Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 3rd, 2013 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreWhat are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 2-4.
-Words do not exist for my entertainment at watching Zhuo Yi Hang turn into the stereotype of the teenaged girl fascinated by the bad boy.
WANG ZHAO XI( Zhuo Yi Hang's BFF, Lian Ni Shang's ally): Oh, yeah, so, there's this she-demon (who is my dad's ally, but let's not get into that) who lives on the mountain. You should avoid her.
ZHUO YI HANG(Our Hero): She sounds interesting.
WANG ZHAO XI: No, seriously, dude. People have nightmares about this woman. Last time I saw her, she maimed half a dozen men before anyone noticed she moved. RAISED BY WOLVES. AVOID.
ZHUO YI HANG: Maybe I'll just, you know, see if I can accidentally bump into her while I'm in the area...
WANG ZHAO XI: ...please don't die...
ZHUO YI HANG: I am at the mountain and wandering around caves and look, I have stumbled across this stunning girl with amazing reflexes who sensed me enter the cave and is faster than me. Surely she is not that wicked demoness (who I am totally not wandering around looking for, nosirree).
LIAN NI SHANG: You're cute, but you aren't that bright, are you?
-First meeting set the tone for the leads, so far, with Lian Ni Shang being the cleverer and more dangerous and not very merciful, and Zhuo Yi Hang being book smart but not yet possessing a lot of common sense, and being convinced there's a good and reddemable person hidden under thedark and sexy and mysterious bad boy infamous bandit.
-This is twice Liang Yusheng has had "betrothed since birth, but separated" and done it in a way that I actually liked (the other being in Paladins in Troubled Times). Liang Yusheng even managed to have Wang Zhao Xi's fiancee, Meng Qiu Xia, go "gosh, this young man who just showed up and immediately committed himself to saving my father sure is convenient, I wonder if my fiancee, who just happens to have the same family name, is anything like him" without making her seem to be missing out on the obvious.
-There's a somewhat faily backstory about how the woman who raised Lian Ni Shang was jealous of her husband's martial success and stole his manuals and challenged him to a duel 20 years later that the footnotes tell me Liang Yusheng later revisited as a much more interesting and nonfaily book called Lian Jian Feng Yun Lu. Sadly, I'll probably never get to read it.
Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman by Elizabeth Abbott. Nonfiction about famous (and less so) mistresses throughout history and in literature. I'm on page 77 out of 500, and it's a bit of a "cliffnotes: version: in addition to various cultural and historical notes for each of her categories, Abbott looks to have at least 70-80 entries, each with a minibiography of 3-7~ pages, so there isn't room to get into a lot of depth with most of them. Pretty good so far, though.
What did you recently finish reading?
A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead. WWII nonfiction about 230 women in the French Resistance who were captured and sent to Auschwitz, only 49 of whom survived. The first half of the book focused on the women's work and how they were captured, and the second half on their experiences while imprisoned. Moorehead interviewed the 7 survivors she was able to locate who were still living when she began work on the book, and so there's considerably more detail about their experiences than in other book about captured spies in WWII that I've read (the others were also about SOE agents, and so also spent quite a bit of time focusing on homefront operations which, if you're familiar with the SOE, can inspire a whole different kind of rage.) It's good and fascinating in the most awful way, and I feel I need to consume about 5000 hours of fluff and love and joy to recover from some of it.
I read a bit of Kelley Armstrong's Men of the Otherworld collection, but then realized that it was all about the werewolf dudes, and decided there were much better ways to spend my time.
What do you think you'll read next?
More Legend of the White-Haired Demoness and Mistresses, library books
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 2-4.
-Words do not exist for my entertainment at watching Zhuo Yi Hang turn into the stereotype of the teenaged girl fascinated by the bad boy.
WANG ZHAO XI( Zhuo Yi Hang's BFF, Lian Ni Shang's ally): Oh, yeah, so, there's this she-demon (who is my dad's ally, but let's not get into that) who lives on the mountain. You should avoid her.
ZHUO YI HANG(Our Hero): She sounds interesting.
WANG ZHAO XI: No, seriously, dude. People have nightmares about this woman. Last time I saw her, she maimed half a dozen men before anyone noticed she moved. RAISED BY WOLVES. AVOID.
ZHUO YI HANG: Maybe I'll just, you know, see if I can accidentally bump into her while I'm in the area...
WANG ZHAO XI: ...please don't die...
ZHUO YI HANG: I am at the mountain and wandering around caves and look, I have stumbled across this stunning girl with amazing reflexes who sensed me enter the cave and is faster than me. Surely she is not that wicked demoness (who I am totally not wandering around looking for, nosirree).
LIAN NI SHANG: You're cute, but you aren't that bright, are you?
-First meeting set the tone for the leads, so far, with Lian Ni Shang being the cleverer and more dangerous and not very merciful, and Zhuo Yi Hang being book smart but not yet possessing a lot of common sense, and being convinced there's a good and reddemable person hidden under the
-This is twice Liang Yusheng has had "betrothed since birth, but separated" and done it in a way that I actually liked (the other being in Paladins in Troubled Times). Liang Yusheng even managed to have Wang Zhao Xi's fiancee, Meng Qiu Xia, go "gosh, this young man who just showed up and immediately committed himself to saving my father sure is convenient, I wonder if my fiancee, who just happens to have the same family name, is anything like him" without making her seem to be missing out on the obvious.
-There's a somewhat faily backstory about how the woman who raised Lian Ni Shang was jealous of her husband's martial success and stole his manuals and challenged him to a duel 20 years later that the footnotes tell me Liang Yusheng later revisited as a much more interesting and nonfaily book called Lian Jian Feng Yun Lu. Sadly, I'll probably never get to read it.
Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman by Elizabeth Abbott. Nonfiction about famous (and less so) mistresses throughout history and in literature. I'm on page 77 out of 500, and it's a bit of a "cliffnotes: version: in addition to various cultural and historical notes for each of her categories, Abbott looks to have at least 70-80 entries, each with a minibiography of 3-7~ pages, so there isn't room to get into a lot of depth with most of them. Pretty good so far, though.
What did you recently finish reading?
A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead. WWII nonfiction about 230 women in the French Resistance who were captured and sent to Auschwitz, only 49 of whom survived. The first half of the book focused on the women's work and how they were captured, and the second half on their experiences while imprisoned. Moorehead interviewed the 7 survivors she was able to locate who were still living when she began work on the book, and so there's considerably more detail about their experiences than in other book about captured spies in WWII that I've read (the others were also about SOE agents, and so also spent quite a bit of time focusing on homefront operations which, if you're familiar with the SOE, can inspire a whole different kind of rage.) It's good and fascinating in the most awful way, and I feel I need to consume about 5000 hours of fluff and love and joy to recover from some of it.
I read a bit of Kelley Armstrong's Men of the Otherworld collection, but then realized that it was all about the werewolf dudes, and decided there were much better ways to spend my time.
What do you think you'll read next?
More Legend of the White-Haired Demoness and Mistresses, library books
no subject
Date: 2013-07-04 02:39 am (UTC)/fangirling
Anyway, I'm still searching for a printed-and-bound version of Legend of the White-Haired Demoness, because I'll finish reading it faster that way.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-04 01:17 pm (UTC)