Wednesday happens to be Bisexuality Visibility Day (not greatly reflected in my reading, I think)
What I read
Finished The Trials of Koli, which is v good, within those parameters of the dystopian landscape (and mapping that to the present landscape...) and our protags discovering the ways in which the world is not the way they had been led to believe, and encountering dangers, and fathoming things out, and I have preordered the next volume in the trilogy and am a bit irked it's not out until the spring.
Fonda Lee, Jade City (2017), which had been sitting on my virtual tbr pile on the e-readers for a while. I found it a bit of a slog? Could see that there were some strengths there but I did not feel terribly invested in the characters and not greatly motivated to go on to the next volume in The Green Bone Saga.
For a complete change of pace and what I hoped would be fluffiness I then picked up Eva Leigh, Would I Lie to the Duke (2020), as it was on promotion, and gave up. I have a lot of trouble with that trope whereby Our Heroine has a Devious Plan on hand on which not only her own prosperity/well-being depend but that of others for whom she is responsible, and this involves layers of deception which it would be fatal to her plan to have penetrated, and yet she is completely mesmerised by the Manly Charms of Powerful Aristo Essential to Her Plans whom she has only just met, distracting her from keeping her eye on the goal... Possibly if there was a bit more about the characters to get invested in, or something?
Whereas Courtney Milan, The Duke Who Didn't (2020) has a lot of fun riffing with and confounding tropes and expectations in a plot around a couple who have history both with each other and more generally to get the story going.
On the go
RF Kuang The Poppy War (2018), another thing that's been sitting about on my e-reader. Wow, this is kind of grim, but I'm not actually putting it down, so.
Also some things for research purposes.
Up next
Possibly Una McCormack and Regina Yung Lee, Short but Concentrated: An essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, available to download here.
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