RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

[quillpunk]

The time dice has been rolled and the universe has decided that it's once again Wednesday.

What are you reading? 👀

Comments

[white_aster]

What I've finished: The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I was hoping that this book would give me more of what I liked about Caves of Steel (the solid sense of place in a skewed future world, some interesting robots) but less of what I hated (the world's worst detectiving and being unable to follow the trail of evidence if it was on fire, plus bonus casual sexism). It did the former (the various phobias of the characters were very prominent and viscerally done, with some neat thoughts of how they became "cultural" in the societies depicted), but fell. down. so. hard. on the latter. Detectiving: still terrible. Sexism: Doubled down on! Ugh. It didn't even give the robot character I like much to do! I am ANNOYED that I still want to read the next book in the series. ANNOYED, I TELL YOU. I blame the popcorn effect, since these books are fairly short.

What I'm currently reading: A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher is going well. Though I'm not much of a horror person, the main character (a somewhat doofy scientist) is enough to blunt the creepiness for me (though not totally! I need to stop reading this late at night!). I also fell to peer pressure and borrowed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. I read like 3/4 of the first chapter and my enjoyment might depend on how the author decides to handle his characters. I disliked the first character introduced, but that might be the point, and I get the sense she's going to get some comeuppance real fast.

What I'll read next: Children of Time is humongous, so that might be my plan for a good while. But, I also would like to read one of my physical books on my to-read pile (I know, I keep saying this, but I keep being a slave to whatever keeps coming up on Libby), and Fool's Run by Patricia McKillip has been sitting on my side table for a good while. So, might be a continued trend of sci-fi for me for a bit.

[peaked]

I've added A House With Good Bones to my TBR as I want to try horror, and if you're enjoying it as someone who's not much of a horror person, I feel there's a chance I might enjoy it!

[white_aster]

It might be good to try, then! Kingfisher really does have an interesting mesh of tones with it. It's a creepy story (oh, and if you are overly scared of bugs...there's a lot of bugs in this book, and they do some creepy things), but (so far) it's not Gratuitously Horror, if you know what I mean. Also, the POV character is very down to earth and earnest and logical and worried that something mundane like abuse or dementia is happening to her mom, and kind of funnily...honestly a lot of the creepy is just BLITHELY SAILING OVER HER HEAD. Once she figures out that (spoilers) The Supernatural Is Involved, I mostly expect her to go, ".....what the @&#^!$ HELL?" and want to fistfight whatever's causing this. So, it blunts some of the harsher parts of the "horror" aspects.

I mean...it's not COZY horror...but if that was a genre, it would be cozy horror ADJACENT, I think.