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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 23rd, 2021 07:09 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Emily Henry’s Beach Read, which would indeed be a good beach read! Ten years after graduation, college writing class nemeses January and Gus find themselves living side by side in beach houses in Michigan. January writes rom coms, Gus writes literary fiction, but they’re each stuck on their current projects, so they make a bet: they’ll swap genres and see if that gets the words flowing. Do they fall in love? Of course they fall in love!
I also really liked January’s banter with her best friend Shadi (a strong presence in the book even though for almost the entire story they only communicate by text) and her complicated relationships with both her parents - or rather, with her mother and with her father’s memory in the wake of his death.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve finally started Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days, the novel that really rocketed the boarding school story to the status of a full-blown genre, and unsurprisingly I’m enjoying it a lot. It makes being a Rugby schoolboy in the 1830s sound so amazing even as I recognize that I would loathe literally every aspect of it if I ever had the bad fortune to get plunked down in the middle of a multi-day football match so helter-skelter that boys are regularly carried off the field with broken collarbones.
I’m also reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands, which I’m finding somewhat slower going than Fence: Striking Distance, but then you can’t expect everything to light up your world like Fence, now can you. I have a strong suspicion that Striking Distance had a tight wordcount, and In Other Lands might have benefited from the same.
Although it is a little slow, I am loving parts of the book, particularly elven culture, which has a sort of gender-swapped Regency going on: elven women are swashbuckling rakes and warriors, elven men are blushing maidens. I wasn’t too sure about this at first (must all sexist fantasy cultures be sexist just like 19th century England?), but actually I’m really enjoying the way that this interacts with Elliot’s assumptions. He’s a human boy from the modern world, and for a while he just sort of rolls with the sexist things the elf girl he’s crushing on says, but once they start dating he slowly starts to realize that his beautiful, courageous, wonderful elven girlfriend who loves him very much nonetheless really means the sexist things she says, and these attitudes will in fact shape his entire life if they stay together.
What I Plan to Read Next
The above-mentioned books are but two of the many books I have in progress. I really must finish a few before I start in on any other new books!
Emily Henry’s Beach Read, which would indeed be a good beach read! Ten years after graduation, college writing class nemeses January and Gus find themselves living side by side in beach houses in Michigan. January writes rom coms, Gus writes literary fiction, but they’re each stuck on their current projects, so they make a bet: they’ll swap genres and see if that gets the words flowing. Do they fall in love? Of course they fall in love!
I also really liked January’s banter with her best friend Shadi (a strong presence in the book even though for almost the entire story they only communicate by text) and her complicated relationships with both her parents - or rather, with her mother and with her father’s memory in the wake of his death.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve finally started Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days, the novel that really rocketed the boarding school story to the status of a full-blown genre, and unsurprisingly I’m enjoying it a lot. It makes being a Rugby schoolboy in the 1830s sound so amazing even as I recognize that I would loathe literally every aspect of it if I ever had the bad fortune to get plunked down in the middle of a multi-day football match so helter-skelter that boys are regularly carried off the field with broken collarbones.
I’m also reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands, which I’m finding somewhat slower going than Fence: Striking Distance, but then you can’t expect everything to light up your world like Fence, now can you. I have a strong suspicion that Striking Distance had a tight wordcount, and In Other Lands might have benefited from the same.
Although it is a little slow, I am loving parts of the book, particularly elven culture, which has a sort of gender-swapped Regency going on: elven women are swashbuckling rakes and warriors, elven men are blushing maidens. I wasn’t too sure about this at first (must all sexist fantasy cultures be sexist just like 19th century England?), but actually I’m really enjoying the way that this interacts with Elliot’s assumptions. He’s a human boy from the modern world, and for a while he just sort of rolls with the sexist things the elf girl he’s crushing on says, but once they start dating he slowly starts to realize that his beautiful, courageous, wonderful elven girlfriend who loves him very much nonetheless really means the sexist things she says, and these attitudes will in fact shape his entire life if they stay together.
What I Plan to Read Next
The above-mentioned books are but two of the many books I have in progress. I really must finish a few before I start in on any other new books!
