What have you recently finished reading?

I finished up with Mr Collins in Love by Lee Welch last night! And yep, that Mr Collins, from Pride & Prejudice. It’s a retelling that fleshes out Mr Collins and empathises with him, giving us a probably-on-the-spectrum man who’s masking all the time, and has to get married in order to keep up appearances — while his most important bond is actually to a friend of his boyhood, with whom he doesn’t have to pretend. I need to write my full review, but I liked it quite a bit. I don’t know if it helps that I’m not a huge Jane Austen fan, or whether a super-fan would get more out of it, but I had fun, anyway.

What are you currently reading?

As ever, I have a few books on the go at once. This morning I started on a new one, Reignclowd Palace, by Philippa Rice. I hadn’t heard anything about this book before, just decided it looked fun when I saw it in the bookshop, so I don’t know a lot about it, but so far I’m enjoying it. A bit of a Howl’s Moving Castle vibe, I guess?

The rest of what I’m reading is mostly non-fiction; I just started John S. Tregoning’s Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them, which is… pretty upbeat and triumphant about how we can beat pretty much all infections, which for me sounds a bit like dangerous overconfidence in a world where we can’t figure out how to prevent or reverse the consequences of various viral infections. I’m not far into it, so I don’t have a great feel for whether there are going to be caveats and cautionary notes. We’ll see, I guess.

I’m also working my way through Emma Chapman’s First Light: astrophysics not being my thing, some of the in-depth explanations of stuff aren’t really holding my attention. Again, I’m not that far into it, though, and it’s possible I’ll settle in a bit more.

What will you be reading next?

Uketsu’s Strange Houses would be a good bet. I was lucky to only be second in the holds queue for it, and I suspect there are a few more behind me, so I should get to it sooner rather than later. It’s not a long book, and if it’s anything like Strange Pictures, I’ll fly through it.

Also, I have Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Deep Dark checked out on Libby, but it’s non-renewable with one person in the queue for it, so I should make time for it soon.

Neither of those books are on my Litsy Book Spin Bingo card, though they’d fit in the free spaces, so it’s possible I’ll start something from that first, too…