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