What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I actually finished was volume three of Liu Gou Hua’s After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, which I loooved. The vibe reminds me of… well, for other danmei readers, if Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge got together in The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, and that made Liu Qingge warm up and show unexpected amounts of happiness (eventually). It takes Huo Wujiu time, but in this volume he’s fully in love with Jiang Suizhou, and happy just to be around him, it’s adorable. The plot has been fairly satisfying so far, too.

I really need volume four and I hate that I’m now waiting until November.

What are you currently reading?

I’m most actively working on Elinor Cleghorn’s A Woman’s Work, which is basically discussing how motherhood has been constructed and viewed over time. It makes for sometimes uncomfortable reading, since that’s not always been positive by any means, and it definitely fits thematically with her other book, Unwell Women — you can see how one led her towards writing the other.

I’m also partway through Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress, which I’m enjoying more than I expected. I was warned that the topic was really heavy and that it’d be a difficult read, but it’s surprisingly quick-moving for me, even though it is heavy.

I did also start on Becky Chambers’ As You Wake, Break the Shell, but haven’t read enough to really have an opinion yet.

What will you be reading next?

I’ll be continuing my quest to read some of my bought-in-2026 books to “make room” for birthday books (since I cap the number of books I can have bought this year and not started at 20). That means reading my two newest manga, vol 2 of My Younger Knight Takes Care of Me in Another World (which is an absolute ripoff of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, but not unfun) and vol 3 of Rinteku’s Love in the Palm of His Hand, and starting my new British Library Crime Classic, Shelley Smith’s The Party at No. 5.

Ideally I’ll start more than that, but we’ll see how it goes.