Reading Record 11.5

 So, finally finished reading the very lengthy The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri.

A fantasy with a setting inspired by the traditional culture of India, which was a refreshing change for me:  I've mostly ended up reading things in settings inspired by Medieval Europe (so overused!), feudal Japan, or ancient China.  The Indian setting was excitingly different from what I'm used to (though I was probably mentally mispronouncing most of the names 😭) while still having just enough touch of the familiar, since I have read some Hindu folklore/mythology, and seen some movies set in India (though typically not before the 19th century, but...)

I discovered the book via a conversation between two other people in a Discord server, as one was providing recommendations to the other for sapphic fantasy novels.  This one the recommender mentioned as being one they had "bounced off" because it was too "high fantasy" for them.  I, personally, thought "high fantasy" typically referred to Tolkien and similar authors, and I'm fine with that style of fantasy (The Hobbit is one of my perennial favorite books), so I figured "yep, sounds like a good match for me," especially since the plot as described on the back of the book sounded interesting.  Having read it, I now suspect that the recommender was thinking more of Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings when they said "high fantasy."  (Not that I've ever read or watched any of Game of Thrones, but it does have a certain reputation...)  There was a lot more human violence--some of it particularly awful in concept (thankfully, there were very few visceral details in the violence) as the villain has a religious zeal for burning women alive--than I was expecting, and a lot more political wrangling and manipulation, than I had any expectation of, since I went in with an inaccurate understanding of the novel's genre.

Honestly, The Jasmine Throne doesn't seem to me to be "high fantasy" at all; the presence of magic and magical beings was quite limited.  In that sense, it would seem to me to fall more into the "low fantasy" category, since most people and aspects of society function in a non-magical way.  For most of the book, the only touch of magic in the daily lives of the people is "the rot," a disease in which plants are growing in people's bodies.  But as it's presented as a blight, a disease, it often sounds less magical than it is.  What this novel does have in common with the "high fantasy" works mentioned above is the grand, sweeping landscape and story ahead, as this is just the first novel out of...uh...actually, I have no idea how many.  🤷🏻‍♀️  I'll find out how many there are eventually, because I need to find out how the story ends, 'cause that villain is especially horrible, and I need to see him get his.  (Ooh, I hope the series is already complete, or will be soon...having to wait years to see that villain destroyed would be painful...) In any case, I can't pick up book two until there are a few fewer books on my to-read shelf than there are at present, 'cause there literally isn't room on it for a book of this size.  (I honestly picked this over the other sapphic novels on the shelf because it was the largest, and removing it would add space for the two books that were on my front table waiting to join the to-read shelf...and I just picked up two more books yesterday...darn you, Barnes & Noble, stop putting interesting-looking books on tables where I can't miss them!)

Anyway, since this isn't a review, just me talking to my future self to remind me what I read and when...I just have one other thing to say.  I always give a cursory glance to the Acknowledgements section of a book, just to see if there's anything interesting beyond the usual thanking family, friends, colleagues and publishers.  And there was, this time, as the author also mentioned her pets:  two bunnies, named Lan Zhan and Wei Ying, and a pet of unspecified species named Asami.  🥰  Two MDZS-named pets and one that I took to be Legend of Korra inspired.  This author knows how to win my heart.  🥰

Reading Record 10.5(?)

 Or 10.4? I dunno.  I need to figure out how to get rid of the decimal points in my count...but that will have to wait until July.  😅

Anyhoo, I am actually in the middle of a 500+ page tome right now (probably will take me another 2-3 days to finish reading it, between current speed through it and what's going on irl right now for me), but I needed some light bathtub reading.  (Light both in the sense of the physical book and in the sense of its contents!)

So, I decided to go with a printed webcomic, specifically Slice of Life, Season One.  I got it as an add-on to the Kickstarter for Aces and Aros, and I admit I hadn't realized it was signed until it was too late to change my mind about reading it in the bath.  😅  (Thankfully, nothing happened to it.)

Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about it:  it was wholesome, charming and heartwarming...though with some angst and stuff as well.  I think the character I most connected with was Ravyn, the unpopular twin sister of the cheerleader Lucy, one of the two leads.  Ravyn is a hardcore otaku with no friends, who is constantly ignored and overlooked, even by the twins' father.  I really felt for her, and I think her suffering will only get worse.  😭  But hopefully she'll recover after she gets out of the toxic cess pit that is high school...

Anyway, yeah.  Good.  Will read more later (after getting more volumes to read... 😅)

Reading record 10.2

 Or maybe only 10.1?  I dunno.  But if it's 10.2 then a standard manga/webtoon/etc volume will get it to 10.5, and then an extra large manga volume could get it to 11.  Or something?  I dunno.

What I do know is that the comic anthology I read today was waaaaay too short to count for anywhere near as much as the webtoon volumes I read earlier this month.

Anyway.  Whatever number I assign to it, what I read today was Aces and Aros (which identifies itself as "Vol. 1" but whether or not they actually run a Kickstarter for a volume two is not a given), an anthology centered on the asexual and aromantic spectrums.  Both of which I am on.

