Wednesday Reading Meme

What I Just Finished Reading

Charles Finch’s latest Charles Lenox mystery, A Death in the Small Hours. Since I first found this series I have been earnestly questing to make someone else read them, because - Victorian murder mysteries! Cracking good mysteries with a good sense of period and a more delicate grasp of character than mysteries often have! How can you go wrong with that?

Actually Finch does sometimes go wrong: he has an occasional fondness for convoluted conspiracies, which are not my cup of tea (although, now that I think about it, A Death in the Small Hours does contain a conspiracy. Clearly that one did not bother me). But A Death in the Small Hours catches him at the top of his game: the mystery is most satisfying, as is the depiction of the country village.

Finch has a great affection for his period, without being blind to its faults. His books are set rather earlier than Downton Abbey, but I suspect they would appeal to much the same audience - provided they appreciate murder mysteries as well as period pieces.

The mysteries are fun, but the thing that sets these books above is the slow unfolding of Lenox’s relationship with his neighbor Lady Jane, and the way the secondary characters grow and change, sometimes two steps forward and one step back. There’s a sense, sometimes melancholy, that we’re seeing snapshots of their lives.

What I’m Reading Now

Les Miserables. By which I mean, I read the first chapter, which is three pages long. Myriel has become bishop of Digne. But still! The journey has begun!

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shield Ring, although I started it when I was getting sick and the beginning has thus descended into a strange dreamlike quality. (To be fair, I think the first chapter is pretty dreamlike anyway: Frytha is too young and too confused to be thinking straight.)

What I Plan to Read Next

More Les Miserables, obvs. Also Sarah Rees Brennan’s Unspoken, which I’ve had for...like a week and haven’t started yet. Does anyone else have this problem? You get a book you’ve been looking forward to and then feel strangely reluctant to start it?

I’ve also got Jaclyn Moriarty’s newest, A Corner of White, which is waiting for just the same reason. It just doesn’t seem likely to me that any of her books are going to knock me off my feet like Bindy Mackenzie did - it’s not that I think Bindy Mackenzie is such a perfect book (in fact I tend to ignore the ending entirely, because I think it undercuts the rest of the book), but that it was the perfect book for me. And yet I can’t help going into Moriarty’s books with Bindy-size expectations.

And Bingo was his name-o

Apparently bingos do mini-challenges when they do not actually have a bingo running? I had not realized that this might be the case until I looked at trope_bingo this morning and, oh look! They have a May challenge. With cards to choose from!

I am trying to decide if I want to do the challenge: trope_bingo didn't go nearly as well for me as hc_bingo did, possibly because I don't find tropes quite as inspiring as hurt/comfort (unless of course they are hurt/comfort tropes. Cuddling for warmth FTW!), but also possibly because I did it during the Semester from Hell (tm) and perhaps I should give tropes another chance by taking a card now.

And also perhaps the fact that tropes don't come as naturally as character torment means that writing more of them stretches my abilities more as a writer? It's always good to try new things.

Although by that way of thinking, possibly I should take one of the AU cards. They have noir AUs! Circus AUs! Royalty AUs! (Royalty AUs? Is that really a thing?)

I could totally see a Veronica Mars royalty AU. Lily as assassinated princess! Veronica, her lady-in-waiting! Also possibly bodyguard, though that would give her an extra burden of guilt for Lily's death. Logan: possibly a prince from a neighboring land? Neptune of course would be a kingdom, or at least a city state.

(Veronica Mars: also perfect for a mermaid AU. They already live in the town of Neptune, for goodness sake.)

Must contemplate this.

Also! Seeing the trope_bingo challenge inspired me to go see if hc_bingo was doing a similar thing, and indeed! A May challenge! But not just any May challenge: it is a challenge for fics for tiny fandoms, and therefore basically made for me.

pneumonia	caught in a robbery
lacerations / knife wounds	counseling

I'm kind of drawn toward the pneumonia prompt (although it's also hard to go wrong with knife wounds...), but I don't have a real yen which fandom to write for. Anyone have any requests/thoughts/ridiculous yet awesome ideas?