Reading record 22

 So, last night I finished reading After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz.

This book was a lot.

It's not terribly long, just very intense.

There were actually two things about this book that if I'd noticed them beforehand, I probably wouldn't have bought it. The first, which is more excusable for me to have missed it, is that it's basically in internet formatting:  unindented paragraphs separated by blank lines, a format that I absolutely detest on the printed page, where it sometimes actually gives me a headache.  The second, for which I have no excuse, is that in the list of prizes and awards the book won, the back of the book mentions that it was a "Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction."  Given my stress-related heart palpitations, I would have avoided anything labeled "political fiction" like the plague, but somehow I didn't notice that.

As usual, I feel that the back of the book still somehow managed to misrepresent the contents.  One of the central sentences of the blurb on the back says "Through a series of cascading vignettes, the intertwined lives of real feminists at the turn of the twentieth century are mesmerizingly reimagined" followed by a list of a few of the most notable of them.  (Which honestly probably shouldn't have listed Josephine Baker, since she basically just passes through the narrative in a single chapter.  But she's one of the only non-white people in the book, which is presumably why the back of the book was so eager to mention her.)  What it didn't mention--despite that the title of the book made it blatantly obvious--was that the vast majority of the real women depicted were not merely "feminists" but also lesbians/sapphics/whatever-other-name-you-can-come-up-with-for-women-who-love-women.  That reluctance on the part of the novel's own marketing is appalling.

Anyway.  As I said, this book was a lot.  It covers from about the 1880s or so (early chapters jump around in time a bit, and/or give dates that are more symbolic than anything else) to 1928, ending with the publication of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.  (Which is one of those novels where I loved the film adaptation, and so I am left wondering if reading the book would ruin the film for me, or if the deeper understanding would make it even better.)  That was not a pleasant time to live in, especially for women, and even more so for women who loved women, so a lot of what happens in the novel is distressing.

I don't usually read literary fiction, being someone who mostly prefers to read for escapism, so it's hard for me to know how to react to this book.  It was amazing, a real experience, and I'm not sorry I read it, but I didn't actually enjoy reading it.  But enjoyment was definitely never the point.

Original language:  English (but it contains a lot of quotes that the author translated out of French and Italian)

Reading Record 21

 So, this morning I finished reading How To Fake It In Society by KJ Charles.  Which part of me feels I ought to look at as a "guilty pleasure" and part of me is like "no, why should I feel guilty?"

Anyway.  Funny(ish) story about the impulse buy for this one.  There was a table that was half covered in Bridgerton novels, and half covered in similar period romances.  Spotting this one out of the corner of my eye, I was immediately struck by the question "wait, is that two men?"  And then I noticed the name of the author and knew that yes, it most emphatically was two men.  And of course I ended up buying both of the KJ Charles novels that were on that table.  🤣  Because I've read an earlier series of her novels that were sort of Victorian urban fantasy, I suppose is the way to describe them.  Absolutely adored them at the time, though I feel somewhat senile (despite only being 51) as I admit that I no longer quite recall the titles, except that they had to do with magpies.

In any case, this one had no fantasy elements, which makes it less like my "usual thing," but it was still delightful.  Heavily researched, and with a firm eye on being period-appropriate (to the extent that the author's note at the end included a strong defense of the use of the period-accurate spelling of "kanguroo" instead of the modern "kangaroo") but without making the characters stiff or too alien to modern sensibilities.  And I'm tempted to pick up a copy of the research book with all the info about the history of paints and colors, because just what was incorporated into this novel (the lead had earned his living making paints before suddenly becoming rich) was already fascinating, and it was necessarily just a fragment!

One thing I should say is that the title doesn't really fit the novel.  While it's hard to classify truly which of the deuteragonists is the actual "lead," the narrative does slightly lean more on the side of Titus, who is thrust into Society against his will when he suddenly becomes wealthy, but he isn't "faking" it as just trying to "survive" it.  If the narrative had leaned more on Nico's side, then the title would be more apt.  I mean, it's a great title, it's just a little off for the actual contents of the book.

