What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was the seventh volume of the Solo Leveling manhwa (in English). I picked up the next two volumes on a trip into town yesterday, so I stopped being scared of starting it and not having more of the story to read. Jinwoo is so ridiculously OP at this point.

Before that, I finished John Dickson Carr’s The Judas Window, which is one of his books I actually got on with really well. Lots of courtroom drama, which crops up in some classic crime, but isn’t that common, so that was fun.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve got quite a few books on the go at once, as usual, but for right now the book on the arm of the chair next to me is Mouhdy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers, a history of ancient Mesopotamia. I’m enjoying Al-Rashid’s style and structure for telling the story, and not minding too much that there are some personal interjections — it’s very readable.

Other than that, I’ve also got started on Molly Conisbee’s No Ordinary Deaths, which feels a bit more… well, not academic, because it still feels aimed at a non-specialist audience, but I’m just not as into it. It is hitting weirdly right now because it talks about our relationship with death and how most of us are quite distant from it, never see a dead person, etc, and that is not true for me.

What will you read next?

As so often, I’m not really sure. I might make a start on T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Strength, or I might start on my reread of Vivian Shaw’s Grave Importance… or possibly both!

I probably won’t start another non-fiction read for a bit, since I have a few on the go at once, including some I need to get back to (like Laura Spinney’s book on Proto-Indo-European, Proto). Buuut in the end I’m a creature of whim, so who knows?