What have you recently finished reading?

I’ve finally been getting through some books that’d been sort of paused for a while, so I finished up Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile and Stephanie Burgis’ Wooing the Witch Queen at last. That’s… a pretty weird mix, I’ll admit; Lost Voices of the Nile is a bit dry, but really interesting (to me, anyway; I never grew out of the obligatory childhood Egypt phase). Wooing the Witch Queen was pretty fun, too: I was pretty worried about the identity reveal part and whether it’d be a totally stupid third act breakup, but honestly, that wasn’t bad.

I also finished volume three of Mistakenly Saving the Villain, and I really wish it was October already so I could have the next/last book. It is unclear to me how everything’s going to work out, but wow. Things sure are messed up!

What are you currently reading?

I’m focusing on three books at the moment: one is Jon Cannon’s The Stones of Britain, which is soothing because I have no actual interest in geology or psychogeography, but Cannon is fascinated by stones and place and how the combination of the two have worked out, and someone else’s enthusiasm is (usually) very enjoyable to me.

I’ve also got back to Helen Pilcher’s Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth, almost none of which is coming as a surprise to me (nor would’ve when it was new), but is sort of soothing because of it.

And finally, I’ve got back to Carwyn Graves’ Welsh Food Stories, which is interesting enough so far; the importance of bread and cheese didn’t come as a surprise, but the chapter on cockles and other seafood was more unfamiliar.

What will you be reading next?

I’m not sure, but I’d like to add some fiction into the rotation with the other three. There are a few books I have already started that I could pick up, so I might just randomly reactivate one of those and see how I get along. Since I have 32 books marked as “paused” on StoryGraph… it’d probably be sensible.

That said, I do also have some ARCs I should get to or should’ve got to already, so maaaybe one of those — Fonda Lee’s The Last Contract of Isako, maybe, or John Wiswell’s The Dragon Has Some Complaints.