Reading Record 44

 So, yesterday I finished reading The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post, volume three, by Lv Ye Qian He.  (And considering volume two was in the Reading Record 10 post, I think I can forgive myself for any details I forgot in between them!)  Didn't want to post about it yesterday because of IWSG.

Anyway, final volume of the novel.  Did not disappoint.  😁

In the course of my new danmei obsession (if "new" is the right word for something that started in like 2022) I have now read three novels in which the main pairing is between a cultivation master and one of his pupils.  This one was by far the least questionable of the three.  (Unsurprisingly, actually.) For comparison's sake:

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System:  the protagonist died and was reborn as Shen Qingqiu, a villain in a particularly bad webnovel, which the protagonist had actively been griping about when he died.  (In fact, he basically died of rage at just how badly written Proud Immortal Demon Way was!)  To save himself, he decides to treat the original novel's protagonist, Luo Binghe (a student of Shen Qingqiu's), like a precious pearl, so that he won't want to rip all of Shen Qingqiu's limbs off, like he did originally.  This, of course, proves a little too effective, and Luo Binghe falls in love with him.  The "romance" is definitely the weakest part of the novel, and has a lot of questionable aspects to it, but the teacher-student aspect ranks much lower than some of the other aspects.

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun:  protagonist Mo Ran, having taken over the world, commits suicide and wakes up in his own teenage body, then proceeds to relive his life, and instead of coming to hate his teacher, Chu Wanning, as the ultimate enemy, he falls head over heels in love with him.  (Er, well, that covers at least a little hint of the earlier portions of the plot...this book is crazy long (it ends halfway through volume ten!) and the plot goes all over the place...)  There are so many unsettling aspects of both this book and the primary romance that I couldn't list them all even if they were all things I was willing to talk about on my blog!  Weirdly, the teacher-student aspect of the romance is so tame by comparison that it doesn't even make the top ten.  😰  I saw someone on discord describe this book as "not for the faint-hearted" and they were very right...

The White Cat's Divine Scratching Post:  protagonist Mo Tianliao dies after protecting his precious pet kitten from the forces that are causing his own death, but his spirit doesn't dissipate, and after three hundred years he manages to possess the divine Undying Tree, turning it into a new body for him.  Before he can resume his life, he has to join a cultivation sect to train up a bit...and the teacher he ends up studying under just happens to be his pet kitten, who has cultivated a gorgeous human body over the last three hundred years.  Again, there are some issues with their relationship (mostly the whole "pet kitten" issue), but since their teacher-student relationship was fake to begin with, it really isn't one of those issues at all!  This is, in fact, a pretty sweet and almost innocent novel...(aside from how many of the other cultivators are treating spirit beasts with full human sentience as essentially slaves...which is at least a practice the hero wants to put a stop to...)

So...yeah...why did I just spend so long talking about other books in this post...?

Hmm.

Well.  Anyway.

Uh.  Yeah.

Book was fun.  Will probably read again someday.  😊

Original language:  Chinese

In other news, my November writing challenge numbers for the last two days:

Yesterday's total was 12419

Today's total was 15536

Tuesday's total was 9689, so that means

Yesterday I wrote 2730 words and

Today I wrote 3117 words.

Seems like 2-3k a day has become my new norm?  Not great, but not terrible, either.