A minor quibble, to be sure.  Because there really isn't any other kind to be had.  Maybe it's not "deep" or "meaningful," but I am not someone who demands that of her reading.  I wanted a pleasant story where the romantic leads are of the same sex, and that is what I got.  I even got a mini-lesson in some of the crazy things pigments used to be made of, in the bargain.  (Though I did already know about orpiment, because that featured at one point in The Apothecary Diaries.)

Original language:  English

Reading record 20

 Hmm.  Am I capitalizing the "r" in "record" or not?

Hrngh.

Well, it doesn't matter.

Anyway.  Last night I finished reading Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. England.  (But it was late at night and I didn't want to take the time to post about it at that time.)

Another impulse purchase, because Barnes and Noble had it on a big table with a sign recommending it to fans of Stardew Valley and Studio Ghibli.  Naturally, that had caught my eye, and reading the back of the book definitely suggested that I would enjoy it, so I picked it up.  (Though I would not have done so if the back of the book hadn't made it clear that the lead is non-binary.  That assurance guaranteed a non-hetero romance (well, in the sense of not male/female; in the most technical sense "hetero" just means "different," and enby is different from anyone who is binary, but...maybe I should have phrased it as "guaranteed any romance would be LGBTQ+", since non-binary is typically also placed under that umbrella) so I didn't have to worry about it turning on me.)

Part of me wants to say this was successfully more "cozy" than the previous "cozy" book I read, but...I dunno, if it was truly "cozy" would I have spent so much of the last third or so of the book crying?  On the other hand, it never got stressful to read and certainly didn't trigger my heart palpitations like You Can't Spell Treason Without Tea did, so...🤷🏻‍♀️

Regardless of its coziness levels (and admittedly most of the book was decidedly cozy), this book was thoroughly delightful.  Mossley's Rest might actually be an even warmer, friendlier place than Pelican Town!  The warning that our protagonist was given, early on, that the town's entire unmarried population would soon be descending on them en masse in the hopes of winning a romance with the newcomer was also very cozy farming sim.  Well, except no one ever tells the player character that "we don't get much fresh blood in this town, so everyone is going to look to snag you asap" and it just sorta happens without anyone acknowledging why that's actually rather strange or wondering why none of those singles ever date each other.  (Okay, some cozy life sims have a few of their bachelors end up in relationships if the player doesn't get them first, but it does seem to be pretty rare in the post-Stardew Valley cozy farming sim boom.  I gather it wasn't unusual in the original Harvest Moon types (but I will admit that I have not yet played any Harvest Moon/Song of Seasons games...though I do own one of the latter that I haven't gotten around to playing yet) but when Stardew Valley inspired the wave of (mostly western) cozy farming sims, most of the new wave followed its lead, including no rival romances.)

...

Hmm.  I distracted myself by going off on a tangent about rival romances in cozy farming sims and now I don't remember if I wanted to say anything else about the book.

Well, I guess I can add it later if I remember anything else I wanted to say.

Original language:  English

Reading Record 19

 Hm.  19 since May 1.  That feels pretty small, doesn't it?

Oh well.

Anyway.  This morning I finished reading Golden Terrace, Book One, by Cang Wu Bin Bai.

So, this was absolutely an impulse purchase:  not long after that previous post where I said I was starting to feel weird about reading so many novels that had always been in English, I happened to go to the bookstore and once there I found myself actively looking for a new danmei to read.  (Instead of doing my usual thing of picking titles in advance by way of reading their page on the publisher's website.)

I had been pretty meh about this one when I saw it on the website, so I hadn't planned on picking it up, but seeing it right while I was wanting a new read pushed me over the edge to buy it.

