Weekly Wednesday Reading meme
What are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 15-20. SO MUCH LOVE. Aside from the brief Old Dudes Talking About Honor parts, where I get lost mostly because I forget who half of them are, but there aren't a lot of those. There's considerably less focus on the romance than I was expecting, given the movies (not that there isn't still plenty of it) but instead the book (and these chapters especially) focuses more on the way people view female fighters and the prejudices and double standards they face, and often on how these things affect their relationships with each other. (Lian Ni Shang dealt with it by just taking over a mountain and building her own private army of women. That's because Lian Ni Shang is the best.)
I am very disappointed, though, that Tie Shanhu didn't simply die, but pretty much got doublefridged for Yue Mingke and Lian Ni Shang. I knew she was going to die as soon as she and Lian Ni Shang became BFF and ran off to the mountain together, because the Inevitable Plot Development Of Doom has to happen eventually, and that wouldn't have been able to happen if Lian Ni Shang still had Tie Shan Hu, the way their relationship was built up, so Tie Shan Hu had to either die or turn on Lian Ni Shang for that to eventually happen, and that girl was loyal.
What did you recently finish reading?
Curses! Foiled Again by Jane Yolen and Mike Cavallaro. Sequel to the Foiled GN I read a few weeks back, about a teenaged fencer who learns she's the champion of faerie. More swashbuckling, Princess Bride referenced and iconic gender swapping on the cover. I don't have much to say about it, but I really enjoyed it. Hopefully, there are volumes in the series coming.
A Kiss For My Prince vol 1-5 by Kim Hee-Eun. Fluffy and adorable medieval-lite shoujo manhwa. The heroine, Sei-Ann, is an orphan who becomes the servant of a duchess. convinced she's meant for greater things, she falls for the crown prince when he visits, and gets the prince's manservant to agree to get her a chance to confess her feelings, which he does by getting her a job at the palace. There, she learns that the boy she thought was the crown prince is actually the cron prince's younger brother, and the manservant is the actual crown prince. It's billed as a reverse-harem series but really isn't. While Sei-Ann has 3 potential love interests, one can't be taken seriously at all, and of the remaining two, one of them is largely operating via the driving force of severe substitution issues. A political subplot causes things to veer off into the realm of angst towards the end, but not too much. I also think the manhwaga originally meant the series to last longer and ended up rushing the last volume, but things were still resolved satisfactorilly.
Kitty Goes to Washington and Kitty Takes A Holiday by Carrie Vaughn. The second and third Kitty Norville books. I dunno. I like Kitty a lot and Vaugh does interesting things with the books, and there's a relaxing element even when it's doing things I don't like, but the actual plots don't work well for me. Also, there's a romantic development in the third book that has me "WTF?"-ing a lot.
Seriously, Kitty falls for a guy she previously had no interest in explictly and only because he becomes a werewolf? And I'm apparently supposed to root for this?
Cutie Boy Vol 1-8 by Hwang Mi Ri. This is about 50 times as cracky as the only other Hwang Mi Ri I've read The Moment When A Fox Becomes A Wolf. This is an accomplishment because that one had the leads swap bodies for the first half of the series. Han Ah is a somewhat-cowardly girl (largely due to a boy who bullied her in first and second grade) who happens to be very good at martial arts, and so gets forced to be her school's "captain" by her classmates, and have fights with the captains of other schools whose students pick on them. She meets Yoo-Min, a boy who appears to be shy and sweet and delicate, but is actually the captain of another school. And the boy who bullied her when she was younger. (He thought he was protecting her from bullies. He is not bright.) it's...strange, about half the series is fueled a huge misunderstanding in which Yoo Min thinks they're dating and Han Ah thinks he's torturing her with the intent to eventually beat her because their respective classmates expect them to have a territorial fight. Then that gets cleared up and...more strange things happen. There are parts I read in wide-eyed amazement/shock and parts I genuinely liked. I feel there's actually a pretty decent, cute (if somewhat stereotypical) shoujo romance buried somewhere in the book, but it gets drowned out by the crack. And the HMR did a better job with somewhat similar leads in The Moment When A Fox Becomes A Wolf.
What do you think you'll read next?
I refuse to speculate beyond "probably more manga," though I'll likely read the first omnibus of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, which I have through interlibrary loan.