I was hoping to get lots of reading done over the summer but the heat has really done a number on my ability to sit and concentrate on anything.
I don’t think I mentioned this one, but I read The mysterious case of the Victorian female detective, which is certainly interesting, but the experience is more like reading a PhD than a piece of popular history. After a while I found I’d lost interest and got as much out of it as I was likely to; there’s quite a lot of repetition, presumably to establish and reinforce the patterns and her conclusions, in proper academic style, but that is a bit wearying for general reading. Worth a look.
I’m lulling myself to sleep by rereading various light novels, none of which would win any kind of literary award but that’s really not the point. Annoyingly, light novels (the ones that actually get translated into English, anyway) have a tendency to lean into the author’s thinly-disguised fetishes* and/or tedious power fantasies. Sometimes one works for me as a relaxing read despite that, so I end up feeling like the meme of the Playboy reader who only gets it for the articles. I quite enjoy the slice-of-life type ones but those tend to drift into “secretly the most powerful X in the world”.
* especially the women’s underwear + female-violence-as-comedy thing, seriously.
I’ve just finished rereading Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun (also bedtime reading) which remains charming.
I’m currently also reading through Madness on the Orient Express, a collection of short and vaguely Lovecraftian horror stories vaguely related to the Horror on the Orient Express campaign. Mostly I’m favourably impressed and I’ll do a review at some point. It doesn’t feel like something to plough through though.
EDIT: Forgot some!
Startup Hell (Caitlin Rozakis) I read after enjoying Dreadful. It’s not as good in my view. Noticeable typos didn’t help. The general concept is a wainscot setting, with the classic “nonmagical child of powerful magical family” protagonist getting caught up when someone else in the company summons a demon, she has to team up with the demon, it turns out Hell operates a lot like a horrible startup, etc. etc. The worldbuilding didn’t work for me though. You can do a lot of different riffs on demons, but if you’re going with “demons temporarily torture contracted souls as their fuel source, demon culture revolves around killing other demons and eating them for magical power right from infancy, it’s a mundane topic of conversation at work” then it simply does not work for your demon love interest to be a naive charming cinnamon roll who in no way behaves like he has routinely eaten people, a thing which is definitely true. The ending is also weak because if you are a demon from hell with no friends whose family have already been eaten, emigrating to the human world from Literally Hell, a place shown to have no redeeming features whatsoever, is not just not a sacrifice of any kind but a clear win in every way. The love interest deciding to move in instead of going back to Greece or Birmingham or wherever works because they’re making an important and meaningful choice! “Well, I could stay in the pleasant place where I have a hot girlfriend and an enjoyable job and a peaceful existence, or live alone in the horrible place where I might be eaten at any moment in order to continue a job I hate for a truly awful boss” is… not that. Cake, or death?
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die was a decent read but felt a bit half-baked on reflection. It’s sort of goofy fantasy, so I don’t expect everything to end up coherent. Still, various things don’t seem to make much sense, including some of the characters’ behaviour and the way the ending unfolds. How any of the stuff in the world works given that… [the revelation at the end of the book]… is a complete mystery. It does have a reasonably effective use of a prophecy that I haven’t seen before: the prophecy’s clear enough, but nobody knows whether it still holds true after he dies and is brought back to life.
