Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What 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!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I am loving parts of the book, particularly elven culture, which has a sort of gender-swapped Regency going on

...looks like I just found my next book to read!

[osprey_archer]

I think you might enjoy this one!

[troisoiseaux]

I immediately borrowed a copy on Libby and finished the first chapter over my lunch break! I am deeply charmed, so far.

[oracne]

I am intrigued by BOTH of these books but I need to read the ones I have on hand! Including my TBR challenge book for next month! Agh! Not your fault, obviously.

[osprey_archer]

This is the danger with reading other people's reading posts tbh, there are days when I'm like MAYBE I SHOULD JUST SKIP ALL THE READING POSTS TILL I CATCH UP ON THE BOOKS FROM THE *LAST* ROUND OF READING POSTS... but then I end up reading all the posts anyway, of course.

[oracne]

At least it's a SWEET pain.

[anna_wing]

Sarah Rees Brennan is one of my favourite younger authors, and distinctly underappreciated, in my view. Her gift for comedy, particularly. I really liked her first books, the Demon trilogy. Especially after I realised that the first book is thematically very similar to "The Lord of the Rings" told from the point of view of the Ring....

[osprey_archer]

Almost every time I post about her books I am quibbling with something, and yet I DO keep reading them. She's just very funny! I also love her book recaps - her Gothic recaps in particular led me to an interest in gothic novels, although I thought the Lynburn Legacy was one of her weaker series.

[anna_wing]

Yes, it was weak compared to the Demons trilogy and 'In Other Lands', which was very funny. I vaguely recall that my big quibble was her Americanised approach to the heroine, who is supposed to be English, with some Japanese ancestry, which is more or less how she would have been described in the UK (at least in my time there, maybe not now; in those days accent was the defining factor that I noticed, not skin colour). She was following the US thing where any non-'white' ancestry makes you a 'person of colour' (apostrophes because the term disgusts me).

SRB seems to be writing a lot of tie-in novelisations now, which is hopefully at least good money for her . I hope she can do original stuff again though.

[sovay]

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.

I look forward to finding out how that resolves.

[osprey_archer]

I suspect he is going to realize that the idea of being a full-time caretaker for children for the rest of his life is really dealbreaker for him, but we'll see!