is...A Choice. There's lots of wasps...lots. Someone drowns in a silo (which reminded me that several of my teachers talked about the danger of silos A Lot...enough to make me really terrified of them for a while...but in hindsight I really have no clue why they were going on so much about this...I mean the area was rural-ish but it wasn't like there were silos at every corner), lots of things happen that made me want to say "You all need therapy now" except it's the 80s and one of them got actually forced to go to therapy in the beginning and it mainly consisted of meds to keep her quiet. Yeah...A Choice. But...I did like it? It was very pulp adventure-y, a genre Mayer is very good at and while it would have probably felt less weird if the characters had been 16ish, I still enjoyed it.
This didn't fit anywhere else
Die Juten Sitten
Another Audible audioplay. It gets advertised as "for fans of Babylon Berlin"...which I guess depends on what you are watching the show for. If it's for the fucking then you will find something in this. Because there's a lot of fucking. In the 'now time' of the play it's the 1950s and Hedi, a German born actress who has been convicted of murder and is now telling Noah, a journalist about her childhood in 1920s Berlin. Which she spent with her grandmother...who owned a brothel. And there she lives happily with not-actually-French prostitute Colette who is of course unhappily in love with a guy and Russian dominatrix Natalia who hates sex.
There's a lot of fucking, as I already mentioned, three rapes, unless I lost count somewhere along the lines and Hedi happily tells about events she wasn't present at which even gets called out in the text but she's just whatever. There's corrupt police, fucking, Natalia accidentally kills one of the dudes she's whipping and more fucking. A random lesbian appears and is unhappily in love with Colette and who teaches Hedi some fun drug cocktails. Grandma forces Hedi to spent time with her dad even though she hates him, just because she wants to punish her son because she also hates him. One really wonders why Hedi ended up killing somebody with that charming childhood...but to be fair she is also a manipulative narcissist who treats Noah horribly...but because he's a man and she's a good-looking woman he does not really think with the brain in his head. At one point he tells Hedi that he thinks she lived her life more fully than his entire family in the last 100 years. This is meant to be about him coming from a well-off family and she obviously not. But the fact that Noah comes from a German-Jewish family does make this comment appear a bit...unfortunate.
Well...it was free so there's that.
I also have a list of books about murders, dead royals and other non-fiction but I'll leave those for another entry.
Narrator: there is no other non-fiction. She just read about murder and monarchs