But the problem with trying to do an anthology centered on asexuality and aromanticness (uh...is that even remotely how I should form that form of the word?) is that the stories all just sort of end up being either semi- (or entirely) autobiographical or they end up being little mini-lessons on just what asexual and/or aromantic means and/or why it's not a problem in need of a cure.  Which...y'know, I don't need a lesson, nor do I need to be told that it's okay to be ace and/or aro, because I'm past that point; I figured myself out when I turned forty, and I don't need to be reassured that I'm not broken.  So, despite that this is one of those rare cases where my own orientation gets representation, it's also...frustratingly lacking in actual stories.  (Even the autobiographical ones are so focused on the writer's process of understanding/embracing their position on the asexuality spectrum that there isn't really time for much else in the narrative.)

So...yeah.  It didn't really do much for me, unfortunately.  It'd be great for a teenager still coming to terms with their own asexuality, but...🤷🏻‍♀️

The tragedy about writing about asexuals and aromantics is that unless they specifically say in the course of the story that they're asexual or aromantic, then it's impossible to tell if they're ace, aro, or just not presented with a love interest in the course of the story.  😭  Which is especially a problem when you're writing about an asexual/aromantic living long before those terms were coined.  Like, in my Atalanta and Ariadne books, Atalanta is aroace, like me, but the terms don't exist yet because she lives in Bronze Age Greece, so trying to telegraph the actual nature of her orientation is not gonna be easy.  (In the rough drafts of the later novels I did attempt it, though who knows if it worked in the roughs I wrote back in 2014 (before I had figured out my own asexuality), but I'll just have to hope I can make it work whenever the new drafts get that far...)

Original language:  English

Reading record 10

 Much more appropriate time this time.

I just finished reading The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume two, by Lv Ye Qian He.

I don't really have much to say about it that I didn't already say about volume one.

Unfortunately, volume three won't be out until August, so...

Anyway, rather than changing over straight from m/m to w/w for my Pride Month reading, next up is an anthology centered around my own letter in LGBTIA+...

(It's quite short and a comic anthology, so it shouldn't take long at all, even with my sudden problems reading anthologies.)

Original language:  Chinese

Reading Record 9

 Welp.  It's taken waaaaay too long to get through this book.

(I blame Nintendo.  I recently got a Switch 2 on the bundle that comes with a download of one of three games, and since I've been thinking that I ought to try playing a Pokemon game now that I've played a couple of Digimon games, I figured "why not?" and got Pokopia.  And it is stupidly addictive, to the point that it's been cutting into my reading time...)

Anyway.

The book I just read is The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume one, by Lv Ye Qian He.

I had initially decided to pass on this book when I saw the description on the Seven Seas Danmei website.  The way the website described it was sort of a "wink wink nudge nudge" as if the reader wasn't supposed to be sure that the reborn protagonist's new teacher was actually his precious kitten, having cultivated a human form over the three hundred years the protagonist was dead.

To my delight, that is not the case.  The book is super-direct about that, from even before his human form makes his first appearance.  Even better, though, are the cat-like traits that said character displays.

There is a convention of describing some people as being cat-like in this genre.  For example, Chu Wanning, the love interest in The Husky and his White Cat Shizun, is described as being cat-like.  (Heck, it's right there in the title, even!)  But what are those "cat-like" traits?  He's aloof and a bit of a tsundere.  That's it.

I mean, okay, yeah, cats are frequently aloof.  And their tendency to be distant even with the humans they care about can seem like tsundere behavior.  But that is only a tiny fraction of what cats are like.  It's the perception of cats held only by people who have never actually lived with a cat.

That is not the case here.  Qingtong, the white cat of this novel, actually does behave like a cat, even as a human.  Yes, he is certainly aloof and somewhat of a tsundere about the protagonist, but he also feels the urge to chase after glass beads rolling across the floor, and at one point, after someone brought him a bunch of rare elixirs, he set them all up on a table, saw that none of them were what he wanted, and knocked them all off the table.  As someone who used to have a two-cat household, his genuinely feline behavior keeps making me giggle fondly.

So, yeah, first volume was excellent (despite how long it took me to read it) and I was a fool to have passed it up earlier.  Admittedly, these things can always turn on you later on, but...the "about the author" blurb at the back says that the author specializes in "cute and feel-good" stories, so I'm hopeful that it will remain as warm and enjoyable as it has so far.  I bought the first two volumes together, so I'll be going straight to volume two from here...

Original language:  Chinese

Reading record 8

 Over the last two days, I have read three printed volumes of a BL webtoon.  I figure three volumes of a graphic novel/manga/webtoon/etc correlates pretty well to one volume of just text, so...yeah, counting those three volumes as one book for my list.

However, as it was even more sexually explicit than I had expected and the relationships involved were actually quite toxic, I've decided not to post the name and thus publicly admit to having read it.  😅  (Especially since it wasn't actually bad and I plan to read more of it... 😅)

Anyhoo.