And I'm glad I did!  If the second volume (it's only got two!) is as good as this one, it will probably end up on the short list of my favorites in the genre.  Although, speaking of the genre, I'm not sure quite what this one's other genre is.  Or rather, I have no idea what its other genre is called.  Since "danmei" is pretty much just an umbrella term for all Chinese webnovels (and other media?) with leads in a gay romance, each work is also in some other genre.  A lot of them are either xianxia or wuxia, Astrolabe Rebirth was sci-fi, Riverbay Road Men's Dormitory was a slice-of-life dramedy kind of thing, but this...?  The closest genre I know of would be "palace intrigue" but since this is centered around two military men outside the palace (though one of them works directly for the emperor, so the palace is visited repeatedly), that's definitely not right, but I don't know what is.  I'm sure it has a name (beyond "period drama") but I am ignorant of that name.

Anyway.  I really enjoyed the relationship between the two leads.  The back of the book oversold the "rivals-to-lovers" thing (unsurprisingly!), but that element is certainly there; I think their much more complicated situation is probably far superior to a standard rivalry situation.  I also find it both entertaining and very realistic that these two men who were forced to marry each other argue repeatedly about who will play which role when they finally consummate the marriage.  (One of them had known he preferred men for years, and the other was such a career soldier that he had never even thought about love and romance...but deep down he had definitely also already been gay (plus the uncle he admired highly who had practically raised him was gay, so he had that positive association) so the fact that they actually will end up happily married despite being forced into it (by a paranoid emperor who wanted to stamp out the one man's bloodline) is not super unrealistic.)

Hmm...I feel like there was something else I wanted to say, but now I can't think what it was.

...

Hnrgh....

...

*sigh*

Oh well.

If I think of it later, I can add it in.

Original language:  Chinese

Random thought of the moment

 Okay, so I am currently playing Persona 3 Portable.

There are a couple of layers of reasons for this; the immediate layer of "why now" being that after finishing with Pokopia, I ended up dropping seven other games (in one case because it ran like garbage on the Switch, so I plan to try on the Switch 2 when my brother is done borrowing it, then on the Steamdeck if that doesn't work, but all the others I'm unlikely to return to) and wanted to pick something I knew I could and would actually complete (also I wanted to play some kind of Persona game this year because of the series' 30th anniversary, and it's awkward trying to play 1, 2 or 2 due to lack of modern console support).  The less immediate reason, the reason I even owned a (physical) copy of it, is that when Persona 3 Reload was announced, I saw people on Discord talking about how awful it was that they had left out the female lead from the portable version.  In talking about that, they gave examples of how much more personality the female player's dialog choices had, and I was won over to the idea that hey, maybe it was actually worth replaying to see her version of the story.

I hadn't realized just how different it would be, but that's not actually what I wanted to talk about.  What I wanted to talk about was this random thought I just had about the foreign exchange student that the player character forms an S.Link with.

As translated, he's from France (with an accent so overstated that it borders between comically overstated and downright offensive) but I don't know if he always was, or if in Japanese he was American and they changed his name to make him French instead.  Either way, what just struck me randomly was how absurdly stupid his dialog is in translation.  (More observant people were probably struck by this straight away, but I have a disturbing tendency not to think about this sort of thing while I'm engaging with media; I only tend to think about these things afterwards, and while I'm reading/watching/playing something I mostly only think about things like where the plot might go next.)  The character, Bebe, is overwhelmingly in love with Japan and its culture, so in the English translation of the game, he is constantly tossing in Japanese words then repeating them in English.  Common enough in American media when dealing with an otaku character...but he's supposed to be speaking Japanese, or the player character wouldn't understand him!!!  So wtf?  How are we supposed to interpret his dialog?  Is he actually tossing out French (or English, if he was originally American) words and then recalling the Japanese word he was looking for?

Or was he just given the most absurdly stupid translation possible?

😰

Pretty sure the answer is number two, there.

Which sucks, because he's one of the few boys the player can't force the heroine to date (I assume, since his S.Link is so far unchanged from the original version).

