What have you recently finished reading?

The last book I finished was Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress, which worked a lot better for me than I’d expected. I’d been a little put off by people talking about how dark it is, and it is… and I was also worried that Terren would somehow turn out to be secretly a great person despite his actions, and the answer to that is that it’s complicated. The ending really got me; I hadn’t thought about the way it actually worked out.

Overall, ended up really enjoying it.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve made a bit of a start on The Villain’s White Halo vol 1 (Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi), but I’m really still finding my feet with the worldbuilding at this moment. It feels like being confronted with The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System all over again on the amount of detail about the sects, peaks, different martial siblings, etc, but I’m really only 100 pages in and there’s plenty of time for the information to settle once my brain prioritises what I need to know. I’m curious where it’s going, but not enormously invested.

I also got back to a book I’d previously started, John and Colleen Darnell’s Egypt’s Golden Couple, but the amount of imaginative reconstruction they’re doing (at least two pages at the start of every chapter, and some chapters are only four pages long) is starting to get on my nerves. It’s not based, as far as I can tell, in actual concrete evidence — it’s based on their knowledge as Egyptologists, of course, but it’s not like “we found a specific broken cup and theorised about it”, more “we imagined an event that seems reasonable”.

Or maybe they are all based on specific objects! But it’s really not clear. It’s all very readable but… hm.

I’ve also started Greer Stothers’ Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die, but I’m not super sure if it’s going to be my thing. The jokiness seems unlikely to jive well for me. But we’ll see!

What will you be reading next?

Shake me like a Magic 8 ball for the answer, “Ask again later.”

Quite possibly more danmei, maybe Thrice Married to a Salted Fish vol 1 (Bi Ka Bi)… but really, no decision yet. It’s my birthday tomorrow and I hope to do a lot of reading since I’m off work, but definitely not constraining myself to reading anything in particular.