Next up are two volumes of danmei that I bought at the same time as these three.  (The store was having a sale weekend for Memorial Day, which included a buy-2-get-1-free deal on books... (The sixth book in the deal was a volume of manga for my brother.))

Original language:  Korean

Reading Record 7

 Finally finished the next book off my overflowing to-read shelf!

The Flame that Sings, book three of the Eternal Library series, by Cedar McCloud.

I'd been putting this one off for a while.  (To the extent that A Party of Fools, a novella by the same author that I picked up as an add-on in the Kickstarter campaign to fund this book, was the first book I read this year.  (I wanted to start the year on a good note, and thought that seemed like an ideal choice.))

Part of the reason I was delaying is because it's pretty long--in the neighborhood of 540 pages--and the subject matter fairly heavy.  (Overcoming trauma is one of the major themes of the series.)

The other part, I think, was just instinctively knowing it would be a slow read?  Like, I hadn't consciously been aware of that from the first two since I hadn't started keeping track of my reading at that time, but now that I have...yeah, these are slow reads for me.  (Which is a pity, because I felt like I should have reread the first two before reading this one, since I'd forgotten a lot of the smaller details of the intricate world-building.)

Some of the reason they're slower reads is that the story takes a while to build up to the more riveting parts of the tale, but I think it's mostly because there's a lot of description.  My aphantasia makes it really hard for me to process descriptive text, and sometimes in this I ended up rereading a paragraph several times in a row because my broken brain took in so little of the text that I had trouble realizing "wait, I already read this!"  (However, to be clear:  the description isn't excessive, nor is it purple prose.  There's just a lot of it.  Like, it's common to have two or three sentences dedicated to what a character is wearing when they first show up in a scene/sequence, because how they dress is indicative of their character and even their mood at that moment.  It's not an excessive amount, but I can't process it mentally, so it bogs me down a bit.  Normal people wouldn't be the least bit bothered, and someone like my mother would probably appreciate the level of detail.  (Though she would definitely be weirded out by all the neopronouns...))

Anyway, as usual, this was excellent, providing a lot of food for thought.  After the Kickstarted DNF last month, I found myself paying closer attention than usual to if there were any grammatical or formatting errors...and I did spot some--maybe a dozen or so across more than five hundred pages--but not significantly more than one would see in a book from an actual publisher.  (Technically, I've read at least one book that came from an actual publisher that had far more errors in it!)  So, as I actually used this series (at the time I gave up on that DNF) as an example of being spoiled by high quality, I'm glad to say that I hadn't misremembered:  these books genuinely are well-written and edited.

Though the characters and story are both very compelling, I feel like the world itself is the unsung star of the series.  It takes place in a country where the locals have no concept of gender (to the extent that the narrator of this book considered "she/her" as neo-pronouns on first encountering them!) and where the major religion that had been persecuting all others for centuries is based around the concept of life being a book.  (For example, rather than talking about "God," they talk about "the Author.")  Honestly, I kind of want a book that's more focused on the world than on the suffering the characters are going through... 😅  (Though maybe if there was less suffering involved, that wouldn't be the case...but poor Aeronwy and June aren't done suffering yet... 😭)

Anyway, I have much congestion to relieve on my to-read shelf (I think I bought about eight or nine books last month?) so I will be focusing on the fastest reads for the foreseeable future!  (Fortunately, three of them should be one-day affairs, and two of them shouldn't take more than two or three...)  Thankfully, all the fastest reads on my to-read shelf are also appropriate Pride Month reading! 😊🏳️‍🌈  (Naturally, given that most of the characters are non-binary, this book also was extremely appropriate for Pride Month!)

Original language:  English

IWSG: June '26

 

    Once again, no decent post title.  😭

Hmm.

What to talk about?

It's hard to concentrate; I forgot to prewrite and woke up at five in the morning and instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I suddenly realized "ack, no post!"

Ugh.

Anyway.

I think the month's suggested topic was about where our ideas come from?

Weirdly, that's actually kind of hard to answer?

I mean, it's hard to recall mostly, somehow.  A few ideas I remember where they came from, but for the most part...

I guess mostly they're just the product of me turning things I've just seen, heard or read over in my mind?  Or otherwise just pondering things.

Like, for example, my series of books about the illegitimate daughters of Achilles and Odysseus.  I had been thinking about the incident wherein, in the final weeks of Achilles' life, he needed purification after murdering Thersites.  Since the Greek army didn't want to go without Achilles' spear, rather than trusting that he would be able to find a cooperative king in time to return quickly from his exile, Odysseus accompanied him to Methymna on the island of Lesbos so that he could perform the purification.  I found myself wondering just what else would have happened while they were there, especially given that they were both...how to put this?  Not exactly "lecherous," but..."sexually self-indulgent," maybe?  Either way, I found myself thinking that even though they would be in Methymna only a single night (probably), they might have ended up leaving behind "presents" in a couple of the local girls...and before I knew it I was naming the two daughters who would be born and planning how they would escape and wander the world as heroines.

That always feels faster and simpler before I try writing it out... 😰

...

...

...I'm gonna go back to sleep now... 😅