Catching up on that Reading Wednesday meme thing

[larryhammer]

Meant to post this yesterday. That didn't happen.

Things I had read before life changed, according to my notes:

Shadow Unit season 4 by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, et al. Ends the series disappointingly in a couple different directions, some of which I think could have been mitigated with different POV choices and making the finale a 90-minute episode to give a couple threads room to breathe (justifiable by the season's other formal experiements). But not in all directions.

Mushoku Tensei volume 2, in which our reincarnated otaku-perv ages into pre-adolescence. Don't even touch this unless you have a very high tolerance for sexual harassment as humor. Srsly.

Mandan no Ô to Vanadis volume 9 -- too much politics, not enough boyfriend ambiguous relationship between the title characters. Ends with yet another cliff-hanger, too. Come on, amnesia plot -- remember how to keep things moving briskly!

The Touchstone Trilogy by Andrea Höst, being an omnibus of Stray, Lab Rat One, and Caszandra. Australian teenager Cassandra Devlin walks around a corner in Sydney and finds herself in a wilderness on another planet, where she manages to survive long enough to be rescued by psychic space ninjas (her term) and the wilderness survival yarn swerves into an integration-into-another-society-at-war story. With psychic space ninjas. Slurped these down yum.

Poems of Places volume XXIV: Africa. Even though more than two-thirds of this deals with ancient Egypt and its remains, this isn't enough to overcome the, um, problematic treatment of the more contemporary subjects. Do not start with this volume. Not that you're likely to, but just to emphasize. (And with this, I've now read 26 out of 31 volumes -- with the remaining 5 covering the United States, in proportion 2 for New England, 1 mid-Atlantic states, 1 the South(east), and 1 everything west of the Appalachians. No geographic bias from the Massachusetts editor, nope.)

Thing I'm reading now:

As ebook: Sentimental Swordsman, Ruthless Sword by Gu Long, the first of the Flying Dagger series. Results so far (I'm not quite halfway through) suggest that noir detective fiction can be a fruitful influence on wuxia -- though one could wish for less reinforcement of the more misogynist tropes. I still plan to continue the series as well as check out some of his other works.

As paperbook: Strange Tales from the Liaozhai Studio by Pu Songling -- yet another translation, this one from a Chinese press, containing almost half the tales, more than any other edition I have. Between the three Chinese translators and an English editor, the result is remarkably smooth -- and the source material is, of course, engaging.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you enjoyed the Touchstone trilogy!

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Does your daughter react differently to being read poetry than being read fiction? (You do have "Where the Sidewalk Ends"?)

[larryhammer]

Not noticeably - song versus spoken, yes, but still learning English and its rhythms. She rarely sits still for an entire four-line poem, at least so far. (Of course!)

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it's the idea of being read to that takes acclimatization. I used to read things in random languages to my daughter, but she recognized the context of sitting down together with a book (rarely an ereader/phone).