What have you recently finished reading?

Volume 13 of the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation manhua adaptation was the last thing I finished, I think! I enjoyed the adaptation quite a bit, it helped cement things in my head a bit more and give me more of an idea how things look (being totally aphantasic, I don’t imagine things in the way other people do). It’s still not my favourite MXTX story, but it was enjoyable in its own way.

What are you currently reading?

Oh boy. Let’s think. The last one I picked up was Steve Roud’s Folk Song in England, which is dense and slow going, but I would like to finish it before my graduation trip — if only so we don’t have to haul such a big book with us! I’m enjoying it, though; the far-away and petty-sounding arguments of the early folk song collectors are mildly entertaining, and the things they wrestled with are useful to understand.

I also started on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis last night. I don’t feel like I have a good handle on what I’ll think of it yet, but it certainly feels like it has an axe to grind about the postgraduate experience at Cambridge, and abusive/careless advisors.

I’m also slowly easing into Joseph Shearing’s Airing in a Closed Carriage, which is a classic crime novel reissued this month by the British Library Crime Classics series, and definitely the chunkiest book they’ve published. It’s slow going, because it’s setting up a story based heavily on a real murder case, in which Florence Maybrick was accused of killing her husband. I really want to read up more on that case to get the context for this, really.

At the weekend, I started on T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart, and really want to get back to it. It feels like the male protagonist/presumably love interest (given the pattern of these books) maybe isn’t quite such a typical paladin as many of the other male protagonists? But of course I’m not far in and it’s all been from Halla’s perspective so far; we’ll see.

That’s still not quite it, but we’ll stop there, because the rest are pretty much on pause.

What will you be reading next?

An Opinionated Guide to London Museums (Emmy Watts) and An Opinionated Guide to London Bookshops (Sonya Barber and James Manning), somewhat on a whim. I won’t be in London that long for my graduation next week, and we do have some tentative plans already… but that includes a day of bookshopping and potentially some extra time to look at museums, so I thought I’d do a little research.