What have you recently finished reading?

I finished up Daryl Gregory’s The Album of Dr Moreau almost in one go, which surprised me — it’s a novella, so I figured it’d be a quick read, but I wasn’t much in the mood for reading, so I wasn’t expecting it to grab me so well. It takes the premise fairly seriously, while also being somewhat playful — inevitable when you’re writing about a boy band made up of human-animal hybrids. I enjoyed the concept, though, and the mystery! I don’t think I’ve read anything by Daryl Gregory before, and now I’m definitely curious (though if I remember rightly none of his books immediately spoke to me, maybe I’m more tempted now).

What are you currently reading?

Let’s stick to the ones I have in my ‘active’ pile, though I have a lot of other books in various states of suspended animation. In no particular order, we have Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half Broken, which I am enjoying quite a lot. Inevitably there’s something a bit reminiscent of Murderbot at first in a first-person narrative about a synthetic intelligence (albeit completely non-human) navigating the world, and you can imagine Murderbot being similarly cranky about losing a leg… but it’s definitely its own thing, too, and I am really enjoying this one. It’s one of the few books lately that I feel the itch to pick up, rather than nudging myself to pick it up: I enjoy books I read in the latter way, but it’s fun and special when it’s the former.

Next, I started on Carter Dickson’s The Magic-Lantern Murders; some of John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson’s work is decidedly not for me, and this is verging into that category. I feel like ‘Yakety Sax’ ought to be the soundtrack, is the problem: coincidences and near-slapstick scenes of chaos just… don’t work for me.

There’s also Jon Cannon’s The Stones of Britain, which I am enjoying inasfar as Cannon is having a ball thinking about geology and how that has shaped human settlements. It is not my interest, but he’s fascinated, and so it’s enjoyable.

Finally, volume two of Lv Ye Qian He’s The Wife Comes First, which I’m enjoying so far — albeit that Jing Shao really does deserve to sleep on the couch sometimes, and Mu Hanzhang shouldn’t let him get away with trying to be a big cute puppy of a man to get out of it. (Though it’s very cute.)

What will you be reading next?

I’m not sure what long-form stuff I’ll read next, but I’m definitely planning to read Sian Northey and Ness Owen’s bilingual poetry anthology Afonydd, not least because I’ve spent several days talking to StoryGraph’s support team to try to convince them to understand that searching the word “afonydd” should pull up a book called Afonydd, not 25 other items which contain only 3-4 of those characters in different orders, such as Rick Remender’s Deadly Class Volume 11: A Fond Farewell Part One or Deanne Dietz’s Hearts Held By Barbed Wire, which matches the search because it is #1 in her “Afton Adders” series.

(If you were wondering, they said thanks for the feedback and told me to add Welsh — a language I don’t speak, because English imperialism — to my profile in order to find the book. That doesn’t work, not least because the edition is listed as being in English, but also because, as stated, I don’t speak Welsh.)

I’m also interested because it’s bilingual: poems written in Welsh have been provided with an English translation, and those written in English with a Welsh translation. It seems like a lovely project, and I feel compelled to note that the book seems to be available on Kobo Plus, and you can find it on StoryGraph if you add Sian Northey’s name to your search. Wouldn’t it be lovely if more people a) read such a lovely and thoughtful project, and b) rated/reviewed it on StoryGraph to maybe convince them to care about their broken search?