What have you recently finished reading?

Last night I finished up reading What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher, which was very good. I loved that it added a lot of flesh onto the bones of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and also the whole character of Easton: the pronouns, the Ruritanian romance details, etc, etc. I’m pretty late to the party on reading it because the process of reading it involves mentally tiptoeing around things that could trigger my anxiety and send me off to wash my hands eleventy-billion times, but so does my entire MSc, so I’m well-versed in coping with that by now.

I also recently finished Arkady Martine’s Rose/House, which I’d been curious about for a while and which seems to be now getting a wider release, for which I got an eARC. It’s described in a way that makes it sound like an SF mystery, but I feel it too owes more than a little to horror. I enjoyed it a lot.

What are you currently reading?

I’m most of the way through The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker, by Annie Gray. I don’t entirely love the format (of imagining yourself into the high streets of yore with a shopping list), and feel like I might’ve liked a differently-organised version of the same information (e.g. chapters themed around a particular kind of shop through time, rather than each chapter covering a time period and jumbling everything together like a shopping trip) — but I’m enjoying it well enough for what it is.

In my efforts to read everything Serial Reader has by Agatha Christie, I’m onto The Secret of Chimneys, which I dimly remember starting at some other point and not finishing. I don’t know what I think of it yet, but I don’t think I’m a big fan.

What will you read next?

There are no certainties in my reading life, since I’m strongly driven by whim, but I’m still thinking of rereading Katherine Addison’s books set in the world of The Goblin Emperor — I just haven’t decided if I’ll reread that again first, or only reread the books where Thara Celehar is the main lead. Either way, it’ll lead into reading the ARC of the third book, in which I dearly hope someone has the gumption to hug Thara Celehar and then possibly tuck him into bed with a friendly cat and firm instructions to rest.

How about you?