“She looked at him as one who awakes: / The past was a sleep, and her life began.”

[larryhammer]

Books on a Wednesday, I've been reading, I've been reading some:

Finished:

Of Mice and Magic and (almost) Giant Trouble, Hamster Princess #2 and #4, Ursula Vernon, read aloud -- Not bad at all. TBD especially looked forward to GT as "Jack and the Beanstalk" is one of the handful of standard fairy tales they already knew from a primary source, but despite this it was harder to keep up interest. Querk?*

Mulberry Song (桑歌), Jiu Lu Fei Xiang (九鹭非香) -- A posthumous romance in a pseudo-historical setting. Sweet and short (a 4-chapter short story).

In progress:

Rise of Humanity (人道至尊), Zhai Zhu (宅猪, literally "House Pig" but probably better read using a slang meaning as "Shut-in Pig," or maybe even "Nerd Pig" using an even slangier sense from Japanese (宅 is the taku of otaku)) -- Starts out as a fairly standard xianxia adventure, albeit one with occasional iffy humor around gender roles, but from the trappings it looks like it might end up connecting its fictional world to the legendary history of Chinese mythology. Sticking with it for now to see how that works out. At the very least, I'm getting a competent adventure story with rising stakes. It helps that attempts at humor are tightly localized and the protagonist moves around a lot as the world stage expands. Read through chapter 155 (out of 420 translated/1490 total).

On hold:

It's Not Easy to Be a Man After Travelling to the Future, Madam Ru -- Another 100 chapters of translation had built up, and I needed something diverting and not especially challenging. Have to say, the protagonist's plot to duck out of her life track and become a "normal" young woman seems underbaked for a supposedly brilliant tactician. Ran out of material at chapter 289.

DNF:

Great Tang Idyll (田园大唐), Tian Yuan Ru Meng (田园如梦, "Pastoral Idyll") -- A successful conman and a crack policewoman are reincarnated-with-memories as 1-year-old toddlers in the Tang Dynasty (specifically 714 CE, early in the reign of Emperor Xuanzong), the children of the two major landowning families of a farming village. The result is not nearly as charming as I'd hoped -- babies talking like adults, as they do after initially faking infancy, is actually kinda creepy. If the cop had more to do than be a foil for the con, this might be more interesting. As there was no sign of this happening after a dozen chapters, I gave up.

Some.


* Which is Quail for "Where's the next book?"

---L.

Subject quote from The Statue and the Bust, Robert Browning.

Comments

[sartorias]

A couple of these sound interesting, or at least with potential! Not the talking babies one. Ick.

[larryhammer]

Jiu Lu Fei Xiang has several romances translated at the short-story/novelette length, both historical and contemporary, ranging from bittersweet to happy in tone. I'm liking what I've read so far.

[sartorias]

Thanks!

[sovay]

A successful conman and a crack policewoman are reincarnated-with-memories as 1-year-old toddlers in the Tang Dynasty (specifically 714 CE, early in the reign of Emperor Xuanzong), the children of the two major landowning families of a farming village.

That is a premise so random that I assume if you stick with the story, there's a reason for it, but I can also see washing out if they don't do much other than be adult-talking toddlers in the past.

[larryhammer]

I'm pretty sure that eventually they'd grow up into at least children, and any artist worth their salt would eventually have the cop detecting something or other, but my curiosity over when either would happen was not enough to overcome the other strikes.

Adult-talking toddlers running money-making schemes in the past, I should specify.

[thistleingrey]

Yes, I think the Harriet books have been sliding towards the Danny Dragonbreath ones in default-target age. That is, Harriet starts in a place that 4-6y can be okay with, but Danny's ensemble shenanigans are too much for all but a few kids in that range: too many moving parts.

That said, I look forward to when Reason can handle 300+ pg middle grade by content. She doesn't want to read with an adult most of the time anymore, unless it's a topic she likes in a form that she'd like explanations/glosses for (mostly non-fiction), and she's run out of chapter-book series at the library but can't quite handle something like Castle Hangnail due to scariness. Too Sad and Too Scary knock out quite a bit, which it seems TBD doesn't have issues with. Pretty soon we'll run out of the library's crafting non-fiction, and then I'm not sure what will happen....

[larryhammer]

That's a good observation to hear, about Harriet -> Danny in target audience. I'd noticed that TBD's reaction to Harriet #4 was similar to Danny #2, but hadn't made that connection. Maybe I'll stop pushing her for now, even though she and Mumfrey have been making repeat cameos in bedtime storytelling (as have Dory, Mary, and Mrs. Gobble Gracker). (Hmm -- just realized that while they and Clementine have all met the cast of DC Super Hero Girls, Ivy + Bean have not.)

I'm looking forward to TBD reading anything by themselves. At the start of summer it looked to be Soon.

And no, TBD likes scary but not too scary. (We're still dealing with the bedtime anxieties from reading the DK Eyewitness book on Mummies last weekend.) Sad, I'm less sure about.

[thistleingrey]

Mumfrey was a big hit with Reason, too, while she was taking a break from Harriet. She returned on her own late last year and said, "It's really good that I read these first, mama." Heh.

Interesting re: cast. Reason's favorite book this summer was apparently Bumblebee x heroes of Super Hero High, except I can't seem to find the exact title now in the library catalog whence we borrowed it.

I'm pretty sure that that's more scariness than Reason would be happy with now. :P (7.67y, give or take.)

[larryhammer]

I suspect at this point current levels of nighttime anxiety are from upcoming start of kindergarten, rather than the mummies, but it's hard to be sure.

[thistleingrey]

Best wishes to TBD for a smooth start to kindergarten!

[larryhammer]

Thanks!