I absolutely do not intend to force the heroine to date any of the boys, ofc.  (Especially not Shinjiro!  I know what happens in the end if she's dating him, and it's actually pretty twisted!  (Especially since Akihiko is obviously into him!  Don't be denying the doomed yaoi, Atlus!))  If she can't date Aigis then she will not date.  (Given the ending of the game, isn't it better for her not to date anyone anyway?)

Anyway.  That was my random and pointless thought about one small aspect of the Switch port of a PSP reworking of a PS2 game from like 2006.  (Which I haven't played since its first release, 'cause why would I have wanted to replay it with that ending?)

Reading record 18

 I decided to go ahead and finish up reading that ebook short story collection off Project Gutenberg.  There were only a couple stories left, so....

The collection is called The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange by Anna Katherine Green.

The ebook itself doesn't say when it was written, and I've forgotten (and don't feel like bothering to look it up at the moment) but I'm wanting to say in the neighborhood of 1900-1910.  There isn't electricity, only gas lighting, and there's no mention of WWI, but there do seem to be automobiles, so...my detailed knowledge of the early years of the 20th century is too sparse to be helpful.  Or rather, too absent.  I have some general knowledge of that period, but very few details, because my interest in history has always been further away from the present than that.

Trying to pin down when it was written is also compounded by the difficulty that despite being set in New York, the author seems to have been English:  British spellings are used, and one man on surrendering himself for a murder asked if the procedure was to take him directly before the magistrate.  (Or something like that.  Key detail being that he said "magistrate" rather than "judge.")

Anyway.

Much better than the earlier ebook of mystery stories from about the same time period.  The mysteries themselves were not always particularly good or mysterious (one problem with a short story mystery is that when one extraneous character is introduced partway through the story, then you know that they're the culprit!), but despite the heroine's wealthy status, they were at least not particularly classist.  Racism had little to no opportunity to arise (though that in itself is actually rather racist), but there was still some internalized misogyny, though at least it wasn't too bad.

Honestly, my biggest problem with it was something also shared by the other one, by Baroness Orczy, which is that an "explanation" for the female detective was provided at the end.  An explanation and an end to her detecting:  she had a purpose, and having fulfilled it, she no longer needed to take on cases.  Frustrating, to say the least.  Male detectives in this period were surely never given an explicit reason to be taking cases (aside from it literally being their job, as I'm sure there were plenty of stories written about police detectives) nor a reason to stop taking those cases.  When a reason was provided, it would surely have been to serve justice or to prevent injustice, or similar aphorisms along those lines.  Not to seek the chance to prove her beloved's innocence (Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly) or to earn money to pay for something very expensive that was necessary for her disowned sister to regain a comfortable life (Violet Strange).  Maybe that was a necessity for writing about a female detective at the time.  I don't know.  But I do know that as a modern reader I found it frustrating.

Still, at least in this case the stories were okay and I don't regret having read them.

Original language:  English

[Hmm.  Been a lot of that lately.  I wonder if there's anything on my to-read shelf (other than 3/4 of a danmei novel that won't get its final volume until September) that isn't originally written in English?  I'm starting to feel weird about bothering to list that at this point, it's been so long since the last one that was originally in any other language...]

Reading record 17

 Finished reading another book today:  Bromantasy by Máire Roche.

The text on the back (and the tagline on the front) pushed this a bit too hard as comedy (when in fact comedy was merely one element, and not even the largest of them), and definitely spelled out too much of the plot, so I went in expecting something a bit different than it actually was.

However, it was still quite delightful.  Sweet and charming, for the most part.  Though some of the "fantasy versions of modern stuff" like talking about reading news scrolls as "scrolling" felt like some degree of forced or exceptionally dating or both.  But maybe that's just me.  🤷🏻‍♀️

Not sure which book off the to-read shelf I want to read next.

Or rather, what I most wanted to read next on my to-read shelf was a fantasy alternate history that promised (among other things) Napoleon leading an army of the dead, only it turned out to be book two in a series so I really need to get myself to a bookstore and find part one first.  😅  I really need to pay more attention to things like that in the future...

Original